It’s hard not to love Devil May Cry 5, despite its aesthetic-over-plot ethos

The fighting mechanics and style points make Devil May Cry 5 a must-have for all fans of adventure games, as long as they can look past vapid characters, plot holes and poor writing.

For the uninitiated, the best way to describe Devil May Cry is to compare it to the TV series Supernatural.

Pretty boys kill supernatural things violently and broodily, and the series has been going on so long that it’s tough to jump in and have it make sense (but also it doesn’t really make sense to anyone any more anyway).

Or, put more simply, if any game would have Panic At the Disco as its soundtrack, it’s this one.

Nothing about this story makes sense.

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Devil May Cry 5 can most easily be described as the video game version of the TV show Supernatural.

There are demons, and they kill stuff, but there isn’t really a “previously, on …” which gives the game context, so you just stab and hope you’ll eventually find out who these people are and why you should care about their survival. Incidentally, the design of many of these demons (particularly the tentacle plants with their vertically cut open wounds) is everything Sigmund Freud warned us about.

And, for some reason, Nico (who has some of the most annoying voice acting of recent memory) keep leaving extremely expensive prosthetic arms around for Nero to find.

I can suspend disbelief enough to understand why fancy guns and ammo would be littered across a warzone, but getting the audience to believe that there’s just a bunch of random weaponised prosthetic arms, perfectly fitted for our hero, just hanging around this apocalyptic, aesthetic wasteland is a stretch.

Devil May Cry 5 is hard not to love despite its shortcomings.

Although the game has the same aesthetic-over-plot ethos as Riverdale and the new Sabrina, it’s hard not to love Devil May Cry 5 anyway.

The fighting is just too good to miss, and the mere fact that your fighting is judged on “style points” and given a grade based not on whether the enemies were slain, but how creative and “badass” you were while doing it, is just darling.

Bottom line: The fighting mechanics and style points make Devil May Cry 5 a must-have for all fans of adventure games, as long as they can look past vapid characters, plot holes and poor writing.

Devil May Cry 5

Overall: 3.5/5

Available now on: PS4, Xbox One, PC

Price: $99.95

Reviewed on: Xbox One X