'DmC: Devil May Cry Definitive Edition' (PS4) review: A sweet afterlife 

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\'DmC: Devil May Cry Definitive Edition\' (PS4) review: A sweet afterlife

2015-03-24T09:00:00Z 2015-03-24T13:58:38Z \'DmC: Devil May Cry Definitive Edition\' (PS4) review: A sweet afterlife

March 24, 2015 9:00 am  •  David Wilcox | david.wilcox@lee.net

DmC Devil May Cry trailer shows Definitive Edition (PS4/Xbox One)Subscribe ► http://bit.ly/GamesHQMediaDmC Devil May Cry trailer delves into the remastered version that includes new gameplay features.DmC Devil May Cry Definitive Edition launches during 2015 on PS4 and Xbox One.

Game review: Divine new \'Devil May Cry\' does Dante right

The color of Dante\'s hair will be the last thing on your mind just minutes into "DmC: Devil May Cry," in which Ninja Theory raises Capcom\'s ha… Read more

ONE-SENTENCE REVIEW: Improvements to its play and its visual presentation make the "Definitive Edition" of "DmC" worthwhile for both fans and anyone who hasn\'t played Ninja Theory\'s impressive reboot of Capcom\'s classic action series.

CONTENT RATING: Mature for blood and gore, drug reference, intense violence, nudity, sexual content and strong language

PLATFORM: PlayStation 4 (also available on Xbox One)

DISCLOSURE: I received a download code for this game from Capcom and completed both campaigns in hardcore mode on Nephilim difficulty in about 10 hours.

Most remasters of games from the PlayStation 3/Xbox 360 generation give them a coat of visual polish on the more powerful PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.

Some fold in all their downloadable contents to package the fragments of the game into one salable whole.

And a select few take the opportunity to rewire and improve the guts of the game itself.

"DmC: Devil May Cry Definitive Edition" does all of this. Realized in 1080p at 60 fps and bundled with its "Vergil\'s Downfall" and "Bloody Palace" DLC, Ninja Theory\'s 2013 reboot of the classic Capcom action series carves out a sweet afterlife for itself on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One with refined and rebalanced play. It\'s the rare reissue made as much for the game\'s old players as its prospective new ones.

In the spirit of remastering, I\'ll lift my synopsis of the game from my original review:

The new Dante is a boozer and a bedder, with a deadpan potty mouth and haphazardly shorn black hair that suggests he\'s been texting while sword-fighting. Yes, black hair — the once-defining silver mop of Capcom\'s Dante is gone. 

He is, however, still half-demon, half-angel. He still has a cooler-headed twin, Vergil. And they\'re still parentless thanks to the dark lord Mundus, big bad of the first "Devil May Cry."

In "DmC," Vergil leads The Order, an underground force pushing back against Mundus\' oppressive fist. He and medium Kat locate Dante in Limbo City, a sort of alternate dimension where the walls bubble with black rust and the architecture goes hypnotically Dali. By helping Dante remember their parents, Vergil recruits his long-lost brother into the cause. 

Mundus\' reimagined perch as a debt baron, marketing an IQ-sapping soda to the masses and stoking their fears through cable news demagoguery, allows Ninja Theory to sneak some shallow social commentary into the series\' heaven-and-hell bluster.

Not every change in the new "DmC" is a halo. Despite shedding one of its more misogynistic lines of dialogue, Ninja Theory\'s new narrative for Dante retains the charm of a rusty axe. The game\'s voice acting and facial animation are up to snuff — even for the same studio that did "Enslaved: Odyssey to the West" and "Heavenly Sword" — but the writing is still a heartless cross between self-serious and self-parody. Mundus casually threatening to bankrupt 

 in the first scene ends up being one of the game\'s milder eye rolls.

On the contrary, "Vergil\'s Downfall" tells a more delicate tale with crudely drawn cartoon segues. This was my first time playing the DLC campaign, and I was taken pleasantly aback at the tonal shift. The play is equally divergent from that of "DmC," stacking enemy waves four or five high where the main game would relent at two or three.

But the grind doesn\'t do any favors to Vergil, whom I found decidedly less fun to control than Dante. His more swordsmanly movements felt arrhythmic, his grapple moves unnatural. The game\'s challenge mode, "Bloody Palace," didn\'t exactly beckon a visit from the bad Son of Sparda.

By triggering angel and demon weaponry, he can hit quickly and gracefully with throwing stars, or bludgeon demons into paste with a mallet and gauntlets. His guns are still crucial, too: Dante can control crowds with a shotgun blast or juggle a foe in mid-air with rapid pistol fire.

But his launching uppercuts and lassos are what turn the brutality into ballet. You can control the fight like a maestro, slinging demons into the air and following them heavenward, blasting, slashing and grappling higher until they\'re dust. It feels as much like choreographing a fight as competing in one.

The most substantive changes of "DmC" concern its combat. A new Hardcore mode toughens the climb up the ladder of style grades such that only the most blitzing, varied chains of offense receive the coveted "SSS." Doing so means mastering the bruising Eryx gauntlets as much as the Aquila throwing stars — hard-wiring into your fingers the D-pad presses and triggers that unsheathe them.

The game offers one form of help: In another tweak, the much-hated enemies who could only be damaged by Dante\'s angel and devil weaponry no longer break your combos if you strike them the wrong way. Otherwise, every cretin, from the rampaging Tyrants to the methodical Dreamrunners, inflicts 5 percent more damage. 

Hardcore still wasn\'t a challenge — I only died a few times during the whole campaign — but the constant presence of the letter "D" in the upper-right corner of the screen sure baited me into doing better. Maybe one day I\'ll even work up the courage to try the also-new Dante Must Style mode, in which enemies only take damage once Dante\'s combos have reached the "S" rank, or the 20-percent faster Turbo mode.

I wasn\'t about to try setting any records on my first return trip to Limbo City, though. On the PlayStation 4, the trippy hellscape looks even sharper, its telescoping alleyways more vertiginous. The doubled frame rate not only vivifies the surroundings, it makes the action of Dante\'s one-man war on the underworld even more savory.

Lake Life Editor David Wilcox can be reached at 282-2245 or david.wilcox@lee.net. Follow him on Twitter @drwilcox, or find him on PSN or Xbox Live under the name davewiththeid.

Devil May Cry, Dmc, Ninja Theory, Capcom, Playstation 4, Xbox One

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