Tears of Joy
Devil May Cry 4 is finally here, and boy was it worth the wait.
Published: March 16, 2008
There is one glaring issue that Devil May Cry 4 never really seems to be willing to correct -- and at times actively flaunts with sadistic glee: repetition. As mentioned, when you finally do swap characters, you get to run backwards through all the levels, fighting the bosses in each of them again. This re-use of ideas hits a peak when you're asked to participate in an overly-elaborate version of the same board game that has already appeared previously in the game, except this time you have to fight all the bosses a third time. It's a shameless way to milk more game out of what was cobbled together by the developers, and despite linking all of the different levels under the banner of one cohesive "world," it screams, "we didn't have enough game, so here, play all this stuff again."
If the game didn't look so damn good, we'd probably take issue with things more. Yes, repetition and retreading is something of a hallmark for Capcom (old-school Resident Evil games, anyone?), and one could even bitch and moan about the fact that there really aren't that many enemies in the game, but thanks to incredibly tight controls and a nice attention to detail on said enemies, there's a decent amount of stuff to look at while body slamming that 100th scarecrow dude.
That the game can rest just as comfortably in gloomy, gothic castles as it can venture out into snow-covered mountainsides, dank caves, sun-kissed forests and harbors at sunset -- all while somehow feeling like part of the same world -- says plenty about the visuals. It might have some slowdown issues in those jungle-like forests and the textures up close may look almost PS2-era blurry, but by and large the game runs quite nicely, peppered with plenty of depth of field and motion blur effects to boot.
Your speakers will have almost as much to chew on as that HDTV. While the dialogue is customarily varied, ranging from so-bad-it's-good deliveries to absolute cringe-worthy melodrama, the sound effects are nice and clean, and there's some fairly decent 5.1 support (though the back channels aren't used as much as I would have like outside of cutscenes). The music outside of battles is nice and gloomy, even borderline creepy at times, but once enemies draw near, the initial eye rolls and dismissive laughter about the screamed vocals in the action music quickly turns to annoyed groans. Yes, it's bad. Really bad.
Devil May Cry 4 does exactly what the series has been trying to do since the first game: it recaptures the careful balance of light puzzles, tight, varied action, over-the-top cutscenes and clever little boss encounters, all starring a pair of smart-mouthed, swaggering dyed-in-the-wool action flick caricatures. Sure, it dips into its bag of tricks far too often on multiple occasions, which is why the game isn't getting a perfect score, but it also has the combat and cutscenes to carry the rest of the game, which is why it's getting a rather commendable 9.