Devil May Cry 4

Cinematic Gaming

Unfortunately, a few of the things that even I could admire in previous Devil May Cry games have been overdone, under-featured or just flat-out ruined in the latest game.

First-up is character animation. One of the great things about the old games in the series was the flawlessly rendered character animation and, while Devil May Cry 4 has undeniably taken huge steps forward graphically and has the boob-physics to match (more on that later), the animation is at times pitiful.

For example, Nero is supposed to be a graceful warrior-knight on the side of justice, trained in the use of swords and firearms. Nowhere in that biography does it say he can levitate for short periods of time though, which is exactly what you’ll see if you jump up in the air and fire your pistol. It is laughable – Nero just kind of hovers and shoots before resuming his return to the rules of physics.

If you can hammer the button fast enough when Nero is in the air then he’ll jerk up and down indefinitely, pumping round after round into his enemy and just… hovering.


At times Nero’s ability to levitate makes the game a tad unbalanced too. When I found especially hard or large enemies, I often found the best tactic was to use my grapple-arm on them and fly over their heads, hacking madly. Time it right and you’ll just get stuck above their heads, free to exploit an obvious and lamentable glitch until the foe falls.

Level design is also a little poor and the developers seem happy to make players repeat the same sections of a level over and over, recycling past environments and occasionally including vast, empty spaces for no real reason.

One thing that really bothered me was the complete lack of proper introduction to the game too. Some parts are really well done and the way that the romantic entanglement between Nero and Kyrie is hinted at is quite eloquent and touching. However, it’s ruined slightly by the seemingly inexplicable demon taint in Nero’s arm, which none of the demon slaughtering guards seem at all worried about. Newcomers to the game will get no hint of setting or why the world is infested suddenly with demons – but that just goes further to proving that the game is essentially just fan-service.

The way levels link together is a bit bizarre too. The first few missions see Nero making his way to a local castle and, although he sets off at midday with fair weather and from a huge temple/city, by the next mission it’s night-time and he’s battling demons in a ghost town. Then he goes through a mine. Then he comes out and it looks like it hasn’t stopped snowing in ten years. Then there's a castle filled with magic barriers, demons and torture rooms. You'd have thought The Order of The Sword would have noticed something like that.

I can appreciate that all of these environments are well rendered, stunning to behold and interesting enough to fight in – but they could have been linked together better (or at all). Surely there has to be a more direct route to the local castle than through an abandoned mine and via the mountaintops?


The worst thing of all though is the cutscenes. The other points can be overlooked and dodgy level structure is an acceptable fault to many fans of this genre, but the sheer number and gratuitousness of the cinematics are another teapot of mollusks altogether. Literally every single time Nero enters a new room there is a cutscene of some sort or the camera drifts off on its own accord to show you something you would have seen anyway. Sometimes it’s helpful, showing you a nearby gyroblade you need to solve a puzzle, but mostly it’s just for gratuitous fight scenes.

Granted, these cutscenes look good. The fights in them are beautifully executed and stylish—a fantastic tribute to manga combat and old Arnie films—but they frankly intrude on the gameplay far too much. Every ten steps or so it seems like Nero is shown performing a wicked-cool move for no reason and the whole premise dies of over exposure.

In fact, the cutscenes go against the entire point of the game. Often, after watching Nero cut his way through a throng of foes without any control, the game dumps you either at the start of fight (making you question what the point in the cutscene was) or at the end, so you just have to move on to the next room (leaving you wondering why you couldn’t actually play the damn game instead of watching that drivel).

In short, Devil May Cry seems to be suffering from a stark identity crisis, unable to decide if it’s a game or a film. The unfortunate result is that the game gets in way of the movie and vice versa. It’s a stunning testament to the misguided intent of the developers that the entire opening credits sequence (which itself is mostly pointless and full of operatic singing and slow-mo swordplay) doesn’t list level designers or developers. Instead, it’s a list of movie directors, animators and choreographers – an early signal of later failings.