Devil May Cry 5 Special Edition - Review

Games that were already out, for months or years before the next generation of hardware was released have generally fallen into one of two camps when it comes to next gen enhancements, the first is a free update that makes the game a little better, or a paid upgrade and DMC5 falls into the second. The question remains, is this cost driven upgrade a worth while investment, or is your money better spent elsewhere?

The basis for your decision honestly comes down to one single factor, do you want to see the world of Devil May Cry 5 with real time reflections or not, because apart from that, there is nothing else different in the main game. Well, that is not exactly true, there is some additional content in the game, one of the new additions is the Legendary Dark Knight mode and the other allows for you to play as a fan favourite character. In all honesty neither of these additions are worth the cost of admission on their own at most one of them is barely acceptable free DLC and the other is really only just a different way of experiencing the main game. The story that is told is the same story from the original release, there are no cut chapters, extra scenes or such, it is the same as previous players got, which is a bit of a shame.

If you're coming into DMC5, having played it already on the previous generation of consoles you're not going to get anything different in your overall experience, from the gameplay point of view. That of course isn't the problem because the gameplay itself is solid, you can dash around, pull off combos and wail on enemies larger than the Empire State building and it feels as good now as it did last time. Unfortunately because there's nothing new in terms of gameplay there is also no real fixes to some of the flaws at the game had initially, mostly related to the story and the repetitiveness of the environments. The latter is really exacerbated when you start playing as Vergil and you have to go through all these same locations again and even though the world is falling apart it hasn't been 100 years so the lack of objects in colour really stand out.

As I said earlier one of the big things for this game is the addition for support of RTX, not just because it makes things look more realistic but it also gave the developers a chance to overhaul the overall presentation. Devil May Cry as a series has always relied on fast paced and frenetic combat and while the earlier games were very limited because of their hardware restrictions the new generation of consoles removed those. What this means is that a game can now run at 60 frames per second and 4K resolution, giving you the most beautiful and smoothest Devil May Cry experience you will ever see. The game does also support a 120 frame per second mode, but you do need the TV to enjoy that an as a lot of people don't have that TV, myself included, I wasn’t able to test that mode out and I think so will a lot of gamers.

Now the only real issue with the game is that you can't run it at 4K with real-time raytracing enabled and given that this was one of those pass gen ports it's not unexpected. It is however a bit of a letdown that one of the big features of the re-release, is the addition of RTX and to not have it when playing in 4K really defeats the purpose of this version of the game.

Devil May Cry 5 Special Edition is a solid release, it doesn't change up everything about the initial game, it just adds little enhancements here and there. The addition of the Legendary Dark Knight mode is fine but that could have been a free update and while the game is not taking full advantage of the new consoles, when RTX is enabled things look incredible. But when it comes down to it if you've already played through the game on last gen, I can't recommend getting it again, purely because it's not taking full advantage of the consoles, instead it's attempting to take full advantage of the players.

The Score

7.5

Review code provided by Capcom

The Pros

+Vergil is interesting to play as and the Legendary Dark Knight mode is a blast

+When RTX is enabled, the world looks stunning

The Cons

-Not being able to enjoy RTX and 4K is weird, given the consoles are meant to be able to do that

-There is nothing new in terms of content that will give you reason to replay it