An intense arena shooter where every second counts.
By Chloi Rad
Devil Daggers is a nightmare that I keep coming back to. 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. 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.
Devil 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. 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. There are no stats to increase and no levels to beat, either. 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.
We want to hear it.
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. 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.
With the amount of intensity packed into a single second of gameplay, even a one-minute run can feel like an eternity. 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) make it easy to get sucked in, losing entire hours to the black hole of “just one more try.”
As 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. Unlike other twitchy, reflex-based games from recent memory, this one doesn’t spawn your opponents randomly. It might be hard to believe at first, but there’s a consistent order to the waves of enemies that appear. 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.
Every 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 shows up, I’d inevitably find myself over-encumbered by the next wave of upgraded spawners. 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. 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 return to it.
We want to hear it.
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. 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.
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. It earns its low-detail art direction because it also has the appropriate playstyle to boot.
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. 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. 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. Then again, making sure the arena never gets that crowded in the first place is key to the challenge.
Despite the apparent simplicity of the controls and your abilities, there are plenty of ways to stay a step ahead of your enemies. Fluid movement physics allow ample opportunity for mastering new techniques in speed and agility: bunnyhopping to gain a slight boost in speed became a near-constant necessity as I wove my way around deadly spawners, leading swarms of skulls around the arena until I could take them all out with a good clean side shot.
A deadly giant centipede emerges from the ground.
The Devil Daggers equivalent of rocket jumping (firing a shotgun-like blast of daggers into the floor mid-leap) let me soar over my pursuers, adding some Z-axis movement to the featureless circular arena. Staying on the move is vital, so it’s a huge plus to have smooth controls that make pulling off these quick and cool moves feel great. Your failures will never result from your character not moving or jumping how you told it to. And naturally, you can rebind keys, invert the y-axis, switch to left-handed mode, and adjust your look sensitivity in the options menu for added comfort.
Enemies are more than just bullet sponges.
There are only two ways to use your dagger shots to destroy enemies, but the lack of variety becomes more of an interesting gameplay restraint than something unfairly limiting. Holding down left-click shoots a steady, machine gun-like stream of daggers great for precision aiming, while tapping left-click fires off a shotgun-like blast for dealing with close-range threats. Both firing modes become more powerful after collecting 10 crystals, and then again after collecting 75 crystals, but they don’t change beyond that. Finding the right ways to make such a standard weapon work in the increasingly chaotic realm of Devil Daggers is part of the fun.
Giant spiders always spawn at the edge of the arenas.
This is especially true in the way this means of attack interacts with the way different enemies move through the arena, and the way the locations of their weak spots affect how you move through it as well. While your typical floating skull can be taken out with one shot, the horned ones take a few direct hits – or one slower shotgun blast – to kill. Other threats, like spawners and spiders, have to be shot in their weak spots (clearly marked by those coveted red crystals), creating tricky situational challenges.
The distilled essence of first-person shooter intensity.
Because the spawners rotate slowly, it may not be worth it to alter your route and dance around the spawner and take it out just yet – sometimes biding your time until it rotates back into view is a safer bet. When spiders curl up to cover their weak points, you have to decide if you want to make a trip around the arena and deal with your pursuers before returning to finish the job, or if you’ve put enough space between yourself and surrounding threats to safely stop and shoot before moving on. Enemies are more than just bullet sponges meant to overwhelm through sheer quantity, elevating the strategy involved beyond “spraying and praying” and making on-the-spot decisions like these compelling and nerve-wracking experiences.
Devil Daggers also puts its incredible sound design to practical use. In lieu of a soundtrack, every enemy’s unique, continuous noise – from the cackling of the skulls to the insectoid click of giant spider legs – combines over time into a rising chorus of Hell. The more crowded the arena gets, the louder and more intense it becomes. This chilling cacophony doubles as a warning system for your impending doom, a signal to step up your efforts to cull the herd or change your priorities to deal with a new threat. Distinct and deliberate sound design makes it possible to know which enemies are where without even having to look – a clean way to work around the restraints that come with an arena shooter that’s first-person, rather than top-down. Spatial awareness and mob management are required for survival, and Devil Daggers’ combination of fluid movement and utilitarian sound design acknowledges both beautifully.
Swarms of easy-to-kill, but hard-to-outrun skulls are the primary enemy in Devil Daggers.
Accompanying the frantic joy of combat is the knowledge that each additional second of survival is owed to the skill you learned from repeatedly braving that infernal abyss. But even when you think you’ve reached your skill cap, and can’t possibly survive beyond the conditions that just killed you, you can watch and learn with a built-in replay system that lets you view the longest run of any player on the leaderboard. That leaderboard also shows your friends’ scores, heightening the element of competition and turning the learning process into a community-driven experience. It’s been a thrill every day to check in on the leaderboards and see what ridiculous new record the top players have achieved, setting my own goals higher and absorbing the techniques necessary to make meeting those goals possible.
Devil Daggers’ stripped-down and distilled essence of first-person shooter intensity will take up a lot of my time in the weeks to come. Every second longer that I survive in its hellish arena is a new record for myself to break, over and over again. It’s a brutal, but brilliant shooter that finds strength in its minimalism, stretching a few seconds of action here and there into endless hours of dreadful fun.
