➤ The Devil May Cry HD Collection review 🎮

We owe a lot to Devil May Cry. He taught us that demons can cry, and that slaughtering them with giant swords and guns with endless bullets is a lot of fun. But above all we owe him the luck of the entire action adventure genre. Who knows if Kratos would have ever existed, for one thing, without Dante. Strange things happened in the early XNUMXs. Devil May Cry, perhaps not everyone knows, was born as a chapter of Resident Evil; then in the course of development you realize that it is becoming something too different. It has enough charisma to materialize in a new IP, and Capcom chooses to take a risk, achieving one of the biggest hits of the era. In 2001 Devil May Cry recorded very high sales on PlayStation 2, so high as to justify two sequels in the years immediately following, creating a real killer app on the Sony console. From then on it is history. A story not always positive, to tell the truth, with some missteps and other peaks of skill. Today, unfortunately, we find ourselves on a misstep: the Devil May Cry HD Collection that arrives on PlayStation 4, Xbox One and PC, is nothing more than a commercial operation, managed with very little respect towards Dante and his companions. But first things first.

Devil May Cry today: user guide

Demons are big, ugly and evil, but there are exceptions. Sparda, Dante's father, who is the protagonist of most of the titles in the series, is an exception. He rebels against his lineage, fights in favor of mankind, becomes its leader and guarantees many years of peace. At the time of his death, all the portals between our world and that of the demons were closed, guaranteeing the survival of man. All this is told to us by the introductory movie of the first chapter of the series: Devil May Cry. Things change quickly: in the XNUMXs, Mundus is resurrected. He is Sparda's archenemy, and he wants to annihilate the Earth. A mysterious woman, Trish, goes to Dante for help; the boy is a very powerful half-demon, the only one who can save the day with tamarraggine shots, swords and guns. Thus began Dante's adventures, on the frontier between our world and that of the demons.

At the time Devil May Cry was a very fresh title, the result of that genius of Hideki Kamiya, then father of other famous productions such as Bayonetta and Okami, just to name two. Many aspects represented a real novelty in 2001: the mix of highly exploratory sessions and others dominated by ferocious fights, for example. The protagonist's spectacular on-screen combos, which the more he upgraded himself, the more he was able to perform truly incredible actions by combining his two guns, Ebony and Ivory, and the giant Force Edge sword. The cast of characters itself was particularly inspired, with protagonists cloaked in the right amount of ambiguity. Taking up these masterpieces in our hands nowadays, the reactions can be basically two. Whoever played them in his time returns to be a child, and remains ecstatic: because he knows that world, and lives it again, with some benefits of a renewed technical sector. Those who have never heard of Devil May Cry, however, must first of all understand that they are titles published in 2001, 2003 and 2005 respectively.

At best, thirteen years have passed, which in this sector is roughly equivalent to a century. By force of circumstances, it is difficult (if not impossible) to find them as fresh as then: because they founded a genre, which has evolved and continued on its way. It's like we play Bayonetta first, and then go back to Devil May Cry and find it incredibly slow. It is an unfair comparison: if this first series of Kamiya had not existed, Bayonetta would never have seen the light. This discourse is partly toned down by examining Devil May Cry 3, the most modern of the three, still able to stand up to other valid exponents of the genre today.

PlayStation 4 Trophies

Devil May Cry HD Collection features the exact same trophies as the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 port. This means that trophy hunters will be able to take home (again) not one, not two, but three Platinum Trophies. It will still be a demanding challenge, because each title will have to be completed at the highest game difficulty of all: Dante Deve Morire. In this mode the enemies will be very fierce, and your health will drop very often: equip yourself properly.

The (little) definitive collection

And now is the time for pain. Seeing the announcement of the Devil May Cry HD Collection, someone will surely have thought: "wait a minute, but isn't it already out?". Yes, the Devil May Cry HD Collection was released in 2012 on Playstation 3 and Xbox 360. Even then it was proposed as an updated version of the three main chapters of the series, a port that threw them into the world of high definition. Even then there was no lack of a good dose of inexplicable situations: the graphics had been improved, but only in part. Most of the textures remained in low quality, the polygonal models had not been touched, the lighting effects not even remotely revised. The character models, those yes, had undergone a facelift, the same as the loading screens. In any case, the game menus, the map and the cutscenes had remained unchanged from the original chapters on PlayStation 2, complete with a traumatic transition to 4: 3 screens. An eyesore, which at the time could also be justified in some way. We come to the Devil May Cry HD Collection of our days, and we analyze the differences: first of all the support for Full HD and 60 FPS, a very important feature in an action game. And then ... nothing. The collection proposed on PlaySation 4, Xbox One and PC adds practically nothing to what has already been seen in that of 2012. Not only that: it is even more serious that Capcom has not even deigned to correct, after six years, many small details that would have made the difference and justified the purchase (again) of the same product.

For example, the quality of the videos: they are essential to follow the evolution of Dante's events, but very ugly to see. They were bad in 2012, let alone now alternating with Full HD gaming sessions. Whenever we collect an object, a collectible or a weapon, the menu that opens is in 4: 3, a real attack on the player's eye health. Not even the game map was created from scratch. Pass the movies, which need a lot of work to be redone from scratch: was it really so difficult to pick up the maps and menus and at least update them to high definition? Hasn't there really been time to do even this in six years? On PC, things are probably better, at least there was support for 4K, absent in the versions for PlayStation 4 Pro and Xbox One X (another case of laxity). On the other hand, it seems that the PC version is plagued by other types of problems, including that of the audio sector. Devil May Cry HD Collection includes the first three chapters of the series: Devil May, Devil May Cry 2 and Devil May Cry 3: Dante's Awakening. Almost sacred, funny and important titles. But it is legitimate to ask a question: in the face of an important price, equal to 30 Euros for the digital version and 40 for the physical one, we could not add Devil May Cry 4 and thus close the series, waiting for the increasingly probable announcement of Devil May Cry 5? Among other things, since the differences are really minimal, the same chapters can be purchased for negligible sums already on PlayStation 3: an extra content, something worthy of attention, would certainly have appealed to fans, who on balance will be then the only ones who are really interested in the "new" port. The one operated on the Devil May Cry series seems (and cannot fail to seem) a shrewd commercial operation: arousing a new interest in the series, attracting fans, all at the price of a very minimal effort. There have been some tweaks on a graphic level, yes. Some textures are (slightly) better defined. The general glance, in some situations, has been enhanced. But it is little, too little to justify the new product, and above all its price. A complete remake of the series would certainly have been expensive to make, but that doesn't mean Dante's adventures deserve such treatment. One shouldn't joke too much with a boy whose blood of demons runs in his veins. Armed with guns and a sword, by the way.

Comment

Tested version PlayStation 4 Digital Delivery Steam, PlayStation Store, Xbox Store Price 29,90 € / 39,90 € Resources4Gaming.com

6.0

Readers (40)

6.3

Your vote

Devil May Cry HD Collection is a lazy commercial operation. We are faced with the same product from 2012, dusted off and updated to Full HD. There are no new contents, there are no particular reasons to pick up the series if we enjoyed it at the time. All the problems of the six-year-old edition recur unchanged, even the game objectives are the same. In the face of a certainly not negligible price, we recommend the purchase only to those who really want to have all the editions of Devil May Cry in their collection. And to those who can play with 4: 3 screens that are occasionally shot on a Full HD screen. All the others can easily pass the turn, and wait for Devil May Cry 5. The vote you read is not what Dante's adventures deserve: it is that of the porting itself.