DMC: Devil May Cry - Review

Well i'll start with the problems everyone else seemed to have with this reboot. The main "controversial" issues i heard beforehand were the protagonist Dante's hair colour and the soundtrack, neither of which personally bothered me. This is firstly because it's a reboot and despite what the recent world of films and videogames would demonstrate that usually means the franchise undergoing significant changes. These issues secondly didn't bother me for the fact that they are actually not significant changes despite what screaming over-obsessed fans would claim.

Dante's hair is now black but upon entering the devil trigger mode it turns white as it used to be and after first achieving this he earns a permanent white streak through his black hair. If you can quell your rage long enough to beat the game you even unlock a costume change solely to turn his hair white and similarly styled to the old Dante. Would you kindly now calm the fuck down.

The other so called problem was the slightly more electronic and modern soundtrack. When i first caught whiff of this, i thought the whole game had been dubstepped on but in actuality it's still a primarily metal soundtrack with a few club or rave elements. The only distinctly Skrillexian tune i heard was accompanying the penultimate boss battle and there were far more prominent disappointments than the soundtrack at that point.

I don't think anyone can blame the new DMC of disgracing it's predecessors as the developers are clearly fans of the series and while they poke fun at the old games they also honour them with all the achievements being quotations from past games, signature moves being recreated and even classic lines and themes getting a knowing nod here and there. Right, now that's out of the way we'll start properly.

DMC brings the series firmly into the modern era but unlike the abysmal second instalment of the old series, it mixes this realism with what it calls Limbo. A purgatorial plain where demons roam freely and the very environment warps and twists to foil or trap you. This is the main stand out highlight of this new game, they've achieved a surreal modern art style that doesn't bore you to tears and genuinely invokes a feeling of oppression and being hunted which weaves perfectly in with the main narrative's themes. Heavily graffitied streets brimming with demonic disease, twisted neon nightclubs or the clinical filtered digital insides of a news program. It's interesting to look at and enticing to play through and the art direction for most of the game is to be applauded.

Remaining in positive territory the core gameplay is mostly solid also. Mainly the combat which is fast, fun, brutal, in depth and everything it should be for a Devil May Cry game. If anything brings you back to replaying the game it'll be the sheer variety of combos, the satisfying impact of most of the different weapons and the allure of maxing out your stylish points. In short the combat is the second major highlight of this new DMC and it stands proudly amongst the best systems of the old titles.

Unfortunately you soon start running out of good things to say about DMC almost as quickly as it's very short campaign wraps itself up. Dante definitely has an arc throughout the story and the side characters are kept few so we can grow accustomed to them and have a fair amount of time to learn their own secrets and motivations. The writing overall is...mixed. There are times when it really shines and these feel like complex, real characters within a witty and self-aware game. Then there are other times where dialogue feels clichéd and cheesy without the wit or self-aware irony.

The narrative is on a mostly downhill slope, starting off pretty interesting with Dante being a smug carefree prick living a life of lust and lethargy until the smart but scarred character of Kat brings him out of his sleazy world and gives him greater purpose, reuniting him with his past and twin brother Vergil. All this amongst a backdrop of a heavily monitored and oppressed society, with a monopolised manipulative media satirising Fox News, polluted iconic popular consumables, reminiscent of a global brand like Pepsi albeit under the perspective of conspiracy theorists. It's truly a Devil May Cry for the modern age, so it's all the more of a shame when it ends up feeling like the worst parts of games we've already seen.

The narrative builds nicely but becomes more and more predictable and cliched whilst slowly this underlying theme of an Orwellian society takes a back seat to mystical, super-powered adventures in magic land. This instead of the subtle blend between the familiar and the fantastical the start of the game accomplishes. As i mentioned the writing also begins to feel less polished and characters start speaking and acting unrealistically, leading to some effectively built up tensions and conflicts that feel utterly underwhelming, unsatisfying or forced by the end. Even the level design becomes more bland and grey after such a strong opening.

Back in the realms of gameplay it's worth noting that the platforming sections that break up the combat can be more than a little clumsy and the game is not without some fairly glaring glitches in places. Then there's the increasingly common tendencies of modern games to strip you of all your abilities and set you following the path of another character (usually down a bland corridor) whilst exposition and plot happens. It's good and important that we have these bonding moments with characters so we care what happens to them later, but they can be made more interesting and ideally intertwine with the gameplay better than simply, travelling, tag along, storytime moments.

There's a constant contrast between moments of considered, well thought out design and cheap, gimmicks we've all seen before. There are new enemies introduced regularly and many of them are innovatively designed and varied, as are some of the bosses, but the further you get in the game the more ideas seem to run out. Fighting through a news program is a great new idea, the final boss of it being a giant floating head is not. The penultimate boss battle with the game's main antagonist Mundus, who has been really effectively built up as a dormant demonic God, secretly pulling the world's strings, ends up being the standard triple A massive monster fight against a disappointingly dull giant.

Perhaps the game is so short because they realised they were running out of good ideas, but that's not a great sign for the first title in a so called reboot. That said there are a fair amount of collectibles and extras if you enjoy such things and don't mind replaying the levels, along with the many sadistic difficulty settings common to DMC games but it doesn't personally make up for such a short overall story. Things are left pretty blatantly unfinished for sequels and even DLC to slowly expand upon, after sucking up more of your money of course. I don't want to sound overly cynical here because i like the bones of this new series and it has the potential to become something really different and interesting, but i feel quite ripped off with only roughly half of the short game fulfilling this potential.

If you're genuinely interested in this new series, be you a fan of the old one or not, and can forgive the games' brief length and increasingly lacklustre moments, there is definite fun to be had here. If you enjoy titles in the arguable "Hack and slash" genre DMC in terms of combat is a great addition to that category. If you're hoping for the kind of satirical strong narrative or drastic re-imagining of Devil May Cry that the trailers and promotion hinted at you could well be eventually disappointed. More than anything else, i look forward to seeing how this new series develops in the future.

Batman: Arkham Origins - Review

The main interest in this prequel is seeing Gotham's villains and heroes before their prime, inexperienced and young as well as giving some of Batman's lesser known villains their time in the spotlight. The assassins premise i find genuinely interesting and the game seemed set on it's story with the eight master killers hunting down Batman for Black Mask's fifty million dollar reward. It's a shame then that after a linear but decent opening involving a breakout at Blackgate prison the game nosedives into what feels just like a remake of Arkham City and Asylum.

Some of the map from Arkham City is cloned here albeit with a Christmas makeover, whilst the game mechanics and controls are shamelessly exactly the same. Raft lassoing, steam dodging, pulling down walls and floors, gliding across the city, interrogating thugs, hostage saving, being poisoned, being mind controlled, following blood trails, all fun admittedly but the same fun most players have had in two games already.

Instead of exploring the assassins themselves and inducing an atmosphere of being hunted the game falls back on the same villains it has before. Often in incredibly cheap and familiar ways it spends most of it's time with Penguin, Joker and Bane which whilst we would expect to see them in some capacity starting their criminal careers, we were lead to believe the focus was on Black Mask and his assassins. Perhaps this is just the marketing of the game accidentally proving inconsistent with the actual plot or perhaps due to the game wanting it's own big twist, as Arkham City had, it deliberately mislead it's audience. Something Arkham City didn't have to do and yet still had a better story than the one portrayed here.

That's not to say Origin's story is bad, it's just nothing remarkable.There are some nice moments such as the first confirmed sighting of the Batman, the increased banter and conflict between Alfred and Bruce or some of the Joker's origin details, most of which are taken from The Killing Joke, so they're good albeit not original. It's just a waste that it spends so much time on these characters we've seen before and have been explored thoroughly already. Six of the eight assassins appear as boss battles, some of which are no more than glorified QTE's or regular thug fights and two of the assassins are completely omitted from the central story and reduced to side mission quests.  The only exceptional encounter is with Firefly and that's the penultimate stage of the game. You don't feel at all like Batman has a bounty on his head which makes me wonder why they gave so much attention to it in all the trailers.

Maybe this was only a disappointment to me but i wanted to see Black Mask and the assassins developed and explored. Batman has arguably the best rogues gallery of any superheroes and yet we remain fixed on the Joker who's been so overdone at this point it's just depressing. That said, some of the heroes do get more fleshed out origins like Jim Gordon and Alfred but overall the game feels indecisive, mixed and unsettled. It improves in the second half but it takes far too long to get to this point and by the time the game has picked up the pace it's essentially over.

Another Joker story was the safe option, there's no denying he's the most interesting character, it just would've been nice to explore someone else for a change.

The gameplay itself works well enough, though the sense that there's too much city and too few grapple points becomes apparent fairly quickly. Travelling through Gotham just isn't that fun and with a much bigger map it can easily feel like a chore. Then there are the multiple reasons why every ordinary citizen is at home which is a missed opportunity for a livelier Gotham and yet again gives a feeling like you're playing one of the previous games where the streets are only ever populated with criminals.

The game is also quite glitchy, there's some bad interaction detection on climbing and breaking walls, grappling more often bugs out whilst bodies sometimes unnaturally glide into or through surfaces. The gameplay that stands out has already been shown off extensively in all the advertising for this game and is the bare minimum you'd expect for a sequel.There's about two new gadgets and the crime scene reconstructions, whilst enjoyable, new and interesting, there's very few of them. 

There's nothing inherently wrong with Origins because it's based on far superior games, but there's lots of minor missteps that detract from the enjoyment. For example, the upgrade system is trying to follow an electronic bat-computerised theme, the downside is this makes all the menus cold and clinical. There's almost no indication of when you choose an upgrade so it's not satisfying to do and you lose the incentive to level up. Then there's the early levels hunting Penguin again who has this awfully voiced irritating English assistant acting as a make-shift Harley Quinn whilst you go through tedious industrial looking levels situated on a boat. It's not memorable and the only good ideas are ones we've already seen.

In the challenge mode you can play as the assassin Deathstroke who was overhyped in all the trailers and then given shockingly little time in the actual game. Oddly though he doesn't kill anyone when you play as him. Let me just restate that, DEATHstroke the ASSASSIN doesn't kill anyone in this game...or how about breaking into the GCPD and tightrope walking above a crowd of SWAT Officers. Officers who don't even flinch if you drop down amongst them and walk right up to their faces. It's little details like that which combine to produce an ultimately underwhelming experience.

I really wanted to like Arkham Origins but in truth it's one of the laziest sequels i've come across. If you're desperate for more Batman and already have the two previous games then Origins relieves a certain itch i suppose, but if you're expecting anything different from the previous games you'll be disappointed.

Gravity - Cinema Review

Gravity is a harrowing desolate breath of freezing fresh air for space-based astronaut antics. It focuses on the simplest and not even the most dramatic ways space can so easily kill you. The biggest threat throughout the film is simply drifting off into the abyss and it makes every scene a nail-biting tightrope act to watch. If the film is weak in any areas i would say it's the necessary routine opening that wastes no time but does have to lay the net of false security in order to pull the rug from beneath you later.

Rather than compare Gravity to other space-faring features it reminds me more of a film like 127 Hours, which for those unaware is similarly spent in isolation with gradual creeping danger albeit on relatively solid ground. The basic premise is simple enough in Gravity, where a standard operation becomes hazardous due to accelerating debris crossing paths with our three person crew. Cut off from support, safety and well...everything,  the protagonist Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) clings to fellow crew member and astronaut veteran Matt Kowalski (George Clooney). Dwindling oxygen supplies, the next impending storm of debris and simply having a firm grasp on something man-made in the inky swallowing blackness become the priorities of survival for these two.

As a primarily two person show, particular mention must go to the acting from both Bullock and Clooney who play off each other as newcomer and veteran incredibly well. The writing from Alfonso and Jonas Cuaron is also solid for the most part and works well amidst the pacing of reflective silence and dramatic desperation that the film swings between. Incredible as the exploits are in the film, they never divert into unrealism and whilst i'm not experienced enough to know if Gravity portrays space accurately, it seems to handle it's own physics very well and it really feels like these fragile people are adrift amongst tiny rafts of safety in this endless vacuous cosmos.

The atmosphere of isolation is potent and can be really chilling especially in the latter half of the film. The Earth is a constant giant looming reminder of life and yet feels so impossibly far away for the essentially crippled astronauts trying desperately to limp through space to safety. The visuals are appropriately stunning in both their majesty and bleakness, detail and desolation. I've not seen a great amount of space films and those i have are highly regarded titles such as 2001: A Space Odyssey and Moon which both capture the isolation of space very well in their own way. That said Gravity should definitely be considered within their orbit as an intensely personal and close gripping drama unique in it's focus on (or lack of) location as we see just how empty the great surrounding emptiness really is.