DmC: Devil May Cry Gets Utterly Trashed By Fans On Metacritic

Ninja Theory’s DmC: Devil May Cry has just been released, and while critics have been praising it quite highly and its current rating is sitting in the eighties over at Metacritic, fans have not been so kind to it and have really been trashing it with masses of extremely negative user scores.

The PlayStation 3 version of the game currently has a user score of 2.8 from 200 votes, while the Xbox 360 version of the game, at the time of writing, has a user score of 2.9 from 255 votes.

I know most of your responses to this will probably be that there is a severe case of immaturity going on or something to that extent and maybe it is, who knows. Personally, I can’t comment because I haven’t played the game yet. But I do know two things, and the first is that I don’t bother with critic scores, especially given how many mediocre titles get showered with eighties and nineties just for being popular, and the second thing is that when users review bomb a game, I’ve learned to take note of it and that’s about it. Even though their negative scores are grossly exaggerated most of the time, their criticisms often have grounds to them, or at the very least have a reason to be there.

I read through a few of the user reviews, and I’ll just quote some that gave mediocre scores, rather than zeroes or ones. I’ve tried to avoid reviews with spoilers, but obviously there might be some minor ones here and there, so read at your own risk. Or don’t read at all, and stay with your mind uncontaminated.

User LFrostByte criticized how easy the game is, the atrocious story and lackluster gameplay:

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It is, perhaps, not as bad as all the people who have not played it throwing bad scores at it would say, however the game is extremely lackluster in many categories. First off the dialogue and story are infamously atrocious, but that goes without saying. The gameplay is incredibly easy as few enemies spawn in the same area at once, the axe weapon is obscenely overpowered, and you can infinitely juggle an enemy in the air with the angel and demon grabs, not to mention that you get SSS almost immediately from any attack, and that the game lacks the lock on system necessary to aim attacks at enemies. The music tends to be obnoxious as well but thats subjective. However, while the story and gameplay are mediocre at best, it is still fun to hack and slash a bunch of demons, so its still earns itself some points.

User prehistoricman gave it a 6/10 and provided an in-depth analysis as to why:

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Very unspecific and light spoilers The good: While the combat may not be as varied or fluid as the previous 2 entries in the series, it manages to retain enough DMC flare to make it solid, better than the competition, killing regular baddies remains very fun, even if 7 year old DMC 3 had over 10 more moves than the new iteration, a turbo mode and an extra playable character that was not DLC. While the platforming is rather shallow, it does manage to show off the very impressive environments. The music seems to be fitting for the game style, and while not really my style, it never seemed to bother me too much.

The bad: Overall, the game is too easy even on higher difficulties, I found myself sustaining 0 damage on some of the bosses, SSS style ranking by repeating two combos over and over, only one if I managed to land it after a demon evade. surprisingly, a normal foe, a dual sword wielding enemy managed to be more challenging than every single boss in the game. Out of 5 melee weapons the game provides, 2 of them manage to be rather useless, since the remaining three cover all your needs, I am talking about Rebellion, Arbiter and Aquila. This also happens with firearms, going from useless, to useful, to broken.

You could say those weapons are there to give variety, you would be wrong, and I explain why next. Color coding, apparently the combat designer felt the best way to show off the move set was not letting you use it, you come across these color coded enemies as the game gets “harder”, that can only be damaged by either a demon weapon or an angel one, the moveset on Aquila (angel) and (Arbiter) are very superior than your other options, so is their damage output, which you need since these enemies have lots of health, there goes variety.

The frame rate drops a lot to 20 fps (the old ones were 60 solid), especially towards the end when even cut-scenes suffer from it, in the very few scenes where the heavy handed red/orange/blue filter goes away, the city starts showing the unreal engine, everything looks grey with lots of bloom, with PS2 like textures and geometry. The chief designer claims that this will elevate storytelling in games to the level of film and theatre …. The old games were 80s B action movie cheesy, the dialog and story on this one were soap opera bad, if they made soap operas for edgy 14 year old boys and men during midlife crisis, I never knew sex scenes and profanity could be badly written until now, it´s full of shock value, no substance at all. Felt like watching The Hangover again, like an unfunny episode of Family Guy, I mean there was an abortion by sniper rifle.

When the game takes itself serious it fails miserably at it too, taking a boss from Futurama character motivations from They Live and Stars Wars prequels. They removed taunting because it felt unrealistic, and yet the they show demon bosses being killed by a single bullet on a cutscene when previous game play shows those same bosses barely damaged by 400 bullets each. they also show the main antagonist, a super smart boy prodigy blabbing his master plan,in front of the wrong people at the wrong time, the worst possible way, to justify the last battle, which is is copy pasted from DMC3, only much slower.

The game is fun, looks and sounds good too. I got some eye candy, I got shallow but serviceable platforming, and for combat I got 75% old DMC, 10% Dark Sector and 15% Heavenly Sword. ……. This confused me, because when Ninja Theory said they were making it their own, I expected the combat to drastically change, for better or worse, I expected them to walk a different path, and yet it seems they walked the same one, only they gave up half way and called it a day, this made me feel the reboot was rather pointless, unless you really really like dubstep.

The last review I’ll quote is from crazyrainbows, who gave it a six.

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DmC isn’t terrible, but for all that the media and it’s creator’s have praised it’s “Shakepearan story”, and “gameplay as good as previous titles” it failed to deliver. The story and characters are dull, uninspired, and frustratingly generic, but in a DMC game, none of that is as important as the combat and gameplay mechanics. While the gameplay isn’t bad, it’s nowhere near DMC3 or 4′s combat.

Pulling combos in DmC felt slower, easier, and not as satisfying. Color coded enemies provided a challenge, but not a good one. It was tedious having to wear them down with one specific weapon, it wasn’t a fun challenge to kill them, it was got very tiring very fast. A lot of the weapons feel unbalanced as well, while one may deal a large amount of damage, another seems completely pointless unless you’re fighting one of the color coded enemies because of how little damage it does.

The platforming was intrusive, and one of the things I disliked the most about the gameplay. At times, it felt like I was jumping around pulling steps out of the environment more than I was getting to fight, and that’s not a good thing in an action game. I feel that a lock-on function would have helped immensely though, there were times were I couldn’t see what I was aiming at, or wasn’t able to tell what enemy I was pulling towards me. Lock-on could have made the game much less frustrating in that regard. Despite these things, the combat is alright. There are a good amount of combos and variety of moves, and some of the weapons are fun to play around with. There are a few enemies, and a couple of bosses that were fun fights as well, though I wish they were a bit more aggressive in attacking you.

The storyline is terribly dull and might have been interesting if I hadn’t already seen “They Live” or if the characters weren’t written to be so unlikable. Honestly, I had more interest and sympathy for the main villain than I did for our supposed “Hero” Dante was crass, rude, and at times outright cruel. There seems to have been very little effort put into the characters, even from the voice actors who slur their lines and don’t sound like they’re trying to put much emotion into their respective characters. Again, half the time the villains are more convincing characters than the heroes.

In all, the game doesn’t play as well as we were promised, but it still plays like an average action game. It’s solid, but doesn’t really stand out as something new. The story isn’t the “Shakespearean” narrative we were told it was either, and while a few rather horrid parts stick out to me, the outright dull and generic nature of the story makes it utterly forgettable. DmC is comfortably average in almost all aspects. Not bad, not great.

I find this interesting, but I’d be lying if I said that I didn’t expect it especially given how controversial this game has been since it’s announcement. But as for me, I’ll wait until I play it before I judge.

Name: Azhar Amien
Location: Cape Town
Position: Editor, Reviews

Azhar has published 2581 posts. Read all of Azhar's posts.

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