Devil May Cry.

If you're wondering why I am reviewing a game over ten years old, it's because I just purchased the Devil May Cry HD collection and being that I've never played the first two instalments of the franchise, I decided I'd review each game individually rather than the whole set on how much value the HD business adds.


I'm going to say Devil May Cry hasn't aged well because upon its release it was met with universal praise but I personally found the game horrible. Well it isn't so much the game, the controls are pretty basic but the action segments are pretty solid it's just all the bullshit with platforming against fixed cameras, horrible underwater sections and a story so convoluted and under explored I haven't a fucking clue what is going on.

So from what I could gather from the game Dante is a demon hunter. Yeah, that is it, everything else happens so randomly and so quickly I had honestly no clue what was happening. Upon reading online Devil May Cry is about Dante's quest for vengeance or something against a guy called Mundus, who is some ultimate demon with an army of demons who apparently killed both Dante's mother and brother.

You basically spend your time fighting respawning enemies (which is frustrating as fuck because you leave the room, go back in and all the monsters are back - this is especially annoying if you go into another room by accident or realise you've gone the wrong way with no minimap to help your travels) thankfully the combat is satisfying, if a little basic with way too few weapons this time around so basically calling Devil May Cry an action game is pushing it, being that most of the game involves exploring an area, finding a key of some kind, going to a new area. Most of the time enemies just feel like they are there to prolong the experience rather than being directly intertwined with the actual game itself. I actually found a lot of this game pure tedium as I wandered around trying to work out where to go next, thinking thrice before going through any door because having to fight a set of respawning enemies you've already defeated four times...again because you still don't know where you are going is a fucking ball pain. I often found myself completely stumped and having to look up a FAQ online and if you need a FAQ to complete a game (and I'm not talking secrets or extras, just the main quest) you have a problem. And don't get me started on those underwater sections... Worse still each combat section is broken down with frustrating platforming (due to the horrible fixed camera, time lag between jump presses and very exact hit detection as to where you can land - each one is a true test of patience.

Most missions are short, ending on boss battles (and each boss is reused like three or more times) which are normally much easier than the basic monsters you wade through due to there only being one at a time. That isn't to say the boss battles are easy, per se, the game has a consistent sense of replacing genuine challenge with frustration. Most demon goons are easy enough, but they attack you with four or more at once meaning your back is always open to at least one cheap attack. The bosses normally just throw about thirty attacks at you on screen at once and no matter how lightning fast your reflexes are, you can never evade everything, it's like playing an old snes game, they also each require 'tactics' and by 'tactics' it just normally means your attacks do absolutely no damage unless you complete a certain objective midbattle, it can be anything from hitting those dials, doing some platforming or whatever, the fights are never as simple as just fighting the boss meaning there are times of real frustration as hundreds of things are trying to kill you at once while you desperately run around trying to find the bosses 'weakness' (the thing that allows you to hit it). Back to the FAQ I go again.

Being that it is all set within a castle...I think, this becomes more and more muddy when you go travelling on pirate ships and fighting through forests but I think it is. And this helps making a lot of backtracking which would normally feel like a cheap way of extending playtime feel like part of the games continuity, you'd see a door find it locked and you'd get the key to open it some three or four missions later which in the end actually makes the world feel more alive than having you sighing you've gotta go back and back track. Even if I know it's cheap deep down. This also allows the tech limitations of 2001 to be somewhat sidestepped, in using the same areas multiple times, rather than only once, it allows each one to be big in scale, multi layered and with some areas of limited exploration leading to full on confrontations in mirror worlds and the underworld, making it feel at times, ahead of its time.

I used the easy controls, rather than the normal ones because the normal ones were clunky as fuck and didn't allow me to do any combos without breaking my hand. Once on easy controls though the game can get a little boring, x to shoot y to slash. Although you can jump around and do combos and so on, you can only buy new moves, you can't ever expand your combos and with a much smaller selection of weapons than in three or four, every fight scene plays out the same and no matter how fun and satisfying it is, it gets old eventually. Luckily a 'long' mission on DMC is normally less than half an hour with an 'average' mission being less than ten minutes and I'm obviously not playing this game as quickly as the game wants since I've rarely gotten a rank over C and didn't get an S rank once throughout the game, so for you aficionados the game is probably even quicker allowing the game to be played easily in bursts to offset the tedium and frustration, I completed the game in under seven hours so the game isn't even particularly long if I was playing it 'properly' I'd have probably completed it in less than five. There is also the issue that the game seems to freeze up for a few seconds before every fight encounter that hasn't been preloaded.

I'm honestly pretty underwhelmed with the 360's graphics in general, when you see how glorious a PC can look (admittedly at settings that require a nuclear powercore) and then come to a 360 with all its dull colours and flat textures but I guess what can you expect from a console that is what...6 - 7 years old now? So the fact that Devil May Cry looks almost the standard of your usual 360 game is an achievement for the 11 year old game, no doubt but still isn't really saying much given how bad your usual 360 game looks. 

As I'm writing this I just feel so bad, I wonder how many fans each paragraph has made me lose. I like the Devil May Cry franchise but I'm sorry guys, I just don't think this game is very good. Maybe if I was older than 10 when this game came out (or however old I was) then maybe I'd have played it and appreciated it and right now I'd be writing about one of my childhood favourites in HD but I'm sorry, coming to an 11 year old game for the first time isn't a pleasant experience, it feels as heavy and as clunky as it is old. Devil May Cry is an old man simply clinging to the memories of all the good it did in its youth.

So do I recommend it? I won't say it isn't worth a recommendation because it comes in the HD collection with number 3 which is one of my favourite games ever and they are all part of the same story so it is worth it for that alone but that isn't all Devil May Cry has, the combat is great if not a little shallow and the universe and characters are great, if not a little hard to follow. This isn't a bad game, far from it, I just don't think in 2012 that this game still deserves a 9/10, it hasn't stood the test of time the 'dramatic fixed camera' thing practically breaks the whole game and is thankfully a relic well in the past.