Then again, making sure the arena never gets that crowded in the first place is key to the challenge.ĭespite the apparent simplicity of the controls and your abilities, there are plenty of ways to stay a step ahead of your enemies. This is especially true in the “late game” (beyond six or seven minutes in), when the visual clutter of pixelated enemies becomes so overwhelming that the real challenge is interpreting the mess on your screen to begin with. The graphics, intentionally dated by the jittering polygonal style and giant-pixel textures of the original Quake engine, may not make everyone feel fond with remembrance though.
Smooth controls make pulling off quick and cool moves feel great.It looks cool as hell anyway, with an aesthetic so satanic it verges on ridiculous. It earns its low-detail art direction because it also has the appropriate playstyle to boot. The faithfulness with which it adapts these principles makes Devil Daggers more than just a retro-for-no-reason gimmick that slaps on the unfiltered textures of old games as a cheap nostalgia trip. Devil Daggers feels like a tribute to that spirit, a throwback to a time when games were simple and uncluttered (but not shallow) and completely unapologetic about their intense difficulty.
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There are certain games that the speedrunning community has spent ages chipping away at, learning how to exploit weak spots in their code and defy their boundaries, but also working within their restraints to pull off seemingly impossible gaming feats. Memorizing and maintaining a mental checklist of pixel-perfect motions isn’t necessary to have a good time shooting down demons, but it does make every run feel like a puzzle that I grow closer to understanding each time I returned to it. If I didn’t take the spider out immediately after the first centipede spawns, I’d lose all the centipede’s crystals to the spider’s gem-converting powers and have dozens of critter-spewing egg sacs to deal with. Every single error compounds on each other, making things exponentially difficult going forward and adding intense levels of urgency to your every move.
As I played more and more, I grew accustomed to the exact conditions and exact timing of moves that I needed to pull off before the next sequence began.Įvery run feels like a puzzle that I grow closer to understanding each time.If I didn’t have all four skull spawners from the first wave destroyed by the time the first spider spawned, I’d inevitably find myself over-encumbered by the next wave of upgraded spawners. It might be hard to believe at first, but there’s a consistent order to the waves of enemies that spawn. Unlike other twitchy, reflex-based games from recent memory, this one doesn’t spawn your opponents randomly. The relentless thrill of blasting baddies and the smooth transition between the game over screen and a fresh start (tapping R instantly resets it at any time) makes it easy to get sucked in, losing entire hours to the black hole of “ just one more try.”Īs simple as Devil Daggers’ run-and-gun routine may seem, there’s enough technical detail to make exploring and exploiting its various systems one chaotic hell of a good time. With the amount of intensity packed into a single second of gameplay, even a one-minute run can feel like an eternity.
Hordes of floating skulls and disembodied demon heads spew out of tentacled behemoths, mindlessly giving chase while increasingly grotesque beasts spawn from all sides until the mobs become too overwhelming to fend off any longer. Trying, failing, and trying again is a particularly brutal process in that abyss, where there’s always some new monstrosity threatening to cut your latest attempt short. It’s just you, the daggers that inexplicably fire from your outstretched fingers, and an endless legion of hellspawn battling it out in a dark arena for as long as your skill can carry you, which probably won’t be that long. There are no stats to increase and no levels to beat, either. There are no weapons to pick up, no armor, and besides collectible crystals that power up your dagger shots in tiers, there are no items whatsoever.
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But it’s also exhilarating, a frantic high-score chaser that buries hours of rewarding playtime deep within its punishing core for only the most determined players to claw out.ĭevil Daggers grounds itself in the look and feel of old-school PC shooters of the ‘90s like DOOM and Quake, then strips the experience down into its purest elements and drops you in without explanation. It’s demanding and frightening – an intensely difficult first-person arena shooter set in some forgotten circle of hell, where survival happens only a handful of seconds at a time and death is constantly looming over your shoulder. Devil Daggers is a nightmare that I keep coming back to.
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