DmC: First Impressions

I am No Fan of the Devil May Cry series–when the first one came out, I wasn’t really into brawly action games and did terribly with it and ignored the rest of the series. When I got into brawly action games with Bayonetta and Lords of Shadow, Devil May Cry had more or less been so outclassed when I revisited it that I totally lost interest in the series. It’s one of those series that finds its mythology interesting, I think, and as someone who doesn’t give a crap about the familial relationships here, I’m not looking forward to playing more recent and more refined incarnations.

But DmC is a reboot and I liked the demo and I have Gamefly so why not. My hope was to have the game on Friday–it was mailed out on Wednesday, sez Gamefly–and play it leisurely through the weekend, through Monday, through Tuesday if necessary, and then receive my copy of Bioshock Infinite and just play the shit out of that. But between the crack staff at the Bed Stuy Post Office and Gamefly’s own incompetence–I’m not particularly thrilled with their service–I didn’t get it till yesterday and only had about an hour of play time. I’ve been told the game is beatable in a few hours if I try hard enough–but I just don’t really feel like marathoning it. I’ve tried to and it just doesn’t seem to support that flow.

Fact is there’s a lot about the game that’s gorgeous–the environment designs and the terrain effects are seriously impressive. While the level design is nothing to write home about, the art direction–as you’re going through the city, it twists around you, bits of brick fly around, corridors pinch shut, demonic messages appear written on the walls. It isn’t well-designed enough to be a series of setpieces, as far as the gameplay is concerned, but something’s always happening to the environment. It’s got an extremely active terrain.

And yet, for all of that, it feels like a very inactive world. I’m not sure if this is intentional–the game is kind of muddy about its cosmology, you spend a lot of it in “limbo”, and so the timelessness may be intentional. But I think about the cyclic atemporality of games like Dark Souls or Majora’s Mask, how they give the sense of being a bubble of time cut off from everything, how that adds to the eeriness and the horror of those games, and DmC just feels very…lifeless. There are some platforming sections which are fine, but Dante doesn’t feel quite as graceful as he ought to, and the areas where you have to use your grapple are very clearly marked. I used to enjoy games like the 2008 Prince of Persia, which were basically obstacle courses that were laid out for you, all you had to do was time some obvious button presses, but after playing stuff like Dishonored, fuck that noise. The platforming sections feel very stiff and unfree.

It’s the same issues that Bayonetta had–and yet because I liked Bayonetta’s combat more, I gotta say that Bayonetta comes ahead. Vigrid never feels like a real place, just as wherever I’m in in DmC doesn’t feel like a real place–it feels like a Series of Videogame Levels. But I enjoy playing in Bayonetta’s Series of Videogame Levels more. Perhaps if we could get DmC’s environment people and Bayonetta’s combat people and have THEM make a game together?

But what plagues me about both those games and about brawly action games in general is how repetitive the combat really is. You’re fighting against waves and waves and waves of similar enemies, and since I’m not particularly loving DmC’s combat, it’s very boring. Every chapter they give me a new weapon and they want me to switch between them and combo more or I’ll get low points and it’s just kind of stressfully torpid. There are occasional times I get into the rhythm, and maybe there’ll be more of them, but it just doesn’t feel as *nice* as I like games to feel.

I must give the team credit for the storyline, mostly because when I was sixteen I saw Marilyn Manson on the Mechanical Animals tour and I fucking loved it, and there’s still a soft spot in me for this kind of shit. DmC’s storyline is, essentially, that Fox News and soda are demonic plots designed to control humanity–Monster energy drinks secreted, Slurm-like, from an actual monster. The soda is called Virility. When you’re in the factory, demonic words are written on the cases: OBESITY, CONSUME, POISON. It’s got such a Hot Topic aesthetic. Everyone swears angstily. The game, far as I can tell, commits to its aesthetic, and I appreciate that.

Still. I don’t feel like marathoning it. I’ll pick it up after Infinite is done.

Filed Under: Blog