DmC Devil May Cry

DmC kinda came out at a bad time. Now, more than ever, are we actively discussing sexism, crassness of anonymous internet types and a general lack of social elegance, or rather social standards, in video game culture. And then here comes this sodding game, with its crassness and its rudeness, like a 16-year-old boy with silly delusions of unearned respect and infinite greatness and is seemingly unaware of the wreckage his self-centered narcissism has brought to his social standing amongst his peers. They praise his status updates, his daily self-shots on Instagram, but secretly in the dark corner of a real-life restaurant that specializes in hot pot, they talk a whole lot of garbage about him.

I didn't know where I was going with that, like practically and procedurally generating a series of syntax to produce something worthy of articulation. Will Wright would weep at how emergent my opening paragraph was. Anyway, the point I was trying to make, I guess, is that DmC is like a 16-year-old boy.

It's juvenile and unabashedly embraces its silly youthful revolt with a lack of self-conscious shame. In that respect, it's brave – the nü Dante spits out terrible, horrible puns like a tempered lunatic. Lunatic because you can't believe someone would ever say these things, but it's delivered with a knowing wink. There is a confidence to it and a willingness to just let go of all inhibitions.

Just like how the game is set in a world destroyed by capitalism and the corrupting dirtbags, and in this case a god named Mundus. Mundus has taken over through the sheer power of debt and the materialistic desires of all who live. It's about as subtle of a parallel to our world as it is a boy who likes a girl telling the girl “There's more than just chocolates at my place.” after handing the girl a box of chocolates for Valentine's Day. And the chocolates are wrapped in condoms.

And this ruled world is a guise for a far more surreal reality, Limbo, that exists in a plane of little reason and totally sick art design and technical wowzahs. It's here where most of the game takes place, with its literally-the-walls-are-scrawled-with-text-telling-Dante-to-fuck-off as he hacks and slashes with sadistic aerial combos to completely dismantle Limbo to expose the true corruption, like literal corruption. Like, demon stygians and more demons. It's really bonkers and elevates into realms of Japan-crazy a little before the halfway point of the game, like when killer7 was a culture shock to like... all cultures. Well, never quite on that level, but the parallels in terms of sheer crazy are quite visible.

Limbo is where most of the game is and the game that is played is great. In a world of heavy and light attacks, DmC decides on a non-partisan decision to play towards its olde time strengths – precision, timing, volumes and tomes of moves – while loosening up the required skill to look magnificent. Obviously, that's unpleasant news to people who revel in the blood and sweat to absolutely master a system, but I'm not Those Guys. It's a pretty little system, allowing for five weapons and three guns to swapped in an out of will. Every weapon combos into each other, allowing for a lot of creative solutions to winning. This isn't God of War in the sense that the end result is the reward – tearing things in half, shoving a minatour's horn up his own bum – but rather is the journey to killing blow. A few design decisions run antithetical to the “Be the sickest dude.” philosophy, like enemy types that respond only to specific weapon types. It limits options and harms the freeflowing nature of the system and deleting these enemy types altogether would only make the game better.

When the game is over, it's not really over. It's rather when the game gets significantly more interesting, as it increases enemy waves and compositions. DmC, in its first three difficulties, has a pretty even split between platforming and combat and it left me hungering for more of a 70/30 split, with a greater emphasis on racking up those silly numbers. The higher difficulties don't make the game just harder, but makes it more interesting. Few games rarely ever have difficulties that influence game mechanics in fun ways, but you can count DmC as one of the few.

The boss battles don't gain a lot from it, though. They're visually creative, but takes just about zero advantage of the kind of things the combat system can do. Jump, dodge, hit the thing. Do it enough to kill the boss. This never changes, but boy, yeah, they look so cool.

So, DmC: Audacious, brash, kind of rude, but it doesn't care. It's a carefully designed game with a high polish gleam that shows just why the game took took so many years to finally come out. It's such a regression from all the slow progression that video games have made as a medium and the culture that exists around it, but it's darn fun and we'll always embrace that with our jaded and cynical hearts. Right?