GAME REVIEW: FTN reviews DMC – Devil May Cry: Definitive Edition

DMC : Definitive Edition
Capcom
PS4/XBOX ONE

Thanks to Spotify on Playstation 4, I changed the soundtrack to The Best of Megadeth, which improved this game further.

A few years ago, Devil May Cry was rebooted into oblivion, as Capcom sat down with a scalpel and a two lists. One of the lists was called ‘All the good things about the Devil May Cry franchise’, and then another list called ‘Things that 13 year old boys think are cool’ and seemed to go through the new game they were making replacing the former list with the latter. Kids love acronyms like COD and WOW and DLC and WTF. They love cocky men with their shirts off who swear a lot and have a slightly sexist view on what women are (Human beings, if you didn’t know). They seem to hate well-established characters who are quietly awesome. The entire first thirty minutes of the game feels like it was scripted by the guy who wrote the TV show Skins. It’s also possible that they hate well-balanced games with challenging difficulty levels and a range of modes.

The Definitive Edition of DMC is, to my surprise, instantly much better.

The DLC excluded from the DMC X360 DVD and PS4 Blu-Ray has been added, along with a turbo mode that makes the game much faster, a rebalancing of the fighting system that makes it slightly less irritating and it flows much better.

The game has a way of making me really want to alternate between all the weapons that I got from the progression in the game and eventually I found myself hammering out ludicrously complicated combos and the like in no time that shocked me as I watched my fingers flail about at a ridiculous speed – and I can play Dragonforce songs on the guitar. Ok, well one of the easier ones.

Though it’s still quite hard to get the combos up, the difficulty levels have been increased and also brought in a hardcore mode which you can apply to the easy, medium, hard, extra hard and extra extra hard modes to make them slightly more challenging/insanely frustrating. The thing about the hardcore mode is that all it does is make ranking up harder and therefore caused me to become an increasingly better game player (in theory), a bit like practicing speed metal on an acoustic guitar with thick strings before progressing back to normal. If you then turn off the hardcore mode and go back to normal you should be hitting SSS ratings in no time and picking up that tasty trophy/achievement with ease. Though I still haven’t.

Despite my facetiousness at the start of this article, I did actually enjoy DMC; it’s not as good as God of War and my brother would argue that Bayonetta is the best in this category, I preferred Devil May Cry 4 (a HD version of which is out soon) but the DMC: Definitive edition is a much smoother beast. Personally, I despise the colour scheme of the ‘purgatory’ areas where most of the game is based and I find the music to be very uninspiring but, as I mentioned, once Spotify was introduced I actually got to play it listening to Rust In Peace and it really made the game feel much better to me, so either the game suddenly got better or the music was annoying me more than I thought.

The Vergil story line, that is a mini sequel to the original DMC game, has slightly different feeling controls giving the characters a different tone, leaving you with the feeling that the game is not just a reskinned version of the same levels. I think the ultimately bad thing about the game is they should have called it Dave’s Quest to Hell or something, and avoided all association with Devil May Cry, too many people are annoyed at character and story irregularities, whereas the game is actually a glorious hack-stuff-to-pieces game with loads’ve side quests, RPG elements and descent DLC, slightly let down by unnecessary cleavage shots and infantile dialogue. If you enjoy speedy slash and shoot and kill games this is the best one the PS4 has at the moment. Until the God of War 3 remake comes out, I imagine.

3 out of 5 Nerds