Devil May Cry 4 is a confusing, but pleasant surprise. Upon loading up the Special Edition, you get given a huge amount of choice. You can elect to play as almost any of the main plot-characters from prior games, except what you're not told is pretty important.
To enjoy the story, with the cut scene sequences, you need to make your first choice as Dante/Nero.
Who is Nero? He's a new kid on the block, and we're introduced to this quiet, potentially broken arm-individual as he sits in a church with some religious order before Dante comes along and slaughters the religious leader.
Then, you're dropped into the classic Devil May Cry mayhem. Nero is an explosive character, fast, enjoyable to play, and he tends to get straight to the point with not only his combat, but also his dialogue in combat.
You're hunting Dante, because you want to know why he attacked the religious proceeding that you were a part of. There's also a romantic interest you're pursuing through this, a woman named Kyrie.
In terms of story, there's a shallow narrative. Beyond this, all the classic Devil May Cry tropes are there, but compared to the third title in the series, things are little more down to Earth when it comes to combat.
Environmental puzzles are pretty easy - and combat is cleverly used to progress you through areas of the game. It's just as fast paced as ever, and looks glorious on a capable PC with the frame-rate (and settings) cranked up as far as they may go.
Having said that, for an eleven year old game, it fares pretty well on PC, with the quality of the animations ageing well - textures are rather low res (as is the case with a console port) - but at least the in-game cinmatics are rendered in-engine, without the shitty method that many developers tend to use where they pre-render out engine cut scenes then compress them to an unrecognisable mess.
Thankfully, there's none of that here.
Music is unobtrusive and suitable to the game, with an industrial / rocky score during combat, and some more classical, orchestral bits for when things want to get emotional, or during cinematics.
Like other Devil May Cry games, there's some annoyances and repeated things - there's a "boss gauntlet" towards the end of the game, where you fight every previously encountered boss... twice. Once as Nero, the other time as Dante. Map assets are completely re-used (though you're playing another character, and running in reverse) - which pads out the second half of the game.
Backtrack Quest, this truly is.
Then before you know it, the credits roll, and you've unlocked some concept art, and a bunch of other gameplay difficulty settings. This is the part where you're meant to go back and try the game out as other characters - and there's a raft of them to do, confusion over.
Overall, the gameplay is pretty decent, and the game feels faster than Devil May Cry 3, but from a story perspective, Devil May Cry 3 has a lot more of a holistic ... plot going on, whereas Devil May Cry 4 doesn't really compel you to keep going on through the missions for anything other than the joy of combat.
As I said earlier, at least the cut scenes are in-engine, and not pre-rendered rubbish. I'd say this game is ... worth a rental - due to the short length - especially if you're going to only play through the story once. If you want to play the maps with all the other characters, then there's probably a bit more value here.
It is easy to see how much better a game like Bayonetta is in comparison to Devil May Cry in terms of combat mechanics, story, and gameplay depth. Still, there's another game in this series I still need to play, and that's Devil May Cry 5, up next.