Since I'm bored and bomba deals of
DmC: Devil May Cry are appearing left and right I thought I could add a short review for you guys so you know what you're getting into:
DmC is the first big release in 2013 and a pretty polarizing title but I want to ignore all the ridiculousness surrounding its release and focus on the game. I want to add that I love the original series, that DMC4 was one of my favourite games of 2008 and that I value combat vastly over presentation, level-design or story, to give you some perspective.
Story, characters and the entire emo/punk/rebel angle they went was heavily advertised (and criticized!) but it's heavily toned down in the finished game. While PR material might have lead to expect one of the most obnoxious protagonists and stories ever, it was a nice surprise to realize that you won't turn blind from rolling your eyes. Of course, the general theme of the world and story can be summarized as a teenager's image of evil politics, media and corporation, it doesn't smack you over the head with it. It is hilarious though that someone actually thought this would be good. Characters or story luckily don't reflect this for the most part. There were two very disgusting scenes in the game though and I don't know what Ninja Theory was thinking. Of course you have some very cheesy (the bad kind) one liners and dialogues and characters are as fickle as the audience they tried to appeal to but it's not offensively bad. Dante, which got the biggest backlash pre-release, is actually rather likable by the end of the game. The female companion Kat is probably my favourite character and also the most consistent. One thing I didn't like at all were the cutscenes. Too many, not all of them are well directed and some are way too long as well. Most should manage the first time around but added to several unskippable gameplay-interruptions and cutscenes during boss-fights I got very annoyed the longer I played. Not comparable to Max Payne 3 but when I think back to DMC4 you could basically miss entire characters if you skipped the cutscenes and I prefer it that way.
As for its looks, DmC is a very pretty game and runs excellently on a decent PC. I got framerates in the 200s on a GTX670, and at 60Hz it is as smooth as butter. Environments are beautifully designed, especially in Limbo (a parallel demonic world to the drab and grey real world), with some of the most imaginative and varied environments I have ever seen in a game, period. It is really amazing how much work they have put in the visual design of the world and one of the game's strong points. Characters are similarly well-crafted for the most part. I haven't touched the standard skin for Dante, going mostly with his
classic counterpart but I never felt the designs were out of place. Mundus, the main-antagonist is probably the most boring though. Bosses can be visual spectacles, especially one boss-fight is a visual masterpiece
. Enemy designs on the other hand aren't really all that special. Most look like mannequin Silent Hell rejects, others just aren't that interesting but the Dreamrunners (don't forget those) are pretty good.
Level-design from a gameplay perspective is a different matter altogether. While previous DMC games had still some of that Resident Evil DNA, DmC almost completely abandons it for better or worse. There is a single unnecessary but simple puzzle at the very end of the game but the rest is held in a very linear fashion with a lot of platforming. Not good platforming though. I don't know if it was a conscious decision but its neither very engaging nor challenging. The superb visual design can't hide the fact that they were very lazy with the platform layout. While the controls feel good you are basically pulling yourself from platform to platform, sometimes alternating with a longer dash or pulling platforms towards you. In some rare occasions you might struggle with the game's automatic lock-on though. It's mostly in order to show you cool stuff and give you a breather from all the fighting. There are a lot of branching paths though, with many keys, doors to secret missions, items and lost souls for bonus completion points. They aren't necessary to finish the game but give some incentive to come back later to max out your health and Devil Trigger bar and some of the secret missions actually offer cool challenges.
If some of this entices you and you can look past its flaws (maybe you don't even see them as flaws) you will find a very competent combat-system. It is much deeper than God of War, Dante's Inferno or anything Ninja Theory has worked on and most likely the deepest combat-system created outside of Japan. Darksiders II might come close but I haven't spend enough time with that to make a final verdict. It isn't quite as good as DMC3:SE, DMC4 or Bayonetta but for most it comes down to preference since the average gamer will sooner break his hands than notice the limits of either combat system. Where DmC succeeds is in streamlining its controls and making a wide array of tools easily available. It has soft instead of hard lock-on, you launch enemies in the air by a single button-press and it's crazy how long you can stay in the air by abusing enemy step and some weapons. In general, many moves are easier to pull off and the game is more forgiving with timed inputs. It makes up for it with the interesting and well-balanced tools, giving you 5 melee weapons, 3 guns and 2 whips. Your basic weapon is a Sword (Rebellion) and using the triggers as modifiers you can access demon or angel weapons. D-Pad left and right let you switch between two demon and angel weapons each. The modifier also works for dodges but this means that both bumpers are occupied so you can pull off demon dodges with RT+LB and angel dodges with LT+RB respectively. Sounds complicated and needs some getting used to but it's a good and satisfying system.
Where the gameplay falls short are enemies and bosses though. The Dreamrunners I mentioned earlier are really the only interesting enemies to me, running around the place, jumping in and out of dimensional rifts and parrying your attacks even in mid-air. Every encounter with them is like a small event. Everything else on the other hand can be either classified as decent or annoying. The biggest sin are the colour-coded enemies though. Throughout the game you will encounter regular enemies with a blue (angel) or red (demon) coat of colour which can only be damaged with the correct weapon-type. Wrong weapons either get blocked, leaving you open for counters or phase right through them. It limits your combat options by more than half but there are easy strategies to handle them effectively. The boss fights are the biggest disappointments though. If you remember Credo from DMC4, none come even close to looking at its feet with binoculars. They are decent if you isolate them from the franchise or the best in the genre and they are "spectacular" for the most part but otherwise I found them to be very lacking.
All things considered, I gotta hand it to Ninja Theory though. They made a well-paced game with a coherent story and vastly better gameplay than their previous efforts. If you're at least a bit interested in the genre you owe it to yourself to try it.
I've spent 15h with the game so far with 2.5 playthroughs and I expect to get at least another 5-10h.
Verdict: Difficult to say. I bought it for 30 and regretted it a bit. It's not a bad game but there's just so much I can't look past at my third playthrough. I've In retrospect, 20$ is the price I would have felt comfortable with but you might have more fun with it than me.