Available on: PS3, Xbox 360
Reviewed for: Xbox 360.
Price: ~$45 CDN
Resale Price: $11 CDN
Made by: Capcom
Boring factual information aside, let's get into the game, shall we? Devil May Cry 4 is the continuation of a series that's been swinging monstrous swords around since the middle era of the PS2. My background with the series is "I played/watched the first one", so I'll be giving this installment of the series the benefit of the doubt when it comes to story. That is, I will assume everything makes sense in context and not dock it any points for things that confused me.
The opening cutscene serves to throw you into the action. Again, assuming this makes sense in plot context, it still a puzzlingly bad gameplay decision. In the scene, your character Nero is depicted as carving his way through a few throwaway badguys, and then arrives to a main chapel where he takes on Dante. Your tutorial then begins with you facing off against Dante, who is effectively a boss. Don't worry, he doesn't julienne you right away, he just acts like an insulting prick with sarcastic applause as you carve him up. He juts takes it and keeps clapping. I accept some fights done in cutscenes as a means of keeping the plot on a railroad, but it would have made far more sense to teach the player on the throwaway monsters, and put the Dante fight into a cutscene. Further, because it encompasses a tutorial, the showdown with Dante is abominably lengthy.
So, I'd mentioned 'throwaway' enemies. Let's talk about them for a minute. Did you ever watch the original Power Rangers as a kid? Remember those 'putties' that always got butchered, and never posed any sort of a threat? The putties that always appeared in small amounts, and never really varied? That's the enemies of Devil May Cry. I had to complete several levels before I saw any variation from these... puppet-things that laugh hysterically and fail to ever hit me. There are some other enemies, but they only appear in very limited numbers in limited places. They actually hurt me on occasion, but I never felt in danger. The only time I ever was concerned for the welfare of Nero was in the first boss fight I encountered. My concern was misplaced, the enemy was a pushover. Even if the moves you execute are stylish, the sheer lack of any excitement in the enemies renders combat pretty stale. Even the Grunts of Halo could stick you on occasion. Finally sealing the deal on the bad combat is the fact that enemies will respawn in areas, consistantly. When you are running around completing objectives that take you through the same room or hallway a few times, having three weak enemies spawn in feels more like an annoyance than a hazard.
While on the topic of enemy spawnings, I should mention a little annoying detail involved in their appearance. Any time enemies appear in a room to impede your path, the game takes exception to the idea that you simply run past their dull and slow asses. A reddish web will appear over the doorway, or in one noteworthy case it appeared over an entire street to impede my path and forbid me from leaving the enemy behind. Not only are you forced to fight the same enemies over and over, and cannot leave until you do, the game designers felt it necessary to show you in exacting detail that you cannot leave. That's right readers: a short cutscene takes control away from you and focuses on the door, showing the web forming. This is puzzling: not only would NOT including this feature keep the player in control for more action, it would also lead to a little more terror the first time the player tried to run and found their path blocked. Further, it will be very, very obvious that you cannot leave when you try to get to the door and find your path blocked. This makes the cutscenes a) dull because you see them all the time, b) sequence breakers making you lose control for a couple seconds, and c) pointless. The developers actually went out of their way to do this to you. While one can skip the scene by pressing start in the middle of it, it's trading one needless annoyance in for a smaller one. Oh yes, and when you kill everything, there's a second cutscene showing you that the door is now open. Thanks guys, I get it.
I suspect whether or not you like the cutscenes and characters contained therein will largely be a matter of preference. I didn't like them, but going back to my opening assumption, if it all makes sense in context I suppose I'll have to give them full points. The characters though, I'm not a fan of. They have that irritating quality of anime one-upmanship in combat where one fighter breaks out a new trick, while the other one proclaims that it cannot be. Then the second fighter breaks out better trick, and the roles reverse. Ho-hum. Again, preference. You might like this. I found the worst part of the whole thing to be the incessant one-liners that Nero spouted off verbatim when using various attacks. I tired of them inside of three very short levels, and I'm sure they don't age as well as wine or cheese.
What I'm almost certain you won't be a fan of is the absolutely horrible camera. This thing is programmed to be unhelpful, and it's so irritating because the lazier solution would have worked much better. It means that Capcom actively made this bad. Allow me to elaborate: the game is played from a third-person camera. Left stick to run move, right stick to change perspective. Problems arise (all the goddamn time) when the camera moves somewhere and fixes itself to get 'the best angle'. It's almost as though there's a highly excitable cameraman with the ability to teleport to and fro. Because the controls retain their third-person scheme, the "forward" you were pressing a second ago may not be "forward" any more. While holding the stick perfectly retains the orientation of "forward", the slightest change is relative to the new co-ordinate system: the result is that if you wanted to run into a room and then turn towards the stairs, you could easily run into the room, and instead of turning ten degrees relative to your old scheme, you spin one-hundred-seventy relative to your new scheme, and bolt out the door again, at which point you go back to the old camera view and the old control scheme. This is infuriating that you can't enter a fucking room properly at times: when your player is having trouble with "walk here" because of something you've done, you have made a BAD decision. Of course, these difficulties compound in combat. I have had times where I tried to make a rushing attack at a distant enemy, only to have my camera change, leaving me to make an uppercut. Then I got backstabbed because I was not rapidly leaving the enemies behind me. Pure infuration. The camera and I battled constantly, and it made simple fights harder, platforming segments difficult, and sometimes walking into a room took two tries. Unforgivable.
Visuals meet the standard. Things look somewhat pretty, or appropriately grotesque as needed. I'm sure this game is nicer in HD, or on a PS3 running full-out, but my TV is an older Panasonic CRT TV: it's never heard of HD. Suffice to say, it's as good as it can get on my equipment. Sadly, I didn't think the audio met the standard. I'm not talking about the incessant bad one-liners: I'm talking about some musical choices. I'm a fan of metal, but the metal soundtrack for combat even annoys me. It's trying flat out to be hardcore, but when the enemies are reminding me of Power Rangers bad guys, the insistant 'hardcore' atmosphere falls flat on its face. Killing those bad guys for the fourth time is not "awesome", "intense", or "hardcore".
Let's sum this debacle up. Devil May Cry 4 had potential to be a good game. The concept is solid: slice things up with a massive sword, possibly gain some demonic powers and slice things up better. Throw in gunfights for more fun, and there's a recipie for fun. Unfortunately, things like the camera and one-liners show Capcom actually went out of their way to make this worse. If the lazy solution of not including tons of extra viewpoints was used, and nobody programmed the one-liners, and there was no cutscene for every door being sealed... it could have been a better game. As it stands right now though
DO NOT BUY .
I never managed more than four levels. Playing this game was either dull or irritating, but never genuinely fun. I won't recommend it to anybody: someone might like the characters, but nobody could like that camera.
*Note: in addition to the "everything in context", I also left the following points alone:
- Motorcycle sword that does nothing.
- Demon blood (currency) resides in everything: chairs, church pews, candlesticks, old dusty crates...
- Game length (I didn't finish, but I hear it's short).
- Dice rolling sections (Never made it to a single one of them).
Reviewed for: Xbox 360.
Price: ~$45 CDN
Resale Price: $11 CDN
Made by: Capcom
Boring factual information aside, let's get into the game, shall we? Devil May Cry 4 is the continuation of a series that's been swinging monstrous swords around since the middle era of the PS2. My background with the series is "I played/watched the first one", so I'll be giving this installment of the series the benefit of the doubt when it comes to story. That is, I will assume everything makes sense in context and not dock it any points for things that confused me.
The opening cutscene serves to throw you into the action. Again, assuming this makes sense in plot context, it still a puzzlingly bad gameplay decision. In the scene, your character Nero is depicted as carving his way through a few throwaway badguys, and then arrives to a main chapel where he takes on Dante. Your tutorial then begins with you facing off against Dante, who is effectively a boss. Don't worry, he doesn't julienne you right away, he just acts like an insulting prick with sarcastic applause as you carve him up. He juts takes it and keeps clapping. I accept some fights done in cutscenes as a means of keeping the plot on a railroad, but it would have made far more sense to teach the player on the throwaway monsters, and put the Dante fight into a cutscene. Further, because it encompasses a tutorial, the showdown with Dante is abominably lengthy.
So, I'd mentioned 'throwaway' enemies. Let's talk about them for a minute. Did you ever watch the original Power Rangers as a kid? Remember those 'putties' that always got butchered, and never posed any sort of a threat? The putties that always appeared in small amounts, and never really varied? That's the enemies of Devil May Cry. I had to complete several levels before I saw any variation from these... puppet-things that laugh hysterically and fail to ever hit me. There are some other enemies, but they only appear in very limited numbers in limited places. They actually hurt me on occasion, but I never felt in danger. The only time I ever was concerned for the welfare of Nero was in the first boss fight I encountered. My concern was misplaced, the enemy was a pushover. Even if the moves you execute are stylish, the sheer lack of any excitement in the enemies renders combat pretty stale. Even the Grunts of Halo could stick you on occasion. Finally sealing the deal on the bad combat is the fact that enemies will respawn in areas, consistantly. When you are running around completing objectives that take you through the same room or hallway a few times, having three weak enemies spawn in feels more like an annoyance than a hazard.
While on the topic of enemy spawnings, I should mention a little annoying detail involved in their appearance. Any time enemies appear in a room to impede your path, the game takes exception to the idea that you simply run past their dull and slow asses. A reddish web will appear over the doorway, or in one noteworthy case it appeared over an entire street to impede my path and forbid me from leaving the enemy behind. Not only are you forced to fight the same enemies over and over, and cannot leave until you do, the game designers felt it necessary to show you in exacting detail that you cannot leave. That's right readers: a short cutscene takes control away from you and focuses on the door, showing the web forming. This is puzzling: not only would NOT including this feature keep the player in control for more action, it would also lead to a little more terror the first time the player tried to run and found their path blocked. Further, it will be very, very obvious that you cannot leave when you try to get to the door and find your path blocked. This makes the cutscenes a) dull because you see them all the time, b) sequence breakers making you lose control for a couple seconds, and c) pointless. The developers actually went out of their way to do this to you. While one can skip the scene by pressing start in the middle of it, it's trading one needless annoyance in for a smaller one. Oh yes, and when you kill everything, there's a second cutscene showing you that the door is now open. Thanks guys, I get it.
I suspect whether or not you like the cutscenes and characters contained therein will largely be a matter of preference. I didn't like them, but going back to my opening assumption, if it all makes sense in context I suppose I'll have to give them full points. The characters though, I'm not a fan of. They have that irritating quality of anime one-upmanship in combat where one fighter breaks out a new trick, while the other one proclaims that it cannot be. Then the second fighter breaks out better trick, and the roles reverse. Ho-hum. Again, preference. You might like this. I found the worst part of the whole thing to be the incessant one-liners that Nero spouted off verbatim when using various attacks. I tired of them inside of three very short levels, and I'm sure they don't age as well as wine or cheese.
What I'm almost certain you won't be a fan of is the absolutely horrible camera. This thing is programmed to be unhelpful, and it's so irritating because the lazier solution would have worked much better. It means that Capcom actively made this bad. Allow me to elaborate: the game is played from a third-person camera. Left stick to run move, right stick to change perspective. Problems arise (all the goddamn time) when the camera moves somewhere and fixes itself to get 'the best angle'. It's almost as though there's a highly excitable cameraman with the ability to teleport to and fro. Because the controls retain their third-person scheme, the "forward" you were pressing a second ago may not be "forward" any more. While holding the stick perfectly retains the orientation of "forward", the slightest change is relative to the new co-ordinate system: the result is that if you wanted to run into a room and then turn towards the stairs, you could easily run into the room, and instead of turning ten degrees relative to your old scheme, you spin one-hundred-seventy relative to your new scheme, and bolt out the door again, at which point you go back to the old camera view and the old control scheme. This is infuriating that you can't enter a fucking room properly at times: when your player is having trouble with "walk here" because of something you've done, you have made a BAD decision. Of course, these difficulties compound in combat. I have had times where I tried to make a rushing attack at a distant enemy, only to have my camera change, leaving me to make an uppercut. Then I got backstabbed because I was not rapidly leaving the enemies behind me. Pure infuration. The camera and I battled constantly, and it made simple fights harder, platforming segments difficult, and sometimes walking into a room took two tries. Unforgivable.
Visuals meet the standard. Things look somewhat pretty, or appropriately grotesque as needed. I'm sure this game is nicer in HD, or on a PS3 running full-out, but my TV is an older Panasonic CRT TV: it's never heard of HD. Suffice to say, it's as good as it can get on my equipment. Sadly, I didn't think the audio met the standard. I'm not talking about the incessant bad one-liners: I'm talking about some musical choices. I'm a fan of metal, but the metal soundtrack for combat even annoys me. It's trying flat out to be hardcore, but when the enemies are reminding me of Power Rangers bad guys, the insistant 'hardcore' atmosphere falls flat on its face. Killing those bad guys for the fourth time is not "awesome", "intense", or "hardcore".
Let's sum this debacle up. Devil May Cry 4 had potential to be a good game. The concept is solid: slice things up with a massive sword, possibly gain some demonic powers and slice things up better. Throw in gunfights for more fun, and there's a recipie for fun. Unfortunately, things like the camera and one-liners show Capcom actually went out of their way to make this worse. If the lazy solution of not including tons of extra viewpoints was used, and nobody programmed the one-liners, and there was no cutscene for every door being sealed... it could have been a better game. As it stands right now though
DO NOT BUY .
I never managed more than four levels. Playing this game was either dull or irritating, but never genuinely fun. I won't recommend it to anybody: someone might like the characters, but nobody could like that camera.
*Note: in addition to the "everything in context", I also left the following points alone:
- Motorcycle sword that does nothing.
- Demon blood (currency) resides in everything: chairs, church pews, candlesticks, old dusty crates...
- Game length (I didn't finish, but I hear it's short).
- Dice rolling sections (Never made it to a single one of them).
