DEVIL MAY CRY V
Exploding robot arms ahoy!
Devil
May Cry 5 is a 16-hour exploration of the hundreds of ways a magical man might hit a demon. Nero hits demons with robot arms like a hyper-aggressive Inspector Gadget. Dante hits demons with two halves of a haunted motorbike. V lets demons do the hitting for him. All things considered, Devil May Cry 5 is one of the best games about hitting demons ever made.
You switch between Nero, V, and Dante across DMC5’s 20 missions. A demon called Urizen is using a bad tree called the Qliphoth to drain the city of all its blood, and it’s up to the trio to fight through his minions to stop him. The story is preposterous, genuinely funny at points, and supported by earnest performances and quality performance capture. Though the areas you visit can be simplistic and washed out, it’s a decent enough setting for combat encounters.
In classic Devil May Cry fashion you clear the level room-by-room and collect ranking scores from each encounter that feed into an overall score for the chapter. The point isn’t merely to survive, but to reach the upper echelons of the scoring system and claim the coveted, ridiculous ‘Smokin’ Sexy Style!’ title.
Each character has their own fighting style, but there’s plenty of opportunity to find your own preferred approaches within each move-set. Nero’s basic abilities let him attack with his sword and revolver. You can hold the fire button to charge the gun and deliver bullets that can stagger enemies, and you can rev your sword like a motorbike to power it up and access fiery new moves. Nero can also whip enemies closer or pull himself towards larger enemies with a tether he fires out of his right arm.
Within this stable framework of go-to combos you use Nero’s disposable robot arms to mix up combos or move around. The Gerbera arm lets you fire shockwaves that can propel Nero away from enemy attacks, and the Punch Line can detach and fly around as Nero rides it. The arms break if you take a hit during their special move, but you tailor an arsenal of up to eight arms before a mission starts and detonate them whenever you like. Some arms do give you an advantage over certain enemies, but the system is lax enough to let you pick the arms you really enjoy using in any situation.
If Nero was the only playable character this would still be a fine game, but Devil May Cry 5 offers so much more. Dante can switch between four melee weapons, four ranged weapons, and four combat styles on the fly. All of Dante’s weapons are fun, but my favorite is the hat, which captures DMC5’s wilful tendency to be incredibly smart and stupid at the same time. You can build your whole combat style around the hat’s clever orb switching mechanics. More importantly, you can make any enemy in the game wear a dumb hat. It even works on giant tentacle-faced rhino monsters. It even works on bosses.
DEMON PETS
V is the palate cleanser of the three. He struts around the edges of the battle reading poetry from his book as his pet demons rip up enemies. Once you’ve landed enough hits to build up your super gauge, you summon a massive oily golem called Nightmare to clobber everything into a near-death state. The demons can’t actually kill anything, so you have to teleport V around the battlefield to deal final blows with his cane.
Nero, Dante, and V don’t reach their full potential until the end of your first run through. The next difficulty level remixes every combat encounter and lets you keep all of your unlocks. The refresh is so extensive that it makes the main campaign feel like a tutorial, and this is before Capcom adds the Bloody Palace gauntlet mode - which should be out now-ish.
I’ve been hitting demons in this game for 19 hours so far, and I can easily see myself putting in 19 more. The setting lacks the flair and imagination of the genre behemoth Bayonetta, but there’s a greater variety of combat styles and a higher degree of challenge. And that’s what will keep me playing until Capcom hopefully releases another one someday.