Contributing Reporter

You just cut a path through dozens of demons with knives for limbs. You climbed your way to the top of a gothic castle by flipping from ledge to ledge. You suplexed a flaming hell-beast into the ground hard enough to make a crater. 

And you’re going to get a “D” ranking for it because you weren’t doing enough stylish combos along the way.

Fans of the Devil May Cry series should be quite familiar with this scenario. And this doesn’t change in the latest installment in the series, Devil May Cry 4, which is currently available on the Play Station 3 and Xbox 360.

Devil May Cry 4 is a return to the familiar sword-swinging, gun-slinging and controller-breaking difficult game play that the series is known for.  

You still fight waves of cackling demons and building-sized bosses, solve simple “open door A with key B” puzzles and get to look cool while doing it.  But there are a few changes to the formula this time around.

Players begin the game as series newcomer Nero, who looks remarkably like the previous games’ protagonist, Dante. Nero brings some welcome change to the stagnant hack-and-slash monotony. 

His right arm, the “Devil Bringer,” allows him to pick up and hurl almost any enemy in the game like a rag doll. This is used both as a sort of grappling hook in the game’s otherwise weak platform jumping sections, and as a way to reach out and bring distant enemies close to you to keep combos going.

Another addition is Nero’s fuel-injected sword, the “Red Queen,” which can be revved up like a motorcycle in the middle of combat and then released to create explosions whenever an enemy is hit with it. Players who master precise timing will be able to rev up the sword even in the middle of a combo to do absurd amounts of damage.

About halfway through the game, the control temporarily shifts from Nero to Dante, who plays much the same way he did in Devil May Cry 3.  

Being a veteran demon-slayer, Dante feels too powerful, so much so that he easily kills bosses that would have presented a challenge for Nero.  

However, Dante ends up working backward through the missions Nero completed, forcing players to backtrack to the beginning of a game. It’s a serious blemish on a game that is otherwise a blast to play.

The difficulty of the game is noticeably lower than previous installments, thanks in part to a checkpoint system that lets you pick up where you died and a system that makes the enemies go easier on you the more you lose — but at the cost of style points. This makes the game more accessible to new players, but also frustrating for players who would rather not have the advantage.  

The game still isn’t easy; the bosses will kill you. But the series seems to have found a comfortable equilibrium between Contra’s “if a guy stands too close to you, you die” and Kingdom Hearts 2’s “press X until you win.”

If you get frustrated by working your way through a difficult section of a game only to be penalized for it, then Devil May Cry 4 is probably not for you. But if you’re a fan of action games and for some reason haven’t played the Devil May Cry series yet, definitely pick this one up. 

Devil May Cry 4 is rated M for mature.