I’ve never played a Devil May Cry game before, but seeing as Capcom did such a brilliant job on Resident Evil 4, I decided to give the DMC4 demo a go, and I found myself playing those same two levels thêm than any other game I downloaded from Xbox Live. I don’t regret buying the full game AT ALL.
GAMEPLAY: COMBAT
The combat is (as suggested bởi Xbox Live labelling it “stylish action”) very stylish and cool. Even an injury to your character results in a flourishing slide-back.
As Nero, bạn use a sword (Red Queen), gun (Blue Rose) and Nero’s left arm “the Devil Bringer". I could spend ages fighting off demons without getting bored. Dante is a slightly odd character to play, as he gets thêm and thêm obscure gadgets as bạn progress through the game, as well as his three súng and two-handed sword. The game encourages bạn to alternate your weapons and moves, and will give bạn thêm points for being thêm stylish. Devil May Cry 4 has the coolest combat I’ve ever played. While bạn play set characters with set personalities, there are RPG elements, like improving certain areas of combat. I find it a little strange that bạn NEVER have to reload.
GAMEPLAY: PUZZLES
Well thought-through and logical (unlike Zelda games, in which bạn light torches to make a treasure chest magically appear).
GAMEPLAY: ANGLES AND ACCESABILITY
I really hate to point out a bad thing about this game, but the camera angles drove me nuts and I hated how limited I was in where I could go. Also, there are parts of levels where they just couldn’t be bothered to make things smashable. I mean, Nero’s arm can stop a sword mid-swing, and yet it can’t break glass windows.
STORY: SETTING
The story starts in a modern-day, yet cổ hủ, cũ thời and isolated town where people use science and magic to fend off demons (some of which look like possessed kid’s toys with blades attached to them). The people of the town are involved in an odd religion in which they worship a demon who abandoned his people and decided to help humans.
STORY: BEGINNING
Nero is a knight of this town, employed to protect the town from demons. He’s skillful, yet his disrespect for the people’s religion means that they give him the dirty-work. Nero is Những người bạn with a songstress at the church called Kyrie, and promised to go to church with her. He arrives late after some demons distract him, although Kyrie is unaware that Nero had been absent for most of the service. Part way through, Nero tries to drown out the preaching with his headphones (one of the tracks is Nero’s combat theme), but quickly loses interest and gets up to leave. At that moment, his arm (which is in a treo lên, sling from an earlier battle) starts to glows blue, a man falls through the glass ceiling, landing right tiếp theo to the priest and shoots him in the face.
STORY: CONTENT
Devil May Cry 4 is shockingly explicit and graphic. During the first two levels, I witnessed a man being dragged behind a pillar with a blade through his leg, another was impaled on a sword and used to batter other people, two demons getting it on and a woman fighting off demons with kick moves in the most impractical and revealing costume I have ever seen. With most games, I’d complain that the violence is over-done, and that any form of limb severing hoặc disembowelling is unnecessary. But the thing is that DMC4 uses graphic scenes when it needs to. The designers didn’t hold back just because it might offend hoặc disgust some people, but they didn’t go overboard either, like Ninja Gaiden 2 did.
STORY: CUTSCENES
Oh....my....goodness! The cinematic are absolutely amazing! Some fight scenes can only be rivaled bởi the Matrix films. When it comes to cutscenes, some people think “oh crap, not thêm story stuff” but when I played Devil May Cry 4, all I could think was “YES! Another cool fight scene/ part of the story.”
STORY: RELIGION
Some of the game confuses me, at some parts it seems like the deities in the story are fictional “when I came to this world 2000 years ago, there was no such human as the likes of you!” and other times they seem to be based on the god of Christianity/Judaism/Islam “You know God, I always hated that bạn made my arm like this”. Either way, the story is interesting and looks at angels, demons and humans; and how we define these three things.
STORY: EMOTION
As Peter Molyneux once đã đưa ý kiến (actually, he says it a lot): a great story is nothing unless bạn feel some form of emotion from it and bạn actually care about what happens to those in the story. For the first time in a video game, I really cared about whether a character lived hoặc died. CHARACTER SPOILER during the final battle, I was on the edge of my ghế, chỗ ngồi (or I would be, if the sofa wasn’t facing an awkward angle) and when Kyrie’s life was at risk, I was thinking “please please please please don’t die!”. Strangely enough I felt thêm concerned about how Nero felt if Kyrie died, than her death itself. SPOILER ENDED I digress, my point being that this story really made me care about the characters, and that’s something that a video game has never done for me before.
STORY: ENDING
Don’t worry, I won’t give away anything big, but bạn get to fight demons while the credits are rolling. Oh, and the ending itself? I think it was great.
SUM-UP
Devil May Cry 4 is a funny, epic, emotional and fun game. Probably the best game I’ve bought for the 360 so far (as of August 2008). If you’re a hardcore gamer, buy it. If you’re a casual gamer who likes a challenge and a great story, buy it.
