Devil May Cry 4 (Xbox 360)

You know, there’s something charming about the sheer earnestness of the Devil May Cry series. Between the blaring rock music, giant swords, large-breasted women, and oh-so-cool main characters, they’re just so determined to get teenage boys to shout “awesome”. Of course, this comes with a price. The story is nigh-incomprehensible (there are some religious guys, and as we all know, in video gaems religion = evil, and you have to save the girl, which seems odd because there’s more sexual tension between the two guys), and the dialogue veers between ridiculous and painful. But really, if you’re playing these games for the writing, then you have bigger problems than I can address.

So Devil May Cry 4 is the first game on the seventh-generation consoles, and I suppose in an attempt to appeal to a wider audience they’ve toned down the trademark DMC difficulty to a point where I am able to beat the game on the easiest mode. Developers, I thank you. I’ve tried to play DMC 3 and I got my ass kicked from here to Pakistan on the third mission or so. Of course, this seems to come with a price: as it’s more a “My First Devil May Cry” game, you get stuck with a trainee character, Nero. Nero is pretty much a teenage version of Dante (yeah, there are two silver-haired demon-men who dress in red and black leather in this universe), but he’s got a magic hand that can grab enemies and punch them. You eventually get to play as Dante, but only for about a third of the game, and it’s kind of disappointing to go back to Nero at the end because Dante is a hell of a lot more powerful.

If you’ve played a DMC game before, you’ll be familiar with the combat. If you haven’t, it’s pretty easy to pick up on, although the default controls are kind of dumb (who can hold down the right shoulder button to lock on to enemies without developing carpal tunnel syndrome?). Your sword is controlled by one button, and you can string together interesting combos by pressing the button in different rhythms (at least, once you purchase upgrades). Your guns are controlled by another button, and there’s not much you can do with them except button-mash, but you probably won’t use the guns much anyway since they do virtually no damage. I’d ask why bullets are less effective than swords, but then, in the DMC world, terminal velocity – hell, gravity, even – is a relative concept, so I’m not even going to guess at the physics here.

The game is pretty fun; aside from a few frustrating boss battles, combat moves smoothly, and it challenges you to figure out the enemies’ weaknesses without beating you over the head with giant glowing-red weak spots or whatever. Only bad thing is the game is really short – if you skip all the cutscenes (and unless your tolerance for cheese is high, you will probably not want to sit through them all), you could probably finish the game in about 6 hours. Of course, given how adrenaline-fueled the combat can get, even on the easy setting, you might have to put the game down after two or three missions (the game being broken up into 20 of them). The brief length is a little ridiculous, since half of the Dante missions involve backtracking through the same areas that Nero went through in the first part of the game.

There’s no point recommending this game to DMC fans, since at this point they’ve bought it, finished it up to and including Dante Must Die difficulty, and complained loudly on the Internet about what an annoying pussy Nero is. If you enjoy action games like this, or if you’re just curious as to why there is a possibility of Beelzebub being sad, it’s worth a play.

3 out of 5