Devil May Cry 4 (PC)

Every bit as good as its console brethren, if not better.
9/23/2008 12:00 AM | 0 Comments | Page 2 of 3

Most of the 20 chapters end with you facing off against tough boss characters, beginning with the 100-foot-tall fire demon, Berial, who chases you around a small village and smashes everything in its way. You'll also come across a horned female beast, an icy Frost creature, a fat and grinning toad creature and the ghostly Mephisto. Some bosses are more interesting than others, but they don't disappoint. In order to take them down, however, you'll need to take advantage of the role-playing game-like power-ups spread throughout the game (usually at stone idols that launch the "Skill Up" menu). Depending on your character and how you like to play, you can spend orbs to increase Nero's or Dante's skills, such as a mid-air sword smash that comes down on an opponent's head, a stronger blast from Nero's Devil Bringer arm, or more power and accuracy when using guns from a distance.

At the end of each mission you're graded on style, time to completion and number of magical red orbs, which are often left behind by fallen enemies or found in objects such as crates, barrels, food items and nooks in the wall. Green orbs replenish your health and are highly recommended before tackling boss characters.

One advantage of the PC version is that enemies won't always appear in the same place if you need to restart a mission (something we had to do a couple of times in the tougher bonus missions). After you finish playing the game as Nero and Dante on the hard difficulty, the PC version also offers a "Legendary Dark Knight Mode," with many more and tougher enemies on the screen at once. You can control the game using a keyboard, but we'd recommend a gamepad. We used the Xbox 360 Controller for Windows, which worked great and didn't require any button programming whatsoever.

PC gamers must be sure they more than meet the minimum system specs in order to run Devil May Cry 4 -- though our testing found a few technical issues even when we did. On two PCs -- a high-end Hewlett-Packard desktop and top-of-the-line Dell laptop -- the game wouldn't run at all, though all the system specs were met (even the recommended ones). We double-checked that all drivers were up-to-date, made sure there were no downloadable patches available online, and also contacted Capcom tech support, but weren't able to resolve the issues. On one PC we kept getting the message "Conflict with PC emulation software" when we selected either the DirectX 9 or DirectX 10 version of the game. On the second PC, the game wouldn't start at all. (On a third machine, a Voodoo PC laptop, the game worked just fine. Odd.)