I do my best, as a gamer, to try out and enjoy as many games as possible, and from as many genres as possible. I'll avoid sports games like the plague but, for the most part, will give everything a go. Shooters are becoming far too frequent and having seen far too many Call of Duty replicas (don't worry, none of them come close to reaching that absolute nirvana of dreadful gaming) I have tried to get into some hack and slash games. In short, the operation was a massive failure.
Taking back to late 2009, Dante's Inferno was on the horizon. I was clueless about the premise having not known anything about the Divine Comedy, despite my horrendous times at school studying classical literature, but safe in the knowledge it had been written by someone better than a failed movie script writer, and seeing early stages of a very dark and original art style I was looking forward to seeing how it turned out. I was wholly inexperienced at hack and slash games so upon browsing the Marketplace I downloaded the demos for Ninja Gaiden II and Devil May Cry 4. These had been applauded by just about everyone I know had played it, so with high hopes I went head first into them. Skip forward twenty minutes, and I was close to looking for a 'fun' button. Maybe I'm of a lower class of gaming intelligence and all this is going over my short head, but I really cannot get what the excitement is about hack and slash.
My first impression of Devil May Cry 4 was not getting used to the sword and gun, in fact I thought that was pretty cool. It was more utter confusion of where I was and when. A guy who looks like he fell straight out of Time Crisis 3 sitting in a church, in the middle ages... listening to trip hop through headphones? Wait, what? Imagine a Backstreet Boy learnt extreme martial arts and built a TARDIS, then decided to unleash his anger at being called gay by going on a killing spree in medieval England, and you're somewhere close to the basic outline of DMC4. I was impressed by nice environments and framerate, but aside from utter confusion I was just bored at hitting endless buttons to do a combination that looks just like the last one.
Onto Ninja Gaiden II. Being me, it took a while before I stopped giggling at the name and occasionally shouting GAAAYYYDEN, but when I eventually got round to playing the demo, I found almost the same result as with DMC4. Very convincing environment - which is actually set somewhere believable as a bonus - and a nice framerate... but still no fun. There's an absolutely horrifying amount of blood, gore and being a very mean man, but you see one limb flying off and you've seen them all. Also, some of the ways Ryu kills his enemies are so incredibly cruel and unnecessary I genuinely began to feel a sense of guilt for what I was doing. They're only enemies, leave 'em be! They just wanna stand there and look menacing! Let them go back to their spawn points and live a happy life with their enemy families.
When Dante's Inferno's release date eventually arrived and I borrowed it off EnglishCarBomb, my hopes weren't all that high after my lessons in hack and slash, and unfortunately this was one time I was to be proven right. It's definitely, in my opinion, a better game than my previous two experiences, albeit an absolute clone to God of War, but when it came down to it I could scarcely remember - let alone care - about all these combinations I could do with the scythe and crucifix. Great art style as expected, the cleanest and most constant 60fps framerate I've seen, but a diabolical amount of boring when it came down to it. Diabolical? Get it? I'm going to stop now.
