Conclusion

Devil May Cry 5 doesn't reinvent the wheel. It takes the award-winning playstyle from previous titles and refines it a little bit through new moves and capabilities, sprinkles on a little bit of skill management for RPG-players, and expands on complexity by letting you play several characters with vastly different playstyles. If you loved earlier DmC titles, you'll feel right at home. If you haven't played any, definitely give it a try. If DmC has always been "just a button smasher" to you, you'll still be disappointed. Personally I find the game a little bit easy, at least on the first playthrough. I guess it's designed that way to familiarize new players with the concepts. While there is a story, it feels a little bit generic and is easily forgettable, and progression is completely linear anyway. Doesn't matter, what counts is the fighting, which is implemented very well and works in a smooth, fluid way, letting you chain together impressive combos. Controls work well as long as you're using a gamepad. Even though mouse and keyboard are supported, I'm having a hard time imagining someone playing DmC with a mouse and keyboard.

The PC port of Devil May Cry 5 is mostly well-done. What's a bit strange is how you suddenly see keyboard prompts as soon as you stop using the gamepad for a few seconds, but those are mostly cosmetic in nature. A noteworthy amount of users are reporting technical issues, though, like a black screen at startup, crashes, missing voice acting, or other issues. Most of these will probably be fixed by Capcom soon.

Graphics look superb, especially the cutscenes, which benefit from the unbelievable detail that went into modeling the characters and NPCs, their animations, and their textures. World-detail is good as well even though I would have liked to see a bit more complexity on some floors and walls, especially in certain maps. Textures are very crisp most of the time—only rarely will you encounter blurry surfaces as you walk up to them. Lighting looks very realistic and dynamic even though the game lacks support for RTX or similar technologies. The range of tweaking options is sufficient. What I'm missing is an option to turn off AA completely—at least Capcom lets us turn off motion blur.

Performance is great across the board—Devil May Cry 5 is very well optimized. 60 FPS will be achieved by pretty much every mid-range card on the market: a GTX 1060 3 GB or RX 570 is sufficient for that. If you're looking for 1440p gaming, you only need a RX 580 or GTX 1660 Ti/GTX 1070. Our most demanding resolution, 4K Ultra HD, is achievable with the RTX 2070, GTX 1080 Ti, and Radeon VII. I do want to highlight that AMD Radeon cards are doing very well in DmC 5. Noteworthy examples are the RX 570 beating the GTX 1060 6 GB (something even the RX 580 can't do most of the time). Another highlight for AMD players is that the Radeon VII matches RTX 2080 performance at 4K, whereas usually AMD's latest card is almost 20% behind. Last but not least, first generation Vega 64 is winning the fight against the RTX 2060 and GTX 1080.