My overriding thought whilst playing Devil May Cry 4: Special Edition was, “Well, it’s nice, but why does exist?” Set between Devil May Cry 1 and 2, the story won’t make much sense to anyone new to the franchise, and despite looking crystal sharp and running and 60fps, this is a seven year old PlayStation game that is showing its age.
For the uninitiated, you play as a Nero for the first half of the game before swapping back to our regular hero, Dante, for the second portion. There’s a rather flimsy plot which boils down to little more than “Oi, you stole my bird and now I’m gonna ‘ave you!” with added religious iconography.
Rather than drown his sorrows down the local pub after losing his love, Nero must hack and slash his way through endless demonic bad guys using his three attacks. One button unleashes sword combos, another fires your rather useless pistols and a third unleashes your possessed devil arm. These can by augmented by flipping in to devil mode, which adds extra power and moves to your attacks.
In terms of gameplay it’s hard to fault DMC4, as hacking through hundreds of demons using the multitude of moves never gets boring and there are some superb boss battles. Playing on the easier difficulty settings, most of the combos are chained for you so you don’t have to worry about remembering lengthy button sequences and the puzzles sections are thankfully few and far between, but on the hardest difficulty, Nero will be a corpse in a matter of seconds, if you don’t know what you’re doing.
Whilst super smooth and sharp, the graphics do look a little creaky with a lack of textures and some blocky designs that really show the game’s age, and though you can now play the game as Virgil, Trish and Lady, little else has been added or changed, which seems like a missed opportunity. Problems from the original game, such an annoying camera and backtracking still exist; reach the level 10Â and then you swap to Dante and battle all the way back to the start.
More frustrating is that the game is still split into the same PlayStation 3-limited chunks, so that you will see an awful lot of the loading sign. It’s terribly distracting during cutscenes, and when you’ve seen games like Uncharted seamlessly shift from one area to the next on PS3, let alone what Naughty Dog are achieving with Uncharted 4 on PS4, you do have to wonder why the simpler levels of DMC4 can’t be loaded in one go.
Another throwback from yesteryear is the blatant and rather sad sexism. Cameras glide around female buttocks with moves that would make Bayonetta blush, boobs – and only boobs – jiggle, and the ladies are either clad in the skimpiest of clothing or, in Kyrie’s case, do nothing other than be helpless and get kidnapped.
Although you can play with new characters, and they come with new attacks like Lady’s explosive grenade launcher, you are still playing the same missions as you would do for Nero or Dante. There’s just not enough variation, and while one play through is fun, you have to wonder if anyone really wants to play the same levels with three sets of characters and three difficulty levels? If you do like a challenge, then the Platinum trophy looks like one of the most difficult to achieve, requiring SSS ranks on multiple battles and clearing the Bloody Palace mode using all characters.
Devil May Cry 4 was a good game in 2008, but by today’s standards it is rather lacking as a PlayStation 4 game. Capcom haven’t helped themselves by releasing the far superior DmC: Devil May Cry on PS4 just a few months ago, and while that may be sacrilege to some ears, placing the two remasters next to one another shows the quality of Ninja Theory’s game. Diehard Devil May Cry fans will enjoy the nostalgia of Devil May Cry 4: Special Edition, but for rest of us it is quite literally a case of having seen it all before.