Great cutscenes and cool bosses salvage an otherwise disappointing game.
DMC4 takes players away from series mainstay Dante and hands control over to newcomer Nero, at least for the first half of the game. Luckily, Nero is pretty bad*** too. His Devil Bringer arm allows players to grab far away enemies and reel them in close for a brutal finishing move. Other than that, he plays similarly to post-DMC3 Dante. Dante, on the other hand, is more complex. He brings all of the available styles from DMC3 to the table, and now you can switch between those on the fly using the d-pad. Despite kicking out the old hero, Dante, the plot isn't exactly shocking. It is good enough to move the game forward, though, and it leads into some very cool battles.
The gameplay in DMC4 is very vanilla hack-n-slash from the beginning. Press Y to attack, X to shoot your weak guns, A to jump, B to grapple, etc. It starts out fun, but it's hardly enough to carry an entire game. Once Dante is introduced, the game starts to get more involving thanks to his multiple combat styles and cooler Devil Trigger moves. Still, the game is linear to a fault, and we all know that the invisible barriers that sometimes impede your progress are so last-gen. The most outstanding feature of the gameplay, in my opinion, is Nero's ability to perform different grapples/finishing moves on different enemies. He might rip one enemy in half with his bare hands, while he could swing another over his head before letting go and sending them flying. Those attacks, unlike Nero's core abilities, are always fun to see.
The level designs, despite being linear, can also be confusing to navigate as you are given no clear instructions on what exactly you are supposed to be doing. For example, one level's objective reads, "Find the ultimate power." Okay, great. What exactly is this ultimate power, anyway? And where am I supposed to find it? The final nail in DMC4's gameplay coffin is the puzzles. All of the puzzles are stupidly simple, but take a long time to finish. For example, one puzzle might consist of slowly punching a statue down a long hallway. When you reach the end of the hallway, punch the statue into a door. The door breaks. Puzzle over. And then there's the jumping puzzles. Let's just say that DMC4's jumping controls were designed with fighting, not platforming, in mind. Buy the double jump ability before level 10, and you won't have a lot of trouble.
The level designs in DMC4 are artistically great. They are always interesting things to look at, and environments often give of a creepy/foreboding feeling. Unfortunately, the graphics are stuck in the last generation. DMC4 often looks like a high end Xbox game, an Xbox 1.5 game if you will. The cutscenes do look better, and the animations are great, so overall the graphics aren't too bad at all.
The music, on the other hand, is bad. The same song will play over and over every time you enter combat, and guess what? The song sucks. And, although I'm starting to feel as if I'm beating a dead horse here, the sound during the cutscenes is quite a bit better.
Finally, the game is kind of easy. I have never played a DMC game before, as mentioned above, and I haven't owned a hack-n-slash game since Gauntlet Legends on the N64 (although I've played demos of Heavenly Sword at the store,) and the game is still easy for me to plow through at default difficulty. Hardcore DMC fans will want to beat the game once and then play through again on a harder difficulty (assuming that, because you're hardcore DMC fans, you won't really mind playing through this game twice.) In conclusion, you should just wait for this game's price to drop to $30 or $40. It will be worth the price then, but I just can't justify paying $60 for what amounts to a last-gen game with next-gen cutscenes.
DMC4:
Graphics: 7/10
Gameplay: 6.5/10
Sound: 6/10
Entertainment: 8/10
Overall: 7.5/10