The game carries with it an "M" rating, something that was going to happen simply due to the amount of blood spilt in the title. It seems as though developer Ninja Theory figured that as long as it was going to get an "M," Dante may as well curse throughout.
The dialogue isn't strongly written and it isn't delivered with much enthusiasm, so we're left with a whole bunch of four letter words dropped in for what appears to be the sake of having four letter words. One particularly bad moment of dialogue features Dante yelling a four letter expletive to a boss who then says it back to Dante who then says it back to her. The serve and volley of f-bombs stops there, but even so, by the time the battle starts you'll be cringing.
I said above that brilliant gameplay could salvage a title with a horrific story, and DmC almost gets there. Almost. What could be utterly fantastic, however, is severely hampered by the linearity of level design, the camera angles, and not being handed full control of what Dante does.
In DmC, Dante is repeatedly sucked from the real world into Limbo, a place where demons appear and are out to get him. But, Limbo is more than just a static place, it's alive and changing – it too is actively engaged in killing Dante.
I think that, as a concept, that's just brilliant. It represents the potential for an incredible amount of fun as things change and paths get altered and Dante is forced into a corner. In actuality though, Limbo doesn't function as well as it ought. You will experience moments in the game where the width of paths shrink, forcing Dante forward at a rapid clip. Nice idea, but if you were a living city and you wanted to kill this guy, why would you move two buildings (or walls or whatever) together slowly, wouldn't you just bring them together instantly to kill your target? Limbo only works in videogame ways – always offering Dante an exit and never quite being dastardly enough to kill him in the oh-so-obvious ways it should. In the end, Limbo is little more than a slightly shifting funhouse distortion of the real world and it could have been much better than that.
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