I’m on vacation for once! Since I am relaxing in Hawaii and separated from my usual machinery that holds all my Flash materials, I’m just going to talk for a moment about that new DmC game.
It’s really good! But then again, I’m not the most rabid Devil May Cry purist fanatic. I enjoyed the first and third but did not play the fourth. Factor that information into your interpretation of my appraisal.
Heavenly Sword is the only other Ninja Theory game I’ve played, and I didn’t even play all the way through it. I say that to mention that I didn’t think the combat system in Heavenly Sword was very engaging. DmC’s is obviously an evolution of HS’s, but it seems like Capcom had a slight guiding hand toward a really solid system. The controls are very straightforward and (some would say) simple, but the variety of attacks and movement opportunities let you string together some really crazy shit. Whenever a load screen would come up, the little example combo sequence it displays would remind me that I am not pulling off crazy enough shit. And I still see new videos pop up on YouTube showing something really cool looking that I had not considered chaining together. It also made me wish I worked at Ninja Theory so I could hook up the game’s inputs to a genetic algorithm to find optimal scores and see what chains it comes up with. The scoring system isn’t perfect. The Trillion Stabs after Stinger seems a little too effective for boosting your rating, but whatever!
I was surprised by how smoothly it performed on my PC. I got it on Steam and played with an Xbox controller (is it even possible to play it without a controller?). I would have been less surprised about that if I had known it was an Unreal engine game. Capcom’s had some real dodgy ports that I have avoided so it was cool to see a really solid, fast PC version. Adding leaderboards via Steam or XBL or PSN was also very welcome. Finally an easy way to actually compare scores in a score attack game. Although maybe DMC4 had leaderboards since it was Xbox 360 and PS3? Someone correct me.
For the art and tone changes, I really enjoyed the craziest/weirdest levels they had in there. I wish they had actually gone even further into abstract bizarro world. It was a little disappointing that the game backed off on the crazy toward the end. I wasn’t irritated by New Dante’s attitude despite predicting I would hate him. He still is very much Fuck-You-For-No-Reason Dante, just more Western and cursey than previous games. He actually seemed a little more realistic and invested in the world around him than Old Dante. Old Dante felt more like he knew he was in a ridiculous video game. New Dante seems like a guy who doesn’t really give a shit about anything but also sometimes does give a couple shits. I’m going to stop because I can’t seem to describe the difference in tone accurately.
Anyway, good game. Buy it. Or wait for a Steam sale and buy it.