Devil May Cry 4

Indeed, in many respects DMC4 is far too faithful to its existing design template. The game can't decide whether to opt for a fixed camera perspective or to give you freedom, and as a result you're often forced to run into the screen before the perspective switches arbitrarily. Suddenly you're pulling down on the stick, yet moving up the screen, causing all sorts of confusion as you force yourself not to change direction, even though logic holds that you should. If you do flick direction as the perspective changes, you'll run back onto the other screen. Sometimes the game wants to be modern and give you full camera freedom, but mostly you're treated like a child. During moments when you can't see what's arriving to attack you, it really does remind you of the bad old days when this sort of thing was routine.

There are other areas where the gameplay feels old - like the way you're penned into a predetermined area to fight demons, which respawn upon your return but with no requirement to fight them other than as a means to harvest more of the game's currency. Elsewhere, the accessibility doesn't extend to keeping you informed as to what to do or where to go next, so you're left to wander around until you find an arbitrary object. Then there's what to do with that, of course. A little mini-map on the bottom right of the screen helps slightly with navigation, but you get no Metroid Prime-style objective markers on it. Backtracking between areas (dodging the respawning goons) becomes commonplace when the smallest amount of prompting would have done away with it. When it does things like this, it just feels like a high-def re-skin of a 2001 game design.

Much has been said of the visual splendour, too, but it's a bit uneven. There are some stunning, picture-postcard moments when the game looks jaw-dropping, but many of these are in the early sections. Later on, you'll be watching Nero's lurching run animation and wonder how it all became so bland. At its worst, you'll see dreadfully blocky shadowing (check out the tree shadows), and areas with nothing to do other than run through them. Next to, say, Uncharted, it looks quite old-fashioned in places, like a scrubbed up version of what we used to think looked amazing. Under the harsh microscope of HD, there's sterility to a lot of DMC4, and when Capcom's not quite lavished the same level of detail in certain parts of the game, it really shows.

Overall, oddly, DMC4's approach isn't a million miles from Lost Planet's. Both games hinge upon spectacular bosses at the end of each level (check one of them out on Eurogamer TV), and both feature levels where you trudge from A to B and clear out the cannon fodder in-between. Worse still, DMC4 recycles not only the locations for the second half of the game, but most of the boss monsters. And then, just as you're zoning in on completing the game, it recycles a few more in a tiresome boardgame to pad things out. Few games I've played in the past few years have been this obviously padded, and it reduces the incentive to go and play it again.

If that wasn't disappointing, the role that Dante plays is little more than a bit part; a concession to appeasing the fans who would have been annoyed without him. But his inclusion is half-hearted and taints the latter third of the game. There's not even an unlockable option later after multiple play-throughs to play as him throughout. Again, with this knowledge, there's even less reason to invest the time and effort going through the game over and over again. On the plus side, the appearance of online leaderboards gives serious players the chance to compare their ranking performance with the best in the world, and on that level alone there will undoubtedly be a lot of players out there replaying the game purely to test their mettle against the community.