Caltrops - Gamerasutra - meh is right

Forum Overview :: Gamerasutra

by FABIO 02/03/2003, 11:49pm PST

curst wrote:

dumbass me wrote:

And the power-ups

Meant to say that the system for powering up your swords isn't as good either. Gone is the ability to pick and choose your moves - you just 'upgrade' your weapon. Meh meh meh all around.

I rented it a few days ago and was going to post a mini review but looks like you beat me to it. For some accurate reviews look at gamefaqs.com and read all the reviews that give this game a 5-7, they all seem pretty dead on.

I read that it was a totally different team that did this one, if that's true boy does it show. What the hell did they do to Dante? He flips a coing everytime he makes a decision? Since when he become Two-Face?

There's no thinking to involved in combat anymore, no more combos, and no more mixing up gun and sword action into combos together, you either entirely use the sword on an enemy or you entirely use the guns. Gone are the different sword moves you'd get by pausing the melee button at a certain momement, you just keep hammering the attack button here. On the 4th hit the enemy gets knocked back 30 feet so gone are the endless juggling combos you could pull off it you were good.

I don't know where you're getting the outstanding graphics and animation part from, I think it's a step down from the first. Since they decided to have huge, wide open city levels it seems they had to sacrifice quality just to be able to see farther than 10 feet in front of you. The whole thing looks washed out and blurry. It seriously looks like this is an unfinished beta version. Instead of the bright, vivid, and varied colors of the original DMC here you have various shades of ruined city grey, sewer green, and decaying building...well, grey. The wide open parts also mean you're going to be spending a LOT of time running around everywhere trying to figure out where you're going (the map is totally useless, it doesn't show you where any doors are and doesn't tell you where you are on it, all it does it show you what area you're in, yay). Half the boss fights seem like they went with that annoying blur effect tech demo method like the last boss fight for that Dead or Alive game (the worst instance being when you fight Phantom). If they had spent half as much time trying to get the entire game to look good as they did rendering Lucia's ass cheeks then it probably would have been pretty decent.

I'm also not sure where you're getting the style part. There are no more varied melee attacks, just getting next to the enemy and hammering the button. You can still knock the enemy into the air to juggle him with pistols, but you can also do that just by shooting him with the pistols (after about the 5th shot he'll start floating up) so most of the time you won't even bother with the melee part. They threw in a move that lets you run along a wall Matrix style, but everyone who's played the game so far says it's absolutely worthless, and they're right. It looks cool but that's it, after amusing yourself with it a few times you'll never touch it again. They also got rid of the cool looking glowing runes that represent your devil trigger gauge and replaced them with a tiny, ugly, blurry, generic bar meter. They also replaced the IN YOUR FACE EXTREME CLOSEUP spinning items on the menu with static, immobile items and the weapons no longer fire and explode when you equip them from the menu screen. The entire menu system feels like you're navigating through Windows, boring.

The wide open areas was such a mistake: in addition to spending hours simply running everywhere, it also means the camera is so zoomed out that for the majority of the game your character is never more than an inch tall, which combined with the blurry graphics makes it hard to figure out which direction you're facing (a problem given how often the camera angle suddenly changes) and even to distinguish yourself from the 8 blurry enemies surrounding you. Huge open areas also mean that you can sit back and just kill everything with guns (the pistols are the only ones worth using) from across the screen since they don't have a prayer of reaching you. Unlike the enemies in DMC1 that could block, dodge, or shrug off bullets, all the enemies here take good damage from the pistols, are slowed down while being hit, and flung back and knocked down after taking half a dozen shots, allowing you to shoot them even more. EVERY single boss I killed with just the pistols (a few of them you HAVE to use just the pistols because he's forever out of range of melee attacks), no fancy manuvering for most of them just keep firing the pistols while walking. That fire demon with the ball and chain was laughable, he just stood still the entire time twirling his weapon around in a circle (a 15 foot range) while I sat 100 feet back and just shot him to death.

What's this FABIO? Easy bosses? Damn right, half of them I killed without taking a single hit. The bosses almost never talk, and no cool exploding impalement deaths when you kill them, they just dissapear. I beat the game with both characters in 5 hours total without dying once; I still have no clue what the game over screen looks like. This wasn't on easy mode either, it was on normal (the only difficulty setting available to start). I'm hardly the DMC1 wizard, I must have died 60 times trying to beat normal mode, I don't know if I'll ever beat hard mode and I'm not even going to touch Dante Must Die, but holy fucking shit is this game far too easy. I just found out that an item you start off with fully restores you when your life runs out, so even if I did ever "die" I would have bounced right back, yay. Oh and the random enemies are all pussies too (they're ALL ripped off from Diablo games). Unless required in order to move on, you'll just end up running past them all because combat gets old and you don't need red orbs anyways.

Red orbs are useless because there's nothing really that great to buy. There are no new moves you can purchase (you hardly start off with that many either), the only things for sale are life/devil trigger restoring items and upgrading your weapons. Items are pointless because the game's so damn easy you don't need them, and upgrading weapons is pointless because all that does is make them do slightly more damage (no new powers, no new appearance) which again you don't need because the game is already ridiculously easy. All the melee weapons are practically identicle that you find lying around hidden (you can easily miss them and never get them) and pick them up (no more getting impaled). Gone are various things like lightning swords, flame gauntles, and sickle swords. The game says some are wider while others do more damage, but damn if I could tell any difference between them.

Story? Blows. Even the first one had an absolute bare ass minimal cheesy one, but here stuff happens and you're wondering what the fuck is going on and what the point is. Dante's cutscenes are him not giving a shit about people with horrendous accents talking to him before he flips a coin to decide what to do, and his ending is 10 seconds of him saying a single sentence, that's it. All of Lucia's cutscenes are her getting angsty over the fact that her mother isn't her biologocial parent (OOPS SPOILER!). Oh yeah and guess what's responsible for this invasion from hell? EVIL CORPORATIONS! Jesus christ I know that's the hot new video game villain of the 21st century, but it just doesn't fit into a game like DMC. Other things that don't fit are some of the enemies (infested tanks and helicopters? what the fuck, are the zerg invading?). Given the fact that you spend a good portion of the game in a burning, ruined city shooting tanks and helicopters, it feels more like Contra than a DMC game.

Now the biggest complaint and most glaring flaw in the game: the god damn auto-targetting. At all times (whenever there's an enemy anywhere) you'll be locked on to a single enemy visible by the giant blurry blue targetting crosshairs superimposed over him (couldn't they keep that shit invisible like the original DMC did?). That crosshair over an enemy means that every time you shoot or swing your sword your character will face in the direction of that enemy and either shoop or chop in said direction. That sounds good on paper, but it's a total fucking mess in execution. You'll be hammering the enemy you're locked on to and when your sword sends him sailing 30 feet across the room it'll remain locked on to him even though there are three more enemies right next to you; you'll hit the attack button to try and kill the close by threats but you'll end up facing the enemy 30 feet away that you're still locked on to. Times when you want the auto-targetting to work, it doesn't. When Dante double jumps, on the second jump he'll aim straight down and fire, not matter where your targetted enemy is located. Even more annoying is you can't help but notice that the auto-targetting seems to always lock on to the least threatening enemy in the room. You can have three giant flying enemies hovering around you shooting you with crap and the game will choose to lock on to the one dinky, slow-moving melee enemy all the way across the room. This really gets to be a problem because a LOT of the bosses summon an endless supply of regular enemies during their fights with you. The game will always target the (endless) regular enemies over the boss. I guess this isn't entirely bad because it's the only semblance of challenge to be offered by the bosses, but when a game's only source of challenge results from a mistake of bad gameplay design, that's just sad.

Things that are better than the original? A few, but not many. First off they realized that DMC1 left one of the four PS2 controller buttons idle and assisned the roll/dodge move to a single button press. I never even bothered with that move in the original because it involved holding down R2, pressing the analog stick exactly 90 degrees to the left or right of where your character was facing (which was damn hard to judge with the constantly shifting camera), then hitting another button. Fuck that, I just jumped instead. Here in the sequel I was actually using the dodge move. They also let you switch guns in-game simply by hitting L2 instead of having to go into the menu everytime, that I like (even though you'd never want to use anything but your starting guns). They also let you double jump from the start instead of saving up an ungodly amount of orbs to buy it like the first game. An unfortunate side effect of this though is that this game is chock full of lengthy jumping puzzles that seem to serve no purpose other than the developers showing off the double jump ability. Sadly they didn't fix the camera problem from the original game either. It seems that they kept the "must show Dante from the front AT ALL TIMES" camera AI mentality so you'll be able to see what's behind Dante but never what's in front. This got extremely annoying in the original during boss fights where you couldn't see the boss half the time and couldn't tell if you about to get blasted by one of his shots. In the sequel it's still annoying, but since all the enemies and bosses are so easy it doesn't really matter much.

Final Analysis: if you're a DMC fan, rent, do NOT buy; if I had paid $50 for this then I'd be the one crying instead of Satan. You'll get some short lived thrills out of it and beat the game entirely (both playable characters) after just over 5 hours, after that you'll go back to replaying the original DMC. There's a hard and Dante/Lucia Must Die mode after you beat it the first time but I can't see how the game would be any harder. The only thing upping the difficulty level does is make late game enemies appear earlier on, increase item cost, and increase enemy health and attack power. But items are unnecessary, ALL enemies are wusses at ALL points in the game, and you can dodge enemy attacks with ease. All a harder difficulty would do is increase their life and make you sit there hammering the fire button for a bit longer. There are also different costumes you can unlock but since none of them put Lucia in an outfit any skimpier than the one she already starts out with there's no point. If you're not a DMC fan then you won't be too impressed with this. Just buy the original instead for only $20.

P.S.- Think with a little work this could be made into a long review? It'd be kind of nice for me to review a new release for a change.