BAD, but not unplayable.

The first thing you’ll notice when booting up the game besides Dante’s dour personality change (a creative choice so perplexing fans have tried to head-canonize an excuse), is that he feels much heavier to control. Like a lumberjack on downers, he swings his default sword Rebellion with hefty imprecision. It creates a clunky flow to combat that DMC 1 never had. I could never get a hand of the combo system either. DMC 2 forgoes the series staple button-delay combos, for one that emphasizes flicking the analog stick in a certain direction to change Dante’s sword technique. Like the flow of movement, it didn’t feel at all comfortable and when I did pull it off a new combo it never felt satisfying because of the lack of flashiness and force. Not to mention a VERY fickle style meter. You can lose it as quickly as one second after not hitting an enemy, and even bullet hazing an enemy with Ebony and Ivory doesn’t guarantee your style rank staying afloat. That’s the whole point of the guns in the first place!

The enemy A.I is one of the most laughed at aspects of DMC 2. Every demon (and even some bosses) can be infinitely stun-locked using Ebony and Ivory, effectively making the sword combat an accessory. Playing through the game like this however, makes it ten times more boring so I avoided this temptation as much as I could. The enemy designs aren’t nearly inspired enough to make up for this massive oversight. Most of them are too “blobby” to be genuinely intimidating and their lack of mechanics effectively makes every demon a fodder demon. The series signature difficulty is completely gutted in this entry.

Visually, DMC 2 mostly looks worse than its predecessor. Character models are decently detailed, and the occasional pre-rendered cutscene teases a scope that could’ve been accomplished if the game wasn’t forced to be made in six months. With all that being said, you’ll mostly be greeted by flatly textured buildings and dull long hallways/street-ways. This makes it so when you aren’t battling demons in extremely one-sided death matches, you’ll most likely find yourself walking in a straight line to a very easy puzzle or some kind of blockade. This is what qualifies as fun and challenging level design in the world of DMC 2.

All in all, DMC 2 is just boring. It has a thin, confusing story and sludgy gameplay but it’s thankfully lacking in game-breaking glitches or impossible difficulty spikes. It’s the video game equivalent to an apathetic shrug, and because of that it’s quite breezy to get through. My game-time clocked in at around 2 hours and 55 minutes (a little bit of a quarter of the time it took me to complete DMC 1). Honestly considering the disastrous production, it could’ve turned out a lot worse. I might get to Lucia’s story sometime but I’d like to do other things with my life at the moment.

How bad could it be?

It really was as bad as people said it was. Having a dedicated dodge button was probably the only good thing that this game added, and that says a lot.

Taunts are gone, meaning that gaining DT-meter takes forever. When you eventually get DT, the only reasonable thing to do is to hold the shoot button as this attack melts common enemies and bosses alike. Combat against normal enemies became a brain dead button-mash-fest. You are at the mercy of the automatic lock-on as Dante randomly picks whichever foe he wants to hone in on, and REFUSES to attack in any other direction than what he has set his in sights on. And holy crap DMC2 didn't have a single boss that felt good to kill. They even had the gall to bring back Phantom from the first game, but even his boss fight sucked this time around. DMC1 managed to do flying bosses right with Griffon, but DMC2 puts them way out of reach, which makes you rely on your guns until you have enough DT charge to either fly up to their face (if possible) or melt them by shooting them. This is where a taunt would have been brilliant, because gaining DT via guns takes forever, unless you take damage on purpose.

This review doesn't take Lucia's route into account, and that's because I have no intention to experience it for myself. I can take solace in knowing that the worst DMC game is now behind me and that I have great things to look forward to within its sequels.

Man...I usually approach infamous bad games with the expectation to find at least something of value in them, or the hope that maybe some of the hate might be overblown. It happened plenty of times before, afterall. But this ? I won't say there wasn't ANYTHING I liked about it...The music, if serviceable, had a couple of nice rocking tunes, a couple of enemy designs were downright cool, but beside that ? DMC2 has to be the most braindead and blandest action game I have ever played.

The game puts our fave demon hunter Dante in a fictional city being taken over by some crazy business man who's apparently also responsible of the woes of the second playable character, trying to summon a demon to take over the world...But the story hardly matters because, to be honest, it's barely there.

It's not that having a simple story is bad. The first game's plot was fairly simple but it took care in letting you feel the setting you were in, giving you contextual info and tidbits as you explored the locations and did its best to make sure the cool setpieces and emotional beats would hit in a satisfying way.

But DMC2's story is a mess...splintered between the two main character stories, there's barely anything happening in it at all other than stuff exploding and Dante acting awfully off-character, feeling like a completely different character from the first game.

Things get even worse in the gameplay as the game was desperately fixed by a new director in the last 4 months leading up to the release, making it at least a playable title from start to end, but a fundamentally broken one. Combos are impossible to chain, the selection of weapons is laughable and the guns are pretty much the only viable way to get rid of the majority of enemies and bosses, which can be pretty much summed up as "press gun button and stand still to win". There are a couple of bosses where things work better, with the final boss of Dante's run being a highlight of things feeling like an actual DMC game for a few minutes at the very least, but the rest is simply a mess.

Some attacks barely work, the levels are awfully short, the puzzles can be barely described as such and the battles are either laughably bad or a huge drag made to increase the already very short play time of the game.

Graphics are also incredibly bland, with the locations looking so devoid of personality, which is quite the feat to achieve after the first game gave us a quite decent set of locales to explore.

Everything that could go wrong went wrong with this title and thankfully it didn't spell the end of the series...But man, MAN, I don't think I played a game this bad in a while and its only appeal is that it's...almost fascinating in just how many things it got wrong, definitely a case study for how not to do an action game.