Two brothers, born from
an Angel mother and Demon father, Nephilim fighting against the armies of hell
and the Demon King to rid them from the earth. Do you recognize this story? If
not then you need to go and play Ninja Theory’s DmC: Devil May Cry.
You play as Dante, just
an ordinary guy who goes to bars and picks up women, except he’s the offspring of
the angel; Eva who was killed by Mundus, the demon king and the demon; Sparda
who Mundus condemned to endure eternal punishment and pain. Unknown by Dante
was that he had a brother; Vergil, who fights in a war against the demons. The
two unite to try and achieve their goal of killing the demon king. That’s
pretty much the general premise of the story with a couple of twists and turns
that I won’t mention for spoilers sake.
The team at Ninja
Theory have done an incredible job on creating unique and diverse personalities
for characters who could have ended up very clichéd. This makes cut-scenes and
interactions between the characters an absolute joy to watch. To be completely
honest, I wish there were more cut-scene just so I could learn more about each
character. To call the story and characters in DmC laughable would be a complete joke in itself. Dante has a slew
of one liner that portray him as a confident and somewhat witty character.
Voice acting is superb, David de Lautour brings the character of Vergil to life
and Tim Phillipps as Dante is the icing on the cake. That’s enough about the
story and characters, now on to the combat.
The banter between the
two brothers is humours at times, even towards the end Dante claims that he’s ‘stronger’,
Vergil says he’s ‘smarter’ in which Dante replies with ‘I’m better looking…..
And I’ve got a bigger dick’. This kind of boy-ish humour is good in a small dose
which is what Ninja Theory understands, thus this being the ONLY blatant penis
joke in the game.
Dante returns with his
iconic sword; Rebellion, as well as Ebony & Ivory, his to pistols. These
weapons combined, Dante can silence the demon scum between him and Mundus. He
also acquires new weapons and abilities along the way that can be switched mid
battle by holding the left or right trigger to increase the length of a combo.
Speaking of combos, Ninja Theory has made them really fun as well as easy to
pull off with the addition of a feature that signals the player when they are
required to add a delay in their combo. If
I were to perform Y, Y, PAUSE, Y (Y being the basic attack), the game provides
a slight vibration in the controller at the end of the PAUSE and signals that
it’s time for me to continue the combo.
I really like this feature;
it allowed me to focus on enemy attack patterns and when to dodge rather than
having to focus on a combo and ultimately get hit which would drop my style
rank down by 2 letters.
Style ranks consist of
7 different levels, these are:
· SSSensational
· SSadistic
· Savage
· Anarchic
· Brutal
· Cruel
· Dirty
The way to achieve
these is by using various weapons and combos opposed to spamming the basic
attack to fill it up. Again, I had a lot of fun with this. When I got my first
full set of weapons (3 in total, firearm, angel, demon), I was a little
overwhelmed by the thought of switching up the weapons mid fight but after my
first play-through, I found myself switching weapons at every chance I could
get and thus further increasing my score.
Technically, the game
runs smoothly with very few hiccups although I’ve heard reports of the frame
rate struggling on the PS3. The Xbox 360 version and I assume the PC version,
only have slight frame rate issues when switching from in-game cut-scene to a
pre-rendered cut-scene and vice versa.
Just quickly before I
wrap this up, DmC: Devil May Cry has
some of the most messed up boss battles and best visual style I have seen in a
game for a while now. All I’ll say is ‘Spawn of Mundus’; you’ll know when you
come across it.
Ninja Theory’s DmC: Devil May Cry is a great game and if you haven’t played it then you need to even if you’re a fan of the original games. With 7 different difficulties to play and unlock (3 are novelties more than difficulties, ‘Hell or Hell’: enemies die with one hit but so does Dante), I know I’ll be playing this game for a while.
DmC:
Devil May Cry gets an 8.5 ‘Muted Microphones’ /10
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