Devil May Cry 4 - Overhyped Fanboy Fluff.

Author's Rating:

Pros: Great graphics, Nero, glorious eyecandy cutscenes, suitcase-demon weapon!

Cons: Play through game twice, fight same bosses 3x, fight same enemies 1000x.

The Bottom Line: 
DMC4 is overhyped, overrated and in need of revision.

Author's Review
I’m going to rage hard against the Devil May Cry 4 series, because quite frankly- the scores I’ve been seeing on gamerankings.com from major review sites like IGN (8.7) and 1UP (8.5) are horribly inflated fluff values undeniably given by a marketing engine that screams to editors and hands them wads of cash every Christmas.

Now I loved the DMC series with a vengeance, I’ve beaten all 4 games, played the first one and gave it a grand shining review that praises it for everything under the god glorious sun. It was after all, the only game at the time that featured a protagonist that commits heinous acts of violence against endless hordes of monsters in all blood-curling fury, all the while psychopathically talking to his guns, and hanging with hotty-woman demon Trish in a dumpster of an office called Devil May Cry. That was Japanese storytelling at its peak, horrible mixing of Western and Eastern cultural antics, giant boobs, obscene blood flow, and weird pseudo grunge-rock combined with over the top combo finger-numbing goodness.

Devil May Cry 4 does not live up to the hype. Not even close. None of the bloody scores it’s been getting on the web have been right, though I’ve been eagerly anticipating Gamespot’s score to see if they indeed truly have balls as they did when they blasted Kane and Lynch through the bloody floor. Well that said let me give you the reasons why this blockbuster doesn’t deserve your wads of cash.

Gameplay – Reduced to Rooms with Monsters, Combo, Spawn, Combo, Repeat.

DMC4 repeats the same old gameplay the old ones had but abuses it on a scale I can’t quite describe. It’s even more of the same stuff, but with less quality and distinction than ever before. Previous iterations of DMC you would walk into a room, and RED SKULL SMOKE would block the door and then these monsters pop up and you have to execute them. It happened every few rooms or so. In DMC4, it’s like the only type of room in the stupid game. Every room you walk into, hold on, short cut scene with door getting covered with smoke, ok now fight monsters, rinse repeat. It’s so irritatingly frequent that it breaks the ability of the game to get you into its glorious atmosphere.

Now even with the uber high frequency of stop and spawn action, the worst foul is that the bloody monsters are all the same. I swear there are probably no more than 6-7 monsters in the game that get recycled in various combinations in every room. So today you won’t be fighting KNIFED CLOWNS or BLACK CLOUD THAT SHOOTS LASERS, you’ll fight instead KNIGHT WITH SWORD and then KNIFED CLOWNS oh wait, we just used that…

It makes me so angry and displeased to see Capcom’s latest attempts to pull a fast one.

Combo System of Stupidity

Yes, DMC4 has a combo system that was praised in the past because you could air juggle, gun, air hike, slam the crap out of enemies and chain to your heart’s desire, which at the time was a novel invention in the 3d brawler genre. It is still there but quite frankly, it’s been kind of broken. Unlike the fluidity of combos that you have in games like God of War that let you whisk guys around and do some serious crowd control, DMC4’s combo system really focuses on one enemy at a time, making combo chains mostly on mixing up moves (because the combo meter won’t repeat if you keep doing the same thing) and not so much on the actual quality of the combo. Anyone can get an S rank combo as long as you are well-versed enough to keep mixing and matching your moves.

Play Through the Game TWICE, once as Nero, once as Dante.

Because they spent so much glorious time making hi-res environments (which indeed are gorgeous), Capcom decided that they would simply make the MOST LINEAR DMC game ever and just use two protagonists, Nero, a guy who SUSPICIOUSLY looks like Dante with his white hair and boy-girlish looks and of course the main man, Dante. Problem is, this is exactly like when MGS3 came out, and they introduced Raiden. Nero actually ends up more fun to play than Dante thanks to his “hookshot” devil arm that allows him to chain combos like none-other, but while he does offer an interesting alternative, the game has you use him for the first part of the game…and then…

You end up using Dante for the 2nd half, which has you traversing all the rooms that Nero went through but in the reverse order. That is, my friends, called, cheap and bad game development. Most games have this as a special feature after you’ve beaten a game, i.e, you can play it through with X character for kicks. But in DMC4, it’s ACTUALLY PART of the game. Oh my.

But No, No, let’s not stop the repetition there, YOU GET TO FIGHT THE SAME BOSS THREE TIMES!

The glorious and most wonderful part of DMC4 is that for some reason, they’ve managed to reintroduce the bosses not, once, not twice, but a whopping three times! Same boss, no new tricks, once as Nero, once as Dante, and guess what? Once again as Nero! I don’t know how this game atrocity is allowed to exist, but while it is ok to reintroduce a boss and maybe beef him up (since the bosses in DMC4 are really friggin cool), it is not ok to abuse this fact without any rationale or enhancement. It made me kind of annoyed.

Hey, I know that Guy! Last Boss = God of War 2’s First Boss.

I can’t help but rub this in, but I swear Capcom stole their last boss straight from God of War. The long bouncy epic battle at the end against giant stone monster looks and plays strangely similar to God of War 2’s first boss, which makes it an epic thud in my opinion. Not sure how the game reviewers missed this one, oh wait, they don’t play games completely through! Now this isn’t a completely bad thing, but it kind of is. The last boss is a complete bore and takes virtually 20 minutes to take down at that.

I may be mad at the DMC4 recycle machine, but I’ll give it a few good points.

Nero = A Cool Dante Clone

The quiet punkish, woman of god dating, demon-claw wielding Nero isn’t nearly as bad as I expected him to be. He’s almost got all the attitude the younger Dante did, but with a cooler weapon to boot. It’s too bad he uses an old-school western pea-shooter rather than Dante’s dual automatics (Ebony and Ivory), but you can’t have it all.

Still in the end when you do switch to Dante, you’ll easily see why he cannot be trumped. Dante’s flair and confidence in dispatching enemies makes Nero look like a 10-yr old with a little baseball bat and toy gun. He will remain the king of DMC.

Plenty of Cut-Scenes, Some Boobies

DMC Series has always had some outrageous action scenes never seen before on the planet and the good thing is that DMC4 continues that trend. The uber-gorgeous widescreen cutscenes are amazing, the demon-spawned women with weapons and boobies appeal again to the teenage hormonally driven crowd. Plus there’s this one scene with a demon-possessed suitcase that will have you in utter shock and muttering expletives until the sun comes down. I was entranced to see this new weapon make its way into Dante’s already beefed arsenal- which again is a plus.

Grunge Rock is Back

Same old soundtrack- the pseudo angry-rock music tantalizes your ears at least while you combo hack through hordes of clones and walk through the same rooms again and again. There’s a weird fusion of this stuff to churchy choir music- which actually makes DMC4 seem like a Calvin Klein commercial on acid.

Conclusion

DMC4 is overhyped, overrated but will still be played because there is nothing like it quite out there yet for the 360 or PS3. Until we see a new God of War, this will be the king of 3d platformers. My only problem is that it recycles the same old tripe we’ve seen for over 5-years and Capcom really, REALLY needs to learn to innovate their games just a tidbit, besides recycling levels, bosses, and enemies to no end, and throwing in one new hero to mash around with. That is the epitome of laziness and is why I’m going to give DMC4 a disappointing 3 –stars. I love the series, I’ve played it from start to finish, but this is just inexcusable.