Welcome back to Spawn Point, where we take something wonderful from the world of gaming and explain what it is, why it s worth your time and how to get involved. This time, we look at Spectacle Fighters , or Character Action Games if you like your genre names vague and uselessly ambiguous.

What s so spectacular about these fighters, then? It s Spectacle> Fighters, a genre of mostly third-person action games that focuses on the visual spectacle of combat above all else. These are games designed to make you both feel and look like a badass through a huge range of freedom in combat options. They also tend to rate your performance with a score, rank or grade of some kind, usually from D through to S.

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While the possibility of a second dose of delicious devil tears seems unlikely, we can at least console> ourselves with the knowledge that Ninja Theory’s next release, Hellblade, will be coming to PC. The studio once teased a follow-up to their first game, Heavenly Sword, but the sequel never appeared. Could a Hellblade be from the same fiction as a Heavenly Sword? Leading theologians say YES. There’s a video below but nobody runs up the side of a building that is also a demon while attacking the physical manifestation of jazz with a gun-whip so I’m not sure you should bother watching it.

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Have You Played? is an endless stream of game recommendations. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.>

It’s a mark of how much I enjoyed ridiculously named reboot DmC: Devil May Cry that I’m absolutely gutted because there’s no sign of a sequel. It was the daftest game I played in 2013 and one of the deftest as well. Having alienated many fans of the series before release, by featuring a different brand of posturing pretty man than they were used to, Ninja Theory’s gloriously over the top romp seemed doomed to fail, but it’s a beautifully barmy concoction.

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In spite of an amazing White House petition to have its non-Capcom-developed impurities cleansed from this Earth, DmC Devil May Cry was actually pretty excellent. As Adam pointed out, it proved exceedingly adept at blending gloriously bizarre environments with weapon-switching combat that put even the most demonically possessed of Swiss army knives to shame. And it was a solid PC port to boot. So the new Dante’s a-okay in my book, and he’s quite welcome to hurl more insanity (and masterfully long-form pun jokes) our way if he so pleases. For now, though, it’s actually his brother Vergil who’ll be snagging the spotlight. In an all-new 3-5 hour-long story expansion, no less.

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There was an unexpected element to DmC: Devil May Cry. It was always going to be about smashing up demons. It was always going to feature weapon-switching, combo-building, score-chasing, and combat tech-fests. What was possibly more of a surprise was it being an outlandish political satire which takes aim at consumer culture, finance and banking, surveillance society, and right-wing media. Ninja Theory’s Dominic Matthews explains the role satire plays in DmC’s cultural commentary on evil.

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