Devil May Cry 5 Review: Capcom Remembers How to Show Off

You rotate between three playable hunters, and the contrast between them is the entire design thesis. Rather than one fighter with a deep toolkit, you get three narrower philosophies of violence, each demanding that you relearn what a good fight even looks like. The campaign paces itself by alternating them, so your mastery never quite calcifies into routine before the game pulls the rug and hands you someone new.

Nero pairs a sword and a revolver with the Devil Breaker, a set of swappable robotic arms that range from a grappling hook that yanks enemies across the arena, to a bullet-time bubble, to an arm that simply detonates. He is the accessible entry point, but there is real depth in learning when to burn a Breaker and when to hoard it, since certain moves destroy the arm outright and you carry a limited stock. He is the closest thing here to a tutorial that never actually stops teaching.

Dante is the maximalist, and playing him well feels like conducting an orchestra with your thumbs. He hauls four melee weapons and multiple firearms at once and layers four combat styles on top that you swap between mid-combo: one for melee flourish, one for gunplay, one for evasion, one for raw aggression. The learning cliff is severe and the ceiling is somewhere up in the stratosphere, and no other character in the genre offers this many simultaneous options to either fumble or nail.

V, the newcomer, is the genuine wild card. Frail and bookish, he never lands a blow himself; instead he commands a summoned trio of demons from a safe distance, sending a panther and a bird to wear enemies down before strolling in to deliver the finishing cane-strike in person. It reframes the whole rhythm of combat into something closer to a real-time strategy puzzle, and it is comfortably the most divisive idea in the package. Some players adore the change of pace; others merely tolerate him until Dante comes back.

Everything the three of them do feeds the Style meter, which climbs a letter grade at a time from a stern D toward the coveted, screaming triple-S as you vary your attacks, stay inventive, and avoid taking hits. It is an elegant, self-reinforcing loop: the game rewards improvisation over rote mashing, so playing well and looking good collapse into the same act, and truly mastering a character starts to feel like learning an instrument. Missions are short, self-contained, and scored, which nudges you to replay a sloppy run and buff it into something you would actually want an audience to see. There is a serious amount of game here for the committed, as well. A first campaign runs somewhere around fifteen hours, the difficulty tiers escalate from breezy Human up through the legendarily unforgiving Dante Must Die, and the free post-launch Bloody Palace adds a hundred-floor survival gauntlet built purely for score-chasers. The reasons to keep playing comfortably outlast the credits.

The trouble is nearly everything that happens between the fights. The level design is largely a string of combat arenas linked by handsome but inert corridors, and the back half leans hard on samey red-and-organic hellscapes that blur together in the memory. The story, enjoyable as its po-faced lunacy is, stops the momentum cold with lengthy cutscenes right when the combat has you buzzing. And a full-priced game selling red orbs, the very currency you already earn by playing, as an optional real-money purchase sits awkwardly no matter how easy it is to ignore in practice.

The RE Engine gives Devil May Cry 5 a strange double nature. Its hunters wear photoreal, performance-scanned faces you could mistake for a prestige crime drama, and then those faces spend the entire game doing things no prestige drama would ever permit: backflipping off a demon's skull, riding a motorcycle that splits down the middle into two swords, striking a pose mid-combo for an audience of precisely nobody. The tension between scanned realism and cartoon excess should collapse, and instead it becomes the whole aesthetic.

Capcom shoots its cast like rock stars. Dante's coat catches the light as he twirls, Nero's Devil Breaker throws sparks with every swing, V trails ink-black familiars that dissolve into smoke, and the screen answers your competence with escalating flash: particle spray, screen-filling flourishes, and that triple-S rank blazing in the corner like a spotlight swinging onto you. Red Grave City itself is forgettable set dressing, a generic ruined metropolis, but the fighters standing in front of it are dressed to kill and lit to match.

The sound is where the whole thing locks together. The battle themes are adaptive: songs like Nero's soaring 'Devil Trigger' and Dante's snarling 'Crimson Cloud' layer in vocals and guitars only as your Style rank rises, so the music quite literally rewards you for looking good and falls silent the moment you flail. Weapons crunch, guns snap, and demons shriek with real physical presence, and the entire audio mix is engineered so that a high-rank run feels like the drop in a song you are performing live rather than merely hearing. It is one of the vanishingly few games where the soundtrack doubles as a scoreboard.