Devil May Cry 4 is beautiful to behold, but ultimately a standard and uninspiring hack'n'slash.
The outstanding graphics will dazzle you throughout the first few levels, and you'll love ploughing through enemy with your sword (the gun is next to useless). But the trouble starts when the novelty of the flawless presentation wears off. It's then that you notice how monotonous the gameplay is, how unnecessarily complicated the later combos are, how slow Nero and Dante 'run', and how their respective exclamations during combat start to grate (Yah! Hajah! Take that! – ad nauseum).
There are a nice variety of different enemies, but this doesn't make up for the very limited ways you can despatch them – unless you have the patience to sit a learn the complicated combos that usual require precisely timed button and anolog stick combinations that are not at all intuitive. And it's not even as though these combos are essential – you can make it through most levels by just repeatedly mashing whichever button your sword is assigned to, combined with the odd dodge here and there.
The story seemed rather incomprehensible, although I did assume that one had to have played the first three games to understand it, and that the story was a continuation of what came before. That's all well and good, but for people (like me) who didn't play the first three, it just makes very little sense, and more effort could have been made to bring newcomers up to speed.
The boss fights do stand out, although the fact that you have to fight each boss twice during the course of the adventure struck me as a rather lazy device to pad the game out.
All in all, it's by no means a bad game, but I think only hardcore DMC fans will have the stamina to see it through to the final credits, and the inclination to give it more than one playthrough.