Devil Daggers

I feel like giving this only three stars is a tad unfair, because the game achieves everything it tries to achieve. Sadly, that is not a lot. There is one level and one gamemode and the only goal is surviving for as long as possible. The game nailed that part, movement is great, shooting enemies feels great, but I honestly haven't gotten more than 40 minutes out of this game, because it is always the same. The concept severely limits the audience.

You're in an empty room, fighting for your life against an endless horde of strange enemies and then you die, maybe after a few seconds. Doesn't sound too appealing but if you're the kind of person willing to test your skills and get better you might find yourself losing hours and hours of your life playing this game, trying to get good, survive longer, become stronger, and see what's next. Don't expect a long campaign with a deep story, because there's literally none of that. A game that's no more than an endless horde mode shouldn't be this good but Devil Daggers got right everything it tried to do. It's a good Linux port and performance is perfect, but in this case I'd be surprised if that wasn't the case. Worth the money.

Devil Daggers is everything it needs to be. It doesn't make vain attempts to appeal outside its intended purpose, and it holds up to the definition of "game" as well as anything like Tetris, Chess or Pac Man. It is a hardcore twitch-action shooter/first person bullet hell that has only one scoring method: how long can you last? The design of enemies, the weapon, the spawns, the lighting in the arena, and the sound are all very well executed and serve the game's purpose effectively. It has a very compelling game loop where enemy spawns get tougher and more numerous, and your weapon gets more powerful and satisfying. In terms of pure game design, Devil Daggers is simply excellent.

Devil Daggers might disappoint you if you think of it as an FPS game, since its aspirations are more in line with classic arcade games like Tempest or Missile Command of Battlezone than with the 90s FPSs to which it may or may not bear more superficial similarities. It seeks to be an unsettling, heavy, macabre experience as those games did, both in term of the stark minimalism of its visuals, its not quite identifiable software-rendered aesthetic, and its oppressive sound design. Like those arcade greats, it's not really about fighting your way through levels or towards a boss as much as seeing how good you can do, which is probably not very, against the relentless and ever-increasing challenge and unpleasant atmosphere. If you manage to be among the relatively small group of players who can get to the end of the sequence, you can even try and keep doing it. Although to be honest, that's also the source of my only disappointment with it. I love the graphics, I love the sounds, I love the world and the situation it implies and how it fuels my imagination. I'd love to one day see more from Sorath in this engine, perhaps a proper entry into the booming throwback FPS scene, or a methodical dungeon crawler. But I keep coming back to this, and have way more hours in it on Steam than I should in any game in which my play sessions are so generally brief. So if this is what we've got, then so be it.