Devil May Cry 3: Dante's Awakening

The good: stylish action
The bad: ridiculously difficult
Half-human, half-demon Dante returns once again to kick demon butt and this time its his butt which gets kicked more.

Right off the bat I'm gonna tell you that this game is excruciatingly initially difficult. I'm talking about several retries in even the first few levels so casual gamers stay away. I guess the developers listened to everyone's comments about the 2nd Devil (which was too easy) and upped the difficulty ante by several levels.

Stay with the game though and the rest of the game wouldn't feel as hard. In fact, if you go back to the levels and bosses that you've fought before, you'd wonder what made you nearly throw the controller in the first place. The action is appropriately frantic and stylish with crazy moves and combos. New to the game is a 'style' system where you get to choose from several styles which augment Dante's assortment of abilities. For example, choosing the gunslinger skill will allow Dante more moves for his gun repertoire while the trickster option (the best choice btw) will let Dante dash etc. However, most of the styles are pretty much useless as with most of the abilities which they provide. You'll only really use the trickster style and that's too bad.

Enemy types are lacking with only a few similar-looking monsters. The levels are also very disappointing, looking a lot like the levels in the first DMC with few variety. It doesn't help that the game forces you to do a significant amount of backtracking which is always a downer.

The moment to moment action is still fun although you'll find yourself running away from the enemies more than fighting them because even the regular enemies takes too long to kill and deals out too much damage. Good thing that the story is quite interesting and the cinematics are some of the coolest ever (I sure hope that a DMC movie is in the works) or I'd have given up in frustration.

For the next DMC, I'd like a more manageable difficulty level, more gun and sword variety, more enemy types, better level design and real puzzles (the puzzles here are a joke), as well as the chance to play as tomboy-hottie Mary. (4/5)