![]() ![]() In your first game of Devil Daggers, your reflexes might carry you through an admirable 40 seconds, but make no mistake: you are very much a babe in the woods. It's a game that plays its cards very close to its chest, forcing you to work things out for yourself while trying its best to kill you before you get the chance. See, Devil Daggers is like that one snot-nosed kid you knew at school - it's deliberately obscure and very hard to get on with. While not my best work, it's a fairly good example of the kind of treatment you can expect while learning the ropes. If you can't watch a video right now, here's what happened: it started fine, I panicked, I died - all in less than a minute. Here's a gameplay clip - sans swearing - to give you an idea of how a typical game goes. You achieve this simple goal by firing the eponymous Devil Daggers from your fingers, circle strafing for your life, and (in all probability) by swearing your head off. Placed on a small stage in the middle of a black abyss, it's your job to fend off innumerable waves of hellspawn for as long as possible. The basic premise of Devil Daggers is fiendishly simple. Before you know it, you're flinching your way through now familiar waves of hellspawn, your ears filling with shrieks and snapping bones. The anaemic glow of your daggers greets you like an old friend. The only logical thing to do, naturally, is to throw yourself back into the hellscape and try again. If anything it only confirms what you already know - that person is an impostor and a charlatan and they don't deserve to be ahead of you. You can download and watch the replay, if you like, but it doesn't make you feel any better. You start to wonder how they managed it - what fiendish pact did they make with Devil Daggers that helped them luck into a score they patently don't deserve? ![]() ![]() I know this because I spent a good hour getting increasingly resentful of fellow Eurogamer staffer Ian, who was just 0.1501 seconds ahead of my best time. As you pore over the two leaderboards - Steam friends and global - it's difficult not to develop an intense, roiling hatred for the person one step ahead of you. Those four decimal points weren't included for comedic effect, by the way - Devil Daggers really does give you that exact a time at the end of each run, because it knows full well you're doing to end up obsessing over every single millisecond. Reviewing your score at the end of a run is like coming back from another dimension in which time runs at a different pace - was that really just 58.4539 seconds? Devil Daggers As the ceaseless waves of enemies stack, the seconds stretch into weeks each one a living nightmare in which you're only just able to stay ahead of the pack. (To me, Hyper Demon looks more disorienting in videos and gifs than it actually feels when playing, but if I'm wrong, I can't think of a more valid use of the Steam refund system than feeling ill.Invigorating and infuriating in equal measure, Devil Daggers is a journey of self torment that will do terrible things to your brain.ĭevil Daggers is brutally, gleefully hard. I'm Matthew McConaughey in Interstellar, except I have a wizard gun and no patience for five-dimensional aliens. In Hyper Demon, it doesn't feel like I'm navigating a real 3D space so much as gliding through reflections and lenses. It's a lot to take in, although 1994 game Descent would be more likely to make me queasy. "Holographic" red images warn you about enemies approaching from behind, and the wildest feature, a dynamic field of view that can reach up to 180-degrees, can make it look as if the world is being reflected on a silver orb in front of you. ![]() Somehow, you have to do all of this with your face pressed against the side of a hyperspace tunnel. Resource management is interesting: Keep shooting and you won't absorb gems, which power up your basic attacks, but that can be helpful, because you can alternatively wait for a good moment to suck them into your gun for a laser attack. Your main weapon only has two basic attacks-dagger machine gun or dagger shotgun, basically-but there are complex ways to manipulate enemies through movement abilities and to turn gems and other powerups into kaleidoscopic laser attacks. Mercifully, there are built-in tutorials, so you don't have to figure out what a "Dagger Jump + Stomp" is on your own. ![]()
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