Devil May Cry 4 reviewed

Ah Devil May Cry....will I never cease to play your games even though the first two are utter crap and three not sucking was a mere fluke.  But then again, Devil May Cry 4 may have the momentum of the third to push it over the edge to another good game....or could actually be a legitimately good game on its own.  Besides, I just can't stop playing the franchise when I only have one more game left to beat...so far.  So with that said, let's dig into Devil May Cry 4.

You are Nero....who is not Dante or Dante in a disguise.  I think they may be related but I'm not sure how and the game doesn't know how either.  But anyways, Nero is bored out of his mind watching his girlfriend, Kyrie, sing a hymn and the Pope blathering on Sparda and how we need a savior.  Then Dante comes crashing down and shoots the Pope in the face!  Of course that's bad and Nero is tasked with finding and apprehending Dante...then Kyrie gets kidnapped and then you find out that there's a whole bunch of demoning going on along with demonic angels.

And that's my biggest problem with the game, Nero.  No, not the fact that he exists because there is a germ of an interesting idea with Dante being a  bad guy who must be stopped at all costs, of course the game doesn't follow with that plotline.  My problem with Nero is that he's pretty much Dante.  He has Dante's weapons, a sword and a gun.  He looks like Dante, only a bit more of a pretty-boy.  He pretty much plays like Dante and I'm thinking, if this guy looks, fights and plays like Dante...why am I not playing as Dante?  What's the point of a new character if he all is going to do is want me to play the old character.

And then for a few missions, you get to play as Dante and all seems to be well.  Then you realize with a sicking feeling that you're just retracing Nero's steps.  Going into rooms that he was already in, either solving the puzzles Nero solved or just slashing it in bits and re-killing the same bosses.  There's nothing new in the levels except palette-swapped enemies with more HP.  And then he gets all the bad missions, one of them has a spontaneous and gratuitous time limit or a level filled with poisonous gas.  Nero's levels had no time limits and no poison at all!

But, for all the problems playing the game, the cut-scenes are by far the best of the series.  If the third game upped the awesomeness and camp to eleven, then the fourth game upped it to twelve.  The action is great and the "camerawork" if you will is fluid and kinetic.  The voice-acting is extremely entertaining and there leads the charm of a few amazing scenes like a Shakespearean duel of words in an opera house or the battle between Dante and Nero.

For every moment I liked, there was an equal number of moments where I wanted to put my controller through a wall.  It would make for a nice B+-movie but then there's playing the game and it's problems.  Granted, those problems are not as bad as the first two games and the results are at least playable even if the difficulty goes back to being unfair at times and the camera system is, by far, the worst of the series.  It's something to pleases the fans but wont' break through to non-fans like 3 did.

6/10