Review: Devil May Cry 4 (PS3)

Get one thing straight right from the start - Devil May Cry 4 is exactly what series fans didn't want to see. It's neither epic nor especially challenging, it doesn't take three months to work out how to beat the first boss, and it has even less fighting styles and weapons than the previous game in the series. Indeed, compared to 2005's Devil May Cry 3, it's positively inclusive, which may go some way to making this the first game in the series to gain wider appeal.

Central to this shift towards a more accessible DMC is the introduction of Nero, a teenage, emo Dante fanboy whose minimalist fighting style is reminiscent of the first game's early sections. His Exceed system, which rewards tapping one of the controller triggers at the moment of attack with a power boost, puts particular emphasis on good timing, gives newbies a chance to warm up their thumbs with every combo and move.

Saving old hands from protracted deja-vu is Nero's party-trick, the Devil Bringer, an elastic demonic arm that draws the player to enemies or vice-versa depending on their scale. It's a simple addition that invigorates and accelerates the combat, sending combos airborne for longer and whipping the player around the screen at a break-neck pace. Complementing the instant gratification this provides, weaker enemies can be hit with heavy-duty Buster moves, something that extended to stunned bosses. It may only amount to triggering an impressive computer-controlled combo, but slapping about the later foes with impunity is exquisitely rewarding.

So successful is the addition that within a few hours, doing without the Devil Bringer seems like living without a limb, which makes the mid-game swap to controlling Dante all the more jarring. Even experienced players will have a hard time adapting to using the complex mix of fighting techniques again, Dante's moves requiring a far more restrained pace and considered approach than Nero's. Little time to given to acclimatise, and just when swapping elegantly between fighting styles, Devil Arms and guns becomes second nature again, players are tossed back into Nero's shoes for the finale, but not before a protracted and tedious retread of some previous battles.

Repetition has always been an integral part of learning fighting styles in games of this sort, but previous outings never saw such unapologetic re-use of the same environments and enemies, with Dante's entire arc running over exactly the same ground as Nero's for the most part. Neither especially varied nor particularly inspiring to look at, the environments compound the problem- while the PS2 could get away with streams of grey castles and monochrome snowscapes, next to more recent genre peers it's simply lifeless. Nor are the adversaries especially ingenious, ranks of rehashes of the previous games' foes combined with a few severely overused new ones, making the repeated play-throughs that the series' hardcore fans will demand of the title a chore.

They've got plenty more to complain about too, much of which will likely go over the heads of more recent converts. Most galling is the apparent absence of clear audio cues for enemy attacks, an issue that renders the perfectly-balanced Royal Guard style lifted from DMC3 far less useful, never mind determining when to dodge or counter correctly. Dante's weapon and style selection, too, is relatively austere in comparison to the third game, removing the ability to experiment among a varied range of fighting methods. There's rarely more than one way to defeat each enemy effectively, which stands completely at odds with the style-is-everything, no-move-done-twice ethic of the reward system.

Those drawn to DMC4 only for the flash combat and preposterous cut scenes may never notice, finishing the game in perhaps ten hours, unlocking a few more bits and bobs on a higher difficulty and trading it in for something else, satisfied that they got their money's worth. That doesn't change the fact that underneath the fireworks and glitter that the generation-jump brings DMC4 is a far less complete video game than its predecessors, and being new to the series will simply delay the realisation that the game just doesn't live up to the series' potential. Devil May Cry 5, anyone?

Rating: 7 / 10

Words by Colin Whiteside