For the first two or three missions, playing Ninja Theory’s DmC—the Heavenly Sword developer’s fresh take on the Capcom’s Devil May Cry franchise—is like watching Sci-Fi Channel-era Mystery Science Theatre 3000, the story arc featuring talking apes and super-evolved Brain Guy. Every second, you expect the new dark-haired, drug-wrecked Dante to turn to the camera and exclaim, like MST3K‘s Crow T. Robot, “I’m different!”
Actually, this moment very nearly occurs. Near the end of the first mission, a wind-flung white wig happens to land on Dante’s head. (If you spend more than a few seconds wondering what a long white wig was doing flying around the streets of an otherworldly carnival in the first place, you’re playing the wrong game.) After a few moments spent entranced by his own reflection, Dante tears the wig off his head with the phrase, “Not in a million years.” In characteristic Devil May Cry style, the game doesn’t just refuse to cater to “fans” of the character who must now be referred to as “old-school Dante”; it directly taunts the fanbase who drew up petitions and wrote letters to the White House in order to prevent this game from being made. If you want to see a Dante who’s old enough to shave, you’ll have to fork over cash for the DLC.
As much as it refuses to apologize for the aesthetic differences of the reboot—among them, a Mundus who’s more Kingpin than Demon King and a Vergil who wears blue latex gloves and a bowler—there are times when the new DmC is oddly, almost predictably reverent of its source material. In-game achievements are all named for famous (or infamous) lines from the older games, from “Flock off, feather-face!” to “Fill your dark soul with light.” The “twist” ending hews closely to series tradition, and the new Devil Trigger (which applies a red-and-white color filter to the entire screen) works only as nostalgia-bait.
When it isn’t engaging in such push-pull antics with fans, it’s easy to view DmC: Devil May Cry as its own game…and on its own merits, it’s nothing short of SSSensational!!! It could be accused of favoring style over substance, where previous Devil May Cry games offered a sublime mix of both. A few of the later setpieces have an on-rails feel to them, and the combat fails to achieve the fluidity of earlier titles. DmC gurus may be able to pull off some insane combos with the game’s on-the-fly 6-way weapon switching, but normal mortals will quickly grow tired of having to hold down the left or right trigger to use Dante’s more interesting melee weapons or his new Nero-inspired grapple moves, and early platforming segments are made frustrated by Dante’s slow running speed and shorter-than-it-should-be jump arc. The latter is no longer a problem once the grapple moves enter play, and combat does have its high points, especially once the second-tier weapons get unlocked about midway through the story. Even at its worst, it’s an undeniable improvement over Ninja Theory’s previous game, Enslaved: Odyssey to the West.
None of that matters, though, because DmC sets the new standard for jaw-dropping level design. Almost all of the playable segments take place in Limbo, a sort of demonic parallel universe that wants you dead. That’s right; the world itself has it out for you. In Limbo, anything goes—hallways can stretch out like Slinkies, the entire world can be flipped on its head, and words can emerge from the landscape itself ordering your demise (or just dropping a timely F-bomb). Billboards and posters, when you get closer, reveal themselves as demonic commands straight to the human unconscious: “Gluttony.” “Consume.” Somebody’s been watching They Live. The devil, as they say, is in the details, and DmC doesn’t skimp, from something as small as the scrolling shooter demo’ing on in-game arcade cabinets to effects so huge and layered it’s hard to keep up. During gameplay, this is one of the best-looking Unreal Engine games on the PS3, even if the cutscenes can look a bit wonky.
The best part is that no two levels in DmC are alike. The game can effortlessly slide between a creepy carnival straight out of Silent Hill—one of the good ones—and a living nightclub whose walls pulse with techno beats, like WipEout HD done as a brawler. The next moment, you’ll be caught in a super slo-mo car chase straight out of Inception. The boss battles are equally imaginative, particularly Raptor news anchor Bob Barbas, who you fight as a literal talking head, pummeling him with your newly-acquired demon gauntlets while he continues his on-air smear campaign against your good name.
Easily the highlight of the game, and one of the best boss fights in the past five years, this battle serves as the perfect answer to those rabidly disappointed Devil May Cry fanboys who refuse to play the game because it’s different. Whether or not you like his new design, this new Dante fits within the world he inhabits, and it’s one of the most thrilling and stylish game-worlds ever created. It would be very difficult to imagine a scenario in which the old Dante finds himself punching a giant holographic news anchor, and for that moment alone, it’d be worth spending eight hours staring at any version of Dante, no matter how stupid his haircut is.
February 20, 2013
Is that first image backwards?