I bought a Playstation 3 and have been spending whatever free time I have gaming. I finished Devil May Cry 4, a game which I’ve been looking very much forward to. I’ve been a fan of this series of games due to the rip-roaring demon-smashing combat and its trash-talking main characters.

Obviously, DMC4 is very pretty. Also obvious is the fact that Dante is replaced by Nero for most parts of the game. Nero is slower than Dante and doesn’t have all the fancy weapons or style-changes, but makes up for it with his demonic arm. It took me a while to get used to the different dynamics, but it works well once I did. Grabbing enemies and slamming them to the ground or tossing them around “like a cheap toy” is highly gratifying. It’s also extremely useful during boss fights where you can grapple onto the cheap suckers who love to float in mid-air and fire bombing attacks at you.

I really could do without the gratuitous fanservice, but alas, that is a perennial “feature” of such video games. Though, we have a female primary love interest — Kyrie — whose breasts don’t jiggle (Trish and Lady obviously do not know sports bras exists) and dresses very modestly. Shocking!

I didn’t care so much for Gilgamesh, Lucifer is not bad, but Pandora? That baby rocks. The new Proud Souls currency for skill upgrades is extremely welcome, as is the option to refund orbs and re-purchase skills. In previous games, having to choose between skills or items limited one’s options; I usually had to give up buying items to level up skills. And there was no way to cancel and reconfigure skills obtained. I often had to re-load games when I bought a skill upgrade only to find that it sucked and wasn’t worth the orbs.

What I don’t like:
Like the other Devil May Cry games, there is an Important Confrontation somewhere near the mid-point of the story, and then you have to navigate through the same environments backwards, albeit altered. Pretty much, if you’ve gone up to stage 10, you’ve seen the whole world. It’s a serviceable idea, but it gets boring and predictable, even with the slight alterations and increased difficulty. Given the new technology, one would think they’d do something different and cram new environments in for a change.

Then there are the jumping puzzles. I don’t mind a jumping puzzle or two sometimes, though my primary motivation of playing DMC is to live vicariously through Dante and beat everybody up violently while insulting them. DMC4 likes to stick jumping puzzles up the wazoo. Disappearing platforms! Rotating blades! Laser beams! Grim grip grappling! Dante and Nero can jump quite high, but they can’t leap very much forwards — which sucks when you miss that irritating platform by just one minuscule inch and have to try everything all over again AFTER fighting enemies that re-spawn. Tedious trial-and-error button pushing is not the same as a serious challenge.

Dante gets three new weapons and Yamato (Dark Slayer style) in the game, but you get these items so late in the game that there’s little chance to maximize their use. You can re-play stages to use these weapons, but it still doesn’t take away the disappointment when you receive Dark Slayer only to find that it’s already a major boss fight in which you spend most of the time leaping around like a flea on crack and using guns.

Despite the niggling issues, the game is enjoyable. Out of the whole DMC franchise, I wouldn’t say it’s the best in terms of game play experience — DMC3 is my pick for that — but it’s fun and attractive enough for me to re-play it.