Devil May Cry 5 - Review

The first Devil May Cry sparked my love of action games in general, but as the series has gone on it’s kept that place in my heart because they aren’t just about killing every enemy in a room. They’re about how you killed every enemy in a room, expressing yourself in an almost artistic and highly technical dance of swords, guns, and lots of jump cancels. Devil May Cry 5 is the new pinnacle of this particular subset of the genre, thanks to a perfectly paced campaign that mixes in three completely different playstyles, each of which containing enough depth to carry a game of their own; a fun and satisfying story; and quite simply one of the best combat systems you’ll find in video games.

There’s a great air of mystery to the unknown nature of both Urizen and V. Like Nero, I was never sure if I could trust V and found myself formulating theory after theory about his identity and motives with every new morsel of information that was fed to me. By the end of its 10 to 12 hours I still had some questions left over, but overall the plot kept me hooked all the way through with satisfying revelations, a few answers that fill in some long-standing series plot holes, and of course, the off-the-wall action that only Devil May Cry can deliver.

Devil May Cry 5’s combat is absolutely sublime.

On the surface, it’s a very simple system: There’s one button for melee attacks, one for ranged attacks, and one for your Devil Breaker, style technique, or cane attack, depending on which character you’re using. If that’s as deep as you want to go, you can absolutely get through the campaign on normal difficulty just fine with nothing more. There’s even an “auto-assist” mode that automatically performs cool and flashy combos by just mashing the attack button, letting even casual players feel what it’s like to play at a higher technical level.

The beauty of DMC 5's combat is in the depth, creative freedom, and variety.

But the beauty of Devil May Cry 5’s combat is in the depth, creative freedom, and variety its three sets of tools offer. If you’re playing as Nero, those tools are your revvable Red Queen sword, chargeable Blue Rose handgun, a grapple that can pull enemies towards you, and an ever-growing arsenal of Devil Breakers, which are disposable mechanical arms that each provide Nero with new abilities and utility. My favorite, Punchline, shoots out an arm that homes in on an enemy and keeps them in place with quick rocket punches. But the real fun starts when you hold down the Devil Breaker button while Punchline is out, allowing you to jump on top of it and ride it like a hoverboard, knocking enemies up into the air with flips, 360s, and other sick stunts.

Dante’s gameplay is by far the most familiar because he plays almost exactly the same as his Devil May Cry 4 counterpart, which is to say that he’s essentially a Swiss army knife. He can swap between four distinct styles (Trickster, Royal Guard, Gunslinger, and Swordmaster) four melee weapons, and four ranged weapons, all on the fly. His arsenal is a fantastic mix of old and new, with the old weapons kept fresh thanks to a number of new tweaks and techniques, and the new weapons adding new layers to Dante’s combat that he’s never had before. He even has a motorcycle that he can crash into enemies with and then transform into two slow but heavy-hitting buzzsaw swords and back again, all in the space of a single combo.

V plays completely unlike any character in any Devil May Cry game.

And then finally there’s V, who plays completely unlike any character in any Devil May Cry game due to the fact that he barely does any of the fighting himself. Instead, he summons three familiars to do battle for him: There’s Shadow, a black cat that can morph into various blades and creatures; Griffon, a bird that can fire a variety of electrical blasts from a distance; and Nightmare, a gargantuan beast that can only be summoned when V builds up his Devil Trigger meter. Nightmare fights completely autonomously, and it can be very extremely satisfying to watch him emerge through a wall or rain down from the sky and just wreck a whole crowd of enemies.

Your familiars can’t actually kill anything, though, so V has to teleport around and deliver the finishing blow with his cane once an enemy has been primed for the kill. That leads to some very cool kill sequences where V just blinks from enemy to enemy, wiping them out one by one while your familiars carry on the fight in the background.

Using V effectively has a pretty steep learning curve, even by Devil May Cry standards, due to the fact that you don’t actually have any directional control over Shadow or Griffon. Getting them to attack a specific enemy can be a challenge, and trying to keep track of where they are in relation to the enemy can also be tricky. However, you can use some of your Devil Trigger meter to have them autonomously attack, allowing you to focus on dodging. Or, if you feel you have a few moments of safety you could read a book and regain some of that meter... Or just play some violin to taunt them.

Even so, V’s missions are the weakest of the trio, mainly because his movement feels so much more limited compared to Dante and Nero. But that’s not to say that they’re bad by any stretch. Once you get a couple of upgrades for Shadow and Griffon under your belt and get used to the flow of combat, V’s unique gameplay becomes quite fun, and it’s used sparingly enough to never outstay its welcome.

Microtransaction Reaction There are eight Devil Breakers in the base game for Nero to equip, but there are also four more that are sold separately as DLC (and included in the $70 Deluxe Edition). The four DLC breakers include The Pasta Breaker, an arm with a fork attached to the end that shoots out to continuously attack an enemy, push them away, and then returns them to you; The Mega Buster, a gun arm that’s a direct nod to the Mega Buster from Mega Man; The Gerbera GP01, a modified version of the Gerbera Devil Breaker; and the Sweet Surrender, which can heal Nero moderately over time, or be charged for a quick burst of health. Another Deluxe Edition piece of DLC is the Cavaliere R, which is pretty much the exact same as the Cavaliere that Dante obtains naturally, with the exception of a slick red paint job, and one awesome technique that causes Dante to fly towards an enemy at high speed. None are essential but they’re all pretty fun to use, with the exception of Sweet Surrender, which felt like a waste of an inventory slot since its only purpose is to heal. I could see getting the Pasta Breaker and Gerbera for $1 each, but $3 for each of the others doesn’t seem worth it for what they add. It should also be duly noted that you can purchase Red Orbs, Devil May Cry 5’s main source of currency, with real money. That’s always a bad look. That being said, the Red Orb cost of just about every upgrade and technique feels appropriately priced (aside from one special technique for each character that’s clearly there for high-level players to strive for), and I never felt any kind of need or desire to drop real cash on Red Orbs, nor did I ever feel like I had to farm them in-game.

It should be said that Devil May Cry 5 looks and sounds stellar. Style and personality oozes out every animation, whether it’s Nero’s wild engine-powered sword attacks that send him flying across the level, Dante’s smug teasing of the various bosses, or V’s subtle mannerisms that just add to his mystique.

Level design is more linear and much less puzzle-heavy relative to previous Devil May Cry games, which I appreciated, as it kept the brisk pace up and put more of an emphasis on skill-based combat challenges. Like, for example, there are a few where you must kill a pack of enemies before their weight causes the platform to fall, which would seal off a hidden room with goodies. That being said, the environments are not as varied as they have been in the past, and you’ll be traveling through a lot of similarly demon-torn cityscapes and hellish underground chasms.

Though the Devil May Cry games have a bit of a reputation for being difficult, on its default settings DMC5 isn’t terribly hard. In fact, it’s actually quite forgiving if all you want to do is survive the ordeal. When you die, you can use a Gold Orb to revive on the spot with all your health and Devil Trigger meters refilled, and those aren’t hard to come by: You can often find them off the beaten path in a level, you earn one per day as a daily login bonus, or you can have your performance rated positively in the weird cameo system, which records a ghost of your character when you play through certain levels and adds that ghost into another player’s game. If you run out of Gold Orbs (I was swimming in them by the end) you can also spend the much more common Red Orbs to revive with and buy back health.

It's not about just killing all the enemies in the room, but how you kill the enemies in the room.

Staying alive isn’t really the challenge, though. As I said at the start, what I love about Devil May Cry as a series is that it’s not about just killing all the enemies in the room, but how you kill the enemies in the room. Trying to get SSS ranks is a real worthwhile challenge that made up for the lack of base difficulty. To that end, I sprang at every opportunity to buy new techniques, which is rewarding because Devil May Cry 5 is paced in such a way that you are constantly getting new toys at just about every turn – whether it be a new form, weapon, or Devil Breaker – and they all come with their own set of new upgrades. By the end of the story all three of my characters felt like all-powerful gods, with even more upgrades still left to be purchased for my next run in the unlockable Son of Sparda mode, which is essentially New Game+ and where the true challenge of Devil May Cry 5 starts to rear its head.

Finally, a great combat system isn’t worth much if the enemies aren’t fun to fight, but fortunately Devil May Cry 5’s meet the high standards set by previous games in the series. There’s a great mix of common fodder enemies that allow you to do basically whatever you want to them to build your combos, tanky enemies that require specific tactics to bypass their defenses, and powerful support baddies that can deal big damage from afar and can be very threatening if not brought down quickly. The same goes for bosses, with a few of the later fights being among the strongest the series has seen. There’s a solid variety of them too, with several towering and powerful beasts, others who are agile and elusive, but the best are just straight up one-on-one duels with high-speed action that require quick reflexes and a careful balance of offense and defense.