DMC: Devil May Cry review

    I was a big fan of the original Devil May Cry series, though not the actual gameplay. Sadly, until recently, I was a fully Xbox fanboy and only was able to watch the game as well as read the spin-offs. DMC was an opportunity to play the franchise with a new continuity, a rebooted timeline, and a re-imagined Dante. So what do I think? Above-average! Fun but not spectacular! Worth the money!

    Yeah, none of my thoughts on the game are fit for putting on box art. DMC: Devil May Cry is a game that I will probably replay, which puts it above Thief but it's also something that strikes me as a good ways away from greatness. The funny thing is, with a few tweaks, I think this game could have been one of my favorite titles this year. As is, I feel DMC is just an inferior sibling to the Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance title.

Dante's new image is...controversial to say the least.

     The premise is Dante is the half-angel, half-demon offspring of the demon general Sparda and his wife Eva. Living in a trailer on a Coney Island pier, which is questionable from all sorts of angles, Dante lives in a world where demons secretly run society, lead by the Satan-analog Mundus, who rules the world through debt.

    Much of DMC's plotline is taken from the cult-classic They Live, starring Roddy Piper and Keith David, replacing aliens with demons. Billboards contain subliminal messages which tell humanity to reproduce, get fat, and obey whatever the demons tell them. Mundus spikes the world's most popular soft drinks with demonic ooze and the planet's equivalent of Fox News is run by a demon version of Bill O'Reilly. There's also a nightclub which recruits celebrities to become demon collaborators. The latter I find all too plausible *rimshot*.

    Dante is uninterested in all of this, content to spend his life drinking away his nonexistent sorrows and getting laid with a bevy of beautiful women. I'm not exaggerating that last part as the game desires so much to make Dante appear "cool" and "extreme" that the first thing we see our hero do is have a threesome with two Victoria Secret Angel-costumed women. The latter does lead to a humorous scene where Dante answers the door to witch assistant, Kat, wearing nothing but a smile.

Limbo is full of interesting visual designs.

     The plot proceeds to, of course, move to Dante slaughtering demons as they finally track him down for extermination. As the seeming last remaining Nephilim, they just won't leave our hero alone and thus twenty-levels of demon slaying action occurs. The mysterious Order, led by Vergil (Dante's brother to anyone with even passing familiarity with the franchise), recruits our hero to kill the bad guys.

    If the storyline sounds complex, it isn't, but is definitely more in-depth than the previous games. Literally, the first plot of the game can be summarized as, "Dante is told to go to a spooky mansion and kill the Devil." Which, props for audacity, but I find this sordid tale of revenge and social-revolution to be more entertaining.

The gameplay is quite fun.

     I also like the actors with the villains being appropriately loathsome and the "heroes" being a complicated mess of hero, anti-hero, and villain protagonist. The fact Dante's love interest for this game is named the same as my wife amused me to no end as well. I hope, somehow, Kat manages to find her way into future installments of the franchise (though this isn't likely unless Ninja Theory regains the contract for the games).

    The gameplay is fun, fast, and relatively easy to learn. I disliked the excessive platforming in the game but given you can continue forever from more or less the point you died, it's not really something that hurts too much. The Bosses are sometimes too easy but the game has no end of exciting mooks and mid-bosses to handle the games between.

    The replay value of DMC is where your money's worth is going to be found, though. While it's fun playing through the game, the New Game+ option of doing the missions with all of your new weapons and abilities is awesome.    

8.5/10