DmC Looks Surprisingly Familiar

The lovely and efficient folks over at Capcom Germany have been kind enough to grace us with some copious amounts of gameplay footage of the upcoming Devil May Cry prequel, DmC. Which is great because we can finally judge the game off its apparent gameplay instead of Dante’s new design. It’s all in German though, so we’ll go by visuals.

It all starts well enough showing Dante kicking all sorts of ass in a familiar way, switching seamlessly between melee weapons and firearms, and even different ones within each category. So far, so good. It looks exactly like the Devil May Cry we’ve all come to love. Down to the moves too, actually. They’re the exact same moves we’ve seen Dante pull off before in previous games.

There is a shot of some non-combat gameplay where the world tears itself apart as Dante makes his way down the corridor. It’s a bit different and more involved than previous entries, which involved running down a straight path. Now there’s actual platforming whereby Dante will have to leap over bottomless chasms to progress in an increasingly disconnected world. That’s not to say the series hasn’t had stuff like this before but it definitely seems more pertinent now.

Dante also seems to have taken some of Nero’s abilities. DmC and Devil May Cry 4 are on opposite ends of the canon so it’s a bit odd to give these powers to this very young version of Dante, but the series has never exactly tried to be too canonical. Dante grabs enemies out of the air and swings from marked hooks and walls.

Even the boss battle seems rather akin to previous entries in the series. Here, Dante fights a gigantic spider thing and hits it a lot. What is a bit different is that he swings from platform to platform. Such mobility was never around in previous boss battles, which basically consisted of a one-one-one arena fight like a couple of comically mismatched gladiators with demon powers.

Finally, the one last detail that should be mentioned is that the game definitely seems more cinematically inclined than the rest of the Devil May Cry series. There’s a lot of fancy camera angles as Dante zooms from one place to the next and many more glamorous close-ups to the boss spider lady.

I guess all that’s left to say is that, well, DmC looks like a proper Devil May Cry game after all. Here’s hoping it’ll live up to the legacy.