Although there have been rumors floating around prior to E3 2018, fans went completely bonkers when Capcom dropped the first Devil May Cry 5 trailer during Microsoft’s press conference. The visuals, the fast-paced action, THE MUSIC, oh my gosh the music. I left that show completely amazed by what I saw, but sadly there were no available demos during E3. Fast forward to October and Capcom has decided to bring a playable Devil May Cry 5 demo to Brasil Game Show. Boy oh boy, did they deliver.

The demo featured Nero in all his Johnny Yong Bosch-voiced sass and swag. For a few Devil May Cry purists, that could have been a letdown, but I’m one of the few who likes Nero as much, if not more than Dante himself (the fourth game is my favorite after all). The demo featured a few cutscenes, some tutorials related to the game’s new mechanics, some really delicious fighting segments, and a boss battle.

Man, the combat! It is so good. So fast-paced. Killing an ungodly amount of demons with tons of different weapons to the sound of “Devil Trigger” is just magnificent. It’s the kind of dumb, self-aware and cathartic hack and slash action I love. Besides your guns and the trustworthy Red Queen, which once again features the Exceed system, Nero has access to a variety of mechanical arms to help him in battle.

His good ol’ Devil Bringer arm got ripped off, but it doesn’t mean those new prosthetics aren’t cool. You can either use them normally, spending one ammo unit, or charge them up for a much more powerful attack, resulting in the destruction of said arm and replacing it with the next arm in line. You cannot freely swap arms at any time and in any order: you need to either spend all of said arm’s ammo or destroy it in order to use the next one, adding a bit of strategy to the insane mix. There were lots of ammo replenishments scattered throughout the level.

The boss battle against the huge demon called “Goliath” was the cherry on top of the insanity cake. Like most Devil May Cry bosses, Goliath is a humongous demon that dwarfs Nero in size with some brutal but predictable attacks, as well as some obvious weak spots. I don’t know if the demo’s difficulty setting was low, but beating Goliath wasn’t too difficult. It was fun as heck though as the controls were extremely fluid and responsive, not to mention the awesome soundtrack to make things even more exciting. It didn’t take me too long to kill the beast, but I enjoyed every last second of it. The only thing I really disliked was the fact the demo ended and I’ll now have to wait until March to play this game once again.

The Devil May Cry 5 demo only showcased a small chunk of what the game will offer, but that was already enough to get me extremely excited for the final release last year. Nero and folks have managed to wow me in less than twenty minutes, in a way few games have done over the past few years. Devil May Cry 5 without a doubt takes the cake as the best game available at Brasil Game Show 2018 and as of now is my most anticipated game for 2019.

By the way, I only got an A rank at that mission. Guess I’ll have to git gudder once the game comes out in March.