Picture the scene: as a modestly successful chocolatier, your confectionary is praised for its fine ingredients and your artistry is well-regarded. Then, one day, after years of making his famous Devilled Maple Candy, the legendary Mr Willy Wonka approaches you to say that he’s looking for a way to freshen-up the recipe. It’s started to become a little stale and doesn’t pack the punch it used to, he says. Perhaps you could experiment with modifying certain elements of it, to introduce some uniquely flavoured ingredients of your own to make it fresh and exciting again. There is just one point on which he is most insistent: the base recipe and silky-smooth consistency must remain, for without those it simply wouldn’t be Devilled Maple Candy.

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“ A pair of misshapen beasts might need to be killed in quick succession, lest one becomes enraged

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Excited to be made responsible for such a prestigious and adored brand of chocolate, you set to work immediately. While you’re busy perfecting the new ingredients to ensure that they blend exquisitely with the rest of the recipe, you decide to have a crack at redesigning the packaging. Stoked with the results, you show it to Mr Wonka who is positively gleeful at what you’ve achieved and bids you show it to fans of Devilled Maple Candy the world over. So, you unveil it, proudly announcing that while the main event is still bubbling away in the background, here is the shiny paper that the exciting, new Devilled Maple Candy will be wrapped in.A stunned, eerie silence follows and in the vacuum it occurs to you that perhaps you should have waited just a little longer, until some taster samples were ready to go alongside that redesigned packaging, and then the air rushes back in and world explodes. In the cacophony, the world screams some very ugly things; the world threatens to burn down your chocolate shop, with you still inside.“When we first announced [DmC], I think that we had some sense that we might not be greeted as liberators, as it were,” Capcom senior producer Alex Jones recalls, somewhat democratically. “We were making a lot of changes to an established franchise that a lot of people were passionate about. I think that we might have been surprised by the intensity and the duration of the feedback, but we actually were heartened by it in a way because it showed that people are still passionate about the series, so that part was fine.”Jones goes on to posit that it wasn’t until gamescom 2011, when Capcom and Ninja Theory began to show larger chunks of gameplay and the liquid fluidity of the combat upon which the Devil May Cry franchise was conceived, that the most vociferous of angry fans began to appraise DmC for its underlying DNA, as opposed to the colour of Dante’s hair.A year later, and the DmC of gamescom 2012 is a joyous mix of balletic environment traversal and the ordered chaos of frenetic combat with a strategic edge. For reasons that are too spoilerific and, frankly, too disgusting to go into here the level carries the title “Secret Ingredient” and takes place in the topsy-turvy alternate plane of Limbo, which exhibits telltale signs of Ninja Theory’s flair for smart narrative. Here, Dante combines his grapple and air dash abilities to gracefully manoeuvre around a world that M.C. Escher would have been proud to depict.The occasional, light puzzle-elements provide a moment’s respite from the toing and froing, but it’s the combat puzzles that present the most challenging task for grey matter made mushy by years of handholding tutorials. The concept is initially simple enough: certain enemies are only vulnerable to certain weapons, which are accessed via the controller’s face buttons or by assigning new weapons to the d-pad and then holding either the left or right trigger to instantly switch to another tool of carnage on the fly.Individually, assailants sporting these characteristics can be dealt without too much fuss, but when several appear at once a change of tactics and increased level of digit-dexterity is necessary. The ultimate goal is to keep the seamless combos melting luxuriously into one another by switching weapons on the fly and launching enemies into the air while reflecting the projectile attacks of others back from whence they came.Some people will consider this to be a great deal of hard work, while others will consider themselves a kid in a candy shop. Mashing the buttons works to an extent, but DmC’s higher level play rewards the patient building of combos; hell, if you’re going to vanquish the damned you’re going to want to be doing it in style, right?Gamescom 2012 also brought with it the introduction of Dante’s twin brother Vergil, who is part of a shadowy organisation that initially draws Dante to its cause with the promise of vengeance, but may yet lend purpose and direction to his otherwise meandering existence. So: Dante, Vergil, twin brothers – in many other developer’s hands that would equate to an ill-advised venture into co-op, not with Ninja Theory.“I’m not even going to tease you,” Jones smiles as he addresses the question. “We’re not doing co-op for reasons that are purely narrative; like we wanted to tell the story of Dante and to have to account for another person on that journey would have an impact on the narrative.“DmC is the sort of game where you want to hoard all the enemies to yourself in order to get your ranking up, so if you’re having to fight with the person that you’re theoretically co-operating with it would just create a skewed set of priorities. At some point in the future, if we can figure out a way to solve that then maybe; but for this one you’re going it alone as Dante.”Fans of Dante-flavoured treats should take note: underneath the divisive outer wrapping, both Dante and DmC are looking very sweet indeed.