Devil May Cry made its debut on the PlayStation 2 back in 2001, built largely on an early prototypical Resident Evil 4. It is, as has often been observed by gamers, the sort of game that makes you wonder if the developers knew what sort of game they actually wanted to make, having started out at the beginning as a rather zippy third-person/fixed camera hack ‘n’ slash gun-shooting brawler puzzle game and ended up, quite predictably, as a quasi-alternative on-rails 3D scrolling shoot ‘em up drug trip. Clearly someone wasn’t paying attention during those early meetings.

Still, the game was successful enough to spawn a sequel and a prequel, the latter of which somehow managing to get itself lost in Capcom’s internal development process and rather mystifyingly finding itself ported to the PC. Now there’s a fourth DMC on the way - a second sequel, if you like. I can hardly contain my indifference.

It’s perhaps interesting to note that DMC4 started life, as so many games do these days, as a PlayStation 3 exclusive. Now it’s also coming out for the Xbox 360. Having sampled the demo on both consoles there’s very little difference between the two, although the PS3 controller is perhaps better suited to the game for reasons I can no longer recall. The demo is, by all accounts, very nice, with lovely, clean graphics and rather enjoyable music. However, the gameplay itself doesn’t appear to have moved onward much from the first DMC. Most, if not all, of the enemies I encountered were easily dispatched with a few mangled stabs at the buttons, and I found myself wondering if a game that can be won by setting the controller down on the coffee table and staring at it intently is enough to keep my attention for an hour, let alone the ten minutes alloted in the demo. I feel like the challenge that the first DMC offered has slowly been diminished with each sequel Capcom chooses to release, and that’s most definitely a Bad Thing.

That being said, this may well be the first level of the game, or possibly a Tutorial. If this is the case then the demo doesn’t really tell you anything about the final retail product, which could very well be the Dog’s Bollocks. I suppose I’ll have to shell out some of my hard-earned dollarpounds and pick up the 360 version when it becomes available, at which point I can give you a final verdict and a genuine opinion. Until then, the demo is up on the Xbox Live Marketplace and the PlayStation Store for the wonderful price of nothing, so I’d suggest you download it and give it a go and form your own conclusion first.