Superb production and sound design cannot disguise this rather cynically timed follow-up - Dante appears to be guest starring in someone else's game. Series creator Hideki Kamiya and Production Studio 4 are out the picture, replaced with the production team behind hysterically high-staked fight off Capcom VS SNK 2. Unfortunately, none of that games brash flair is brought to bare.
In stark contrast to Devil May Cry's almost endless lists of money moves, 2 finds the hero stuck with one default Devil Trigger and only cosmetically divergent swords to stomp with. Pistols fire at snails pace making Dante's signature sword-lift-gun-blast move deadly boring. Dante's sneery brash attitude is gone too, replaced with another stoic Clint-alike, manfully silent in the face of blah blah blah. The originals languid Castlevania-alike atmosphere is out replaced by successive techtroplis scapes and other dull real world-ish urban environments. Even the difficulty has been scaled way back - Enemies circle and bare teeth rather than attack.
A quite stunning disappointment, Devil May Cry 2 is antithetical to its predecessor. Every in-road into originality that game represented is ditched in favour of also-ran mundanities. DMC2 only ever comes into its own on multiple-playthrough-necessitating sky-high difficulty levels, even then only with the firework bomb secret character Trish.
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