They warned me, they told me it was bad. They told me to skip it, I didn’t believe them. I thought maybe it would be like the Dark Souls 2 situation. Hell, someone once recommended I skip Trails in the sky 3rd and it ended up being my favourite game in the series.

No, this time they were right. The game is just as bad as everyone says.

Everything sucks about it except maybe the graphics. The melee moveset is pretty lame and a lot of the enemies require guns to be fought anyway. The upgrade system has been replaced by just numerical upgrades and honestly I’m not even sure I see the difference.

Mobs barely try to hit you. You can play most of the game by holding the button to fire your gun and you don’t even have to bother moving except for a few bosses. What’s more annoying is that it takes a lot of time to kill tanky enemies despite them not doing anything and the game loves throwing groups of enemies. You advance to a new area, you trigger a group spawn and you have to kill maybe twenty trash mobs. It never stops.

For my second playthrough as Lucia, I just skipped every optional encounter and the game was still dull. It feels like a bad copy of Mario 64 where I just follow the red coins. I don’t even know why I bothered playing this playthrough, it’s some of the same levels plus an underwater section and the cutscenes are barely different. Yes, even the cheesy cutscenes you get to watch twice.

Why is there even a story? Dante talks to a random girl who tell him to go somewhere and they both meet again there. Couldn’t they have do so right away? Then from a random village he’ll take a bike to go to a big city instead? Why? Why are you chasing this comical sorcerer dude and all? Why is there a full city “infested” (yes infested) by tanks?

Perhaps the only positive thing about this game is that it’s quite short, at least you only have to endure about six hours of suffering.

It’s a terrible experience, but real gamers don’t skip DMC 2.