Alittleacorn
Smile it confuses people
Before you see this hands-on review of the first ten missions, you should know this was the most embarrassing magazine I have EVER had to pick up and pay for at the counter. Why you ask? Well, take a look at the cover.
DmC Hands-On Review Magazine Pages:
Page 1, Page 2, Page 3, Page 4, Page 5, Page 6, Page 7, Page 8.
Yep, I had to say aloud ‘my brother will love this!’ to stop an old guy staring at me funny. I couldn’t even look the lady at the check-out in the eye when I paid for it. They probably thought I was buying porn to entertain myself. Being a 20 something female, picking up a magazine of a man surrounded by half naked angels is not an easy thing to do…but I regret nothing. <3
I’ve typed up the review and added in the pictures amongst it feature in the game magazine. The original pages are below the cover image above if you wish to look at them! :3
So let's get started, the DmC hands-on review of the first ten missions on the Xbox360.
------
WORRY NOT, PARADISE HAS BEEN FOUND
DMC DEVIL MAY CRY
So here we are. Ten out of twenty missions completed and a mahoosive hamper of humble pie is being ripped apart by the eager acids of our metaphorical stomach. That’s half of this reboot dealt with under the Nephilim difficulty setting –in other words, that can be played and commentated on until review code arrives.
At no time did young and punky Dante come across like a dick. At no time was a single concern raised about 30 rather than 60 frames per second affecting the taut controls of the combat. At no time was it ever considered that Capcom had given one of its most iconic properties over to the wrong developer. Sorry for ever doubting you, Ninja Theory. Thus far, we’re plenty impressed
Not that this has always been the case. Previously we too had taken some dark pleasure from laughing at the new guy, his plea to younger players and his aching amounts of teenage attitude. And while the external developer has done pretty things with its past games, we had never seen it employ twitch dynamics with such sheer authority and fidelity before.
But it absolutely does in Devil May Cry. It all begins so bloody well, too, with plenty of nudges and winks and, as always, with a cut-scene in which Dante does something fantastically impressive. This time he has half of his trailer park home hurled at him by a demon after he awakens to deal with a hangover, having spent the night delighting the ladies.
Naked, he contorts his body to pass through the holes of the bisected caravan, dressing himself while he flies through in slow-motion as a slice of pizza covers his junk from view. He’s a young man living as many young men do – messily and eager for sex, booze and excitement. He just happens to be the offspring of the unholy union of a demon and an angel.
THERE IS ANOTHER
DMC: DEVIL MAY CRY + STAR WARS: FORCE UNLEASHED:
Remember when we all thought the New Apprentice would be rubbish and he turned out to be parsecs better than Hayden Christensen? Yeah, that kind of thing.
From purely a cinematic point of view, DmC in action is an energetic, imaginative and powerful revelation that makes the previous outings seems rigid, outside of their FMV sequences and epic combat combos. A shift to Unreal Engine 3 has brought with it a previously impossible level of visual intensity that goes beyond mere close-ups of finishing blows.
Once transported to the netherworld that is Limbo the entire environment comes alive with pitch-perfect effects. Adding breath to what would normally to be static and airless locales that merely act as a backdrop to intense twitch action.
And this kind of dynamism isn’t just for show. Once Dante has uncovered some new powers he can whip and then pull chunks of the landscape towards him to open pathways. Think of it as a gadget from Arkham City and you’ll start to appreciate how it can be used, should you backtrack and take a previously denied route. The game features many such shifts, but it rarely forgets where it came from or what it should be doing.
Instead of the magical force field barricading doors shuts when it’s time for a scrap, blockades are now created by twisting the walls and the very ground beneath your feet. Previously, aside from some certain scenes, you would have needed to understand what the Devil May Cry series was all about in order to enjoy watching someone play it.
Now, however, it contains so much optical punch and pizzazz – and it even has a story that follows a clear narrative arc – that it can be a far more enjoyable spectator sport than ever before. All the verse that Enslaved: Odyssey to the West featured so prominently? With hindsight, it was so obviously just a warm-up exercise and a developer limbering-up before the big dance.
Ten missions into the game and it’s so very good. It’s “better than the last two Ninja Gaidens” good. From our perspective it’s a hurricane compared to Devil May Cry 4’s mild breezy good. And this goodness (if not greatness) isn’t just down to the characterisation of the hero that we used to love to hate (we really do like this new guy, if not outright the love the wee bugger), or the fluidity of the presentations, the quality of the acting or any of the other tertiary areas that come together to form such a pleasing shell.
Ninja Theory has nailed the crux of what Devil May Cry games were always about: rewarding and testing players’ fighting capabilities via a combat system that enables a ferocious amount of showboating and panache, by providing the constant opportunity to adapt to shifting threats and circumstances. Nephilim difficulty is meant to be DmC for those who have enjoyed Dante’s iconic skillset before and won’t accept anything less.
Those who just want to bash, crash and smash their way through have two other easier settings with which to please their eyes, if not minds; those wanting more toughness have another four increasingly painful modes to be horribly punished or tickled by. It’s a game to initially enjoy get good at and then become a genius at, and to play through again and again, keeping learned abilities and moves as you do so (and so enabling even greater displays of finesse).
Eventually equipped with devil and angel powers, which can be instigated by holding their respective pad triggers down while rattling off combos, Dante has never looked so balletic in motion. And as the screenshots that we’ve taken from the preview code illustrate, motion blur hasn’t been smeared all over the visuals to hide a lack of frames. There’s no drop in the drame-rate, ever, and when a fight is on it really can be fully and unremittingly on – all the way to 11. Sometimes beyond.
Enemies come in a wide range of freakish variants, as expected, but have also been subtly colour-coded thanks to a level of cunning design work that’s on display throughout. If they display redness then they’re more susceptible to devil attacks and a giant fist or axe; enemies displaying white, meanwhile, could be put down with the angelic attacks of scythes. Not being particularly effective? Try the other trigger.
When fighting a mixed batch of monsters such subtleties become incredibly important, since the time you have to decide who needs what is minuscule. Who is bullet proof? Who can be grabbed by a chained weapon attack and brought in for a flurry of further blows? Who can Dante pull himself towards, often keeping himself in an aerial state of violent grace, as varied attack after varied attack is administered and the rating climbs? Who can have their s shots deflected back towards them?
By midway through, you’ll have to defeated a menagerie of the foes you’ve previously face –and in a game that has so much motion in its camerawork, that could have caused a problem. But it hasn’t. Keep focused and your ways with hectic crowd control can be intoxicating. Get distracted and you’ll get battered.
As mentioned, there are plenty of little nods and winks to long-term fans. The pizza slice, for example, as well as another notable touch (which we’re contractually forbidden from mentioning) that’s not quite so subtle. But above all it’s when returns to his family home and it looks and sounds exactly like the first location from the first game, complete with the central stairway leading to upper areas and the giggling of children. It’s not exactly the same but it’s so highly reminiscent that, oh yes, you can see what they did there.
This could have been one massive mistake, but it works. DmC feels like classic Devil May Cry and, by the time we’ve experienced the final ten levels, it could well be a classic Devil May Cry –reimagined with better technology and featuring a more human and so more enjoyable protagonist. Haters gonna hate but, in this case and so far, they’d be fools for doing so.
What we have right here, unless something dramatically awful occurs in the second half of the game, is a Japanese franchise being taken on by a studio that (being based in Cambridge and all) couldn’t be any more British, yet has so far done a magnificent job despite all the initial reservations. Indeed, there was a time not that long ago when we saw the Union Jack on Dante’s sleeve and it instilled all the horror of seeing Geri Halliwell strutting about in that horrific flag dress.
It also brought back the exact kind of violent loathing you only get when you walk past Liam Gallagher’s shop, Pretty Green, and see him swathed in colours of the unions. It didn’t sit well, then. It had sky high potential to be embarrassing but now, ten levels later, it’s left us with a warming sense of national zeal last felt during the opening ceremony of the Olympics. Nice one, Ninja Theory.
WE LIKED
+ The new Dante
+ The fluid combat
+ Non-stop cinematic feasting
WE DISLIKED
- The small Virtual Reality level
- Loading from the disc isn’t quick
- Ten levels leaves us hungry
HANDS ON
The kid stays in the picture...
DMC DEVIL MAY CRY
If you’d never played a Devil May Cry game before and hadn’t heard of it, or the anger that younger Dante brought with his arrival on the scene, then there’s every chance that DmC would strike you as being universally brilliant. Even with the power of its prestigious heritage pulling on its coattails it fails to flounder. And as “one of those games in which you fight rooms of things” it’s already looking to be one of the best ever made from what we’ve seen so far. In the past we were probably far too negative, but now we’ve got code in the office it’s obvious that we were being terrible human beings back then – and for that, we’d like to say sorry to practically everybody.
-----
A review like that would make Dante leap for joy :lol:
DmC Hands-On Review Magazine Pages:
Page 1, Page 2, Page 3, Page 4, Page 5, Page 6, Page 7, Page 8.
Yep, I had to say aloud ‘my brother will love this!’ to stop an old guy staring at me funny. I couldn’t even look the lady at the check-out in the eye when I paid for it. They probably thought I was buying porn to entertain myself. Being a 20 something female, picking up a magazine of a man surrounded by half naked angels is not an easy thing to do…but I regret nothing. <3
I’ve typed up the review and added in the pictures amongst it feature in the game magazine. The original pages are below the cover image above if you wish to look at them! :3
So let's get started, the DmC hands-on review of the first ten missions on the Xbox360.
------
WORRY NOT, PARADISE HAS BEEN FOUND
DMC DEVIL MAY CRY
So here we are. Ten out of twenty missions completed and a mahoosive hamper of humble pie is being ripped apart by the eager acids of our metaphorical stomach. That’s half of this reboot dealt with under the Nephilim difficulty setting –in other words, that can be played and commentated on until review code arrives.
At no time did young and punky Dante come across like a dick. At no time was a single concern raised about 30 rather than 60 frames per second affecting the taut controls of the combat. At no time was it ever considered that Capcom had given one of its most iconic properties over to the wrong developer. Sorry for ever doubting you, Ninja Theory. Thus far, we’re plenty impressed
Not that this has always been the case. Previously we too had taken some dark pleasure from laughing at the new guy, his plea to younger players and his aching amounts of teenage attitude. And while the external developer has done pretty things with its past games, we had never seen it employ twitch dynamics with such sheer authority and fidelity before.
But it absolutely does in Devil May Cry. It all begins so bloody well, too, with plenty of nudges and winks and, as always, with a cut-scene in which Dante does something fantastically impressive. This time he has half of his trailer park home hurled at him by a demon after he awakens to deal with a hangover, having spent the night delighting the ladies.
Naked, he contorts his body to pass through the holes of the bisected caravan, dressing himself while he flies through in slow-motion as a slice of pizza covers his junk from view. He’s a young man living as many young men do – messily and eager for sex, booze and excitement. He just happens to be the offspring of the unholy union of a demon and an angel.
THERE IS ANOTHER
DMC: DEVIL MAY CRY + STAR WARS: FORCE UNLEASHED:
Remember when we all thought the New Apprentice would be rubbish and he turned out to be parsecs better than Hayden Christensen? Yeah, that kind of thing.
From purely a cinematic point of view, DmC in action is an energetic, imaginative and powerful revelation that makes the previous outings seems rigid, outside of their FMV sequences and epic combat combos. A shift to Unreal Engine 3 has brought with it a previously impossible level of visual intensity that goes beyond mere close-ups of finishing blows.
Once transported to the netherworld that is Limbo the entire environment comes alive with pitch-perfect effects. Adding breath to what would normally to be static and airless locales that merely act as a backdrop to intense twitch action.
And this kind of dynamism isn’t just for show. Once Dante has uncovered some new powers he can whip and then pull chunks of the landscape towards him to open pathways. Think of it as a gadget from Arkham City and you’ll start to appreciate how it can be used, should you backtrack and take a previously denied route. The game features many such shifts, but it rarely forgets where it came from or what it should be doing.
Instead of the magical force field barricading doors shuts when it’s time for a scrap, blockades are now created by twisting the walls and the very ground beneath your feet. Previously, aside from some certain scenes, you would have needed to understand what the Devil May Cry series was all about in order to enjoy watching someone play it.
Now, however, it contains so much optical punch and pizzazz – and it even has a story that follows a clear narrative arc – that it can be a far more enjoyable spectator sport than ever before. All the verse that Enslaved: Odyssey to the West featured so prominently? With hindsight, it was so obviously just a warm-up exercise and a developer limbering-up before the big dance.
Ten missions into the game and it’s so very good. It’s “better than the last two Ninja Gaidens” good. From our perspective it’s a hurricane compared to Devil May Cry 4’s mild breezy good. And this goodness (if not greatness) isn’t just down to the characterisation of the hero that we used to love to hate (we really do like this new guy, if not outright the love the wee bugger), or the fluidity of the presentations, the quality of the acting or any of the other tertiary areas that come together to form such a pleasing shell.
Ninja Theory has nailed the crux of what Devil May Cry games were always about: rewarding and testing players’ fighting capabilities via a combat system that enables a ferocious amount of showboating and panache, by providing the constant opportunity to adapt to shifting threats and circumstances. Nephilim difficulty is meant to be DmC for those who have enjoyed Dante’s iconic skillset before and won’t accept anything less.
Those who just want to bash, crash and smash their way through have two other easier settings with which to please their eyes, if not minds; those wanting more toughness have another four increasingly painful modes to be horribly punished or tickled by. It’s a game to initially enjoy get good at and then become a genius at, and to play through again and again, keeping learned abilities and moves as you do so (and so enabling even greater displays of finesse).
Eventually equipped with devil and angel powers, which can be instigated by holding their respective pad triggers down while rattling off combos, Dante has never looked so balletic in motion. And as the screenshots that we’ve taken from the preview code illustrate, motion blur hasn’t been smeared all over the visuals to hide a lack of frames. There’s no drop in the drame-rate, ever, and when a fight is on it really can be fully and unremittingly on – all the way to 11. Sometimes beyond.
Enemies come in a wide range of freakish variants, as expected, but have also been subtly colour-coded thanks to a level of cunning design work that’s on display throughout. If they display redness then they’re more susceptible to devil attacks and a giant fist or axe; enemies displaying white, meanwhile, could be put down with the angelic attacks of scythes. Not being particularly effective? Try the other trigger.
When fighting a mixed batch of monsters such subtleties become incredibly important, since the time you have to decide who needs what is minuscule. Who is bullet proof? Who can be grabbed by a chained weapon attack and brought in for a flurry of further blows? Who can Dante pull himself towards, often keeping himself in an aerial state of violent grace, as varied attack after varied attack is administered and the rating climbs? Who can have their s shots deflected back towards them?
By midway through, you’ll have to defeated a menagerie of the foes you’ve previously face –and in a game that has so much motion in its camerawork, that could have caused a problem. But it hasn’t. Keep focused and your ways with hectic crowd control can be intoxicating. Get distracted and you’ll get battered.
As mentioned, there are plenty of little nods and winks to long-term fans. The pizza slice, for example, as well as another notable touch (which we’re contractually forbidden from mentioning) that’s not quite so subtle. But above all it’s when returns to his family home and it looks and sounds exactly like the first location from the first game, complete with the central stairway leading to upper areas and the giggling of children. It’s not exactly the same but it’s so highly reminiscent that, oh yes, you can see what they did there.
This could have been one massive mistake, but it works. DmC feels like classic Devil May Cry and, by the time we’ve experienced the final ten levels, it could well be a classic Devil May Cry –reimagined with better technology and featuring a more human and so more enjoyable protagonist. Haters gonna hate but, in this case and so far, they’d be fools for doing so.
What we have right here, unless something dramatically awful occurs in the second half of the game, is a Japanese franchise being taken on by a studio that (being based in Cambridge and all) couldn’t be any more British, yet has so far done a magnificent job despite all the initial reservations. Indeed, there was a time not that long ago when we saw the Union Jack on Dante’s sleeve and it instilled all the horror of seeing Geri Halliwell strutting about in that horrific flag dress.
It also brought back the exact kind of violent loathing you only get when you walk past Liam Gallagher’s shop, Pretty Green, and see him swathed in colours of the unions. It didn’t sit well, then. It had sky high potential to be embarrassing but now, ten levels later, it’s left us with a warming sense of national zeal last felt during the opening ceremony of the Olympics. Nice one, Ninja Theory.
WE LIKED
+ The new Dante
+ The fluid combat
+ Non-stop cinematic feasting
WE DISLIKED
- The small Virtual Reality level
- Loading from the disc isn’t quick
- Ten levels leaves us hungry
HANDS ON
The kid stays in the picture...
DMC DEVIL MAY CRY
If you’d never played a Devil May Cry game before and hadn’t heard of it, or the anger that younger Dante brought with his arrival on the scene, then there’s every chance that DmC would strike you as being universally brilliant. Even with the power of its prestigious heritage pulling on its coattails it fails to flounder. And as “one of those games in which you fight rooms of things” it’s already looking to be one of the best ever made from what we’ve seen so far. In the past we were probably far too negative, but now we’ve got code in the office it’s obvious that we were being terrible human beings back then – and for that, we’d like to say sorry to practically everybody.
-----
A review like that would make Dante leap for joy :lol:
