Whining how developers get lazy when it comes to porting games to the PC is one of my favorite pastimes. I’m sure most of you are thoroughly tired of hearing me grumble about bad ports by now; thankfully Devil May Cry 4 (PC) doesn’t leave too much room for that. However, being an action game on the PC, the controls are as expected – painful like a one-way trip to the depths of hell with a flaming sword shoved deep up... well, you get the point, don't you? What I’m trying to say is: don’t even bother with this game if you don’t have an Xbox360 (or any other) controller for Windows, since the game handles miserably when you play it using a keyboard.
Okay, so I did whine a little, sorry. Now that that’s out of the way, let me tell you about the good stuff. It’s extremely rare to see a game as visually impressive as DMC4 make such a smooth transition across platforms. Technically the game is rock-solid and gave me a stable 60-80 frame rate (using DirectX 10) on my NVIDIA 8800 GTS / Intel E6300 Core2Duo rig. Compared to the Xbox360 version, the game looked better when played using DX10, with everything from Particle Effects to Dynamic Lighting making a small but noticeable jump in quality. While using DX9 the game looked on par with the Xbox360 version, and ran at a frame rate similar to its DX10 counterpart; so on a technical level, the game’s definitely a winner.
Where gameplay’s concerned, I found DMC4 a lot more fun than DMC3. The boss battles are not too hard, the challenge level of the overall combat is about right for any action gamer, and the combat system is wholesome. You have a plethora of combos and variations of moves that you can buy to customize the combat. I’m not going into the details of the combat system and storyline, since Nash has already covered it in his review of the Xbox360 version of the game.



