The best way I can explain the difference between Devil Daggers and its surprise sequel is comparison to another pair of goth-o-ramas: Devil Daggers is Dark Souls to Hyper Demon's Bloodborne. Both first-person score attack shooters are dressed in similar beautiful cloaks of skulls and gurgling industrial soundscapes, but while Devil Daggers nudges you into cautious survival, Hyper Demon shoves you into aggression. In Hyper Demon, a long and cautious run will likely score lower than a short burst of ultraviolence. What glorious ultraviolence it is!
When I first saw Hyper Demon's trailer, I felt excitement, wonder, and fear. Here's the important thing to realise: the unearthly and incomprehensible violence you see in that trailer is genuinely what the game looks like to play. That's how it feels to play, too.
]]>Imagine waking up in the morning and finding out there’s a brand new FPS from the creators of trippy skull-obsessed shooter Devil Daggers. Well, that’s exactly what’s happened for some of us today. Hyper Demon seems to be all about the disembodied, infernal craniums too, but don’t call it a sequel. Brace yourself as you watch the nightmarish trailer below. It's a wild one.
]]>FPS games are a classic PC gaming staple, and whether you've been playing them since the 90s or started your journey more recently with the boom in battle royales, there are plenty to choose from when it comes to the all-time greats. To help you narrow down what to play next, we've created this list of the best FPS games to play right now, from single-player epics to team-based shooters you can play with mates. Heck, some don't even necessarily have guns in them at all, and you may find the odd boomerang or bow in here too.
]]>Demonic shooter Devil Daggers is five years old, and to celebrate its developers have put out a quality of life update. It's got some neat new features for replays, some performance improvements, and a new dagger that I will never, ever unlock.
]]>It's been an eventful decade for PC games, and it would be hard for you to summarise everything that's happened in the medium across the past ten years. Hard for you, but a day's work for us. Below you'll find our picks for the 50 greatest games released on PC across the past decade.
]]>"Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven," Satan once wrote on a toilet door, back before he was ejected from his skull throne by Devil Daggers players. Those Hellbound hearts have been scrapping for top spot on the leaderboards since the wave-survival FPS launched in February 2016, and today I'm delighted to see records are still being set. New hellchamp "Bintr" yesterday survived over eighteen minutes, beating a months-old records by a precious three seconds. I am still in awe of not only how well they play, but how amazing the game looks and sounds once things really kick off (officially the best-looking and best-sounding FPS, says me). Come watch Bintr's performance.
]]>Our favourite game of 2016, Devil Daggers, has escaped the shackles of Steam and is now sold on GOG too. It's not of this world, a brutal score attack arena FPS which swarms with skulls and communicates by roars, hisses, and wibbles. If you're particular about storefronts and have been holding out, get stuck in. Even if you're not into the idea of an intense score attack arena shooter, £3 to fill your ears and eyes with a game which looks and sounds like no other isn't half-bad. And if you have to play Devil Daggers intensely to improve enough to reach its best sights and sounds, well, so be it.
]]>Devil Daggers turned two last month, so I went looking for ways to celebrate. What's the world record by now, I wondered? In this hellscape of an arena shooter in which most people struggle to get past the 60 second mark, someone's managed to last an utterly flabbergasting 18 and a half minutes. That video awaits below, but more exciting still is my round up of the best Devil Daggers mods.
Yep, those are a thing! If you're hoping for new enemies or weapons, I should probably nip those expectations in the bud: nobody's made Devil Badgers just yet. For the most part, all these do is mix up the enemy spawns. If this were any other shooter that might not be all that interesting, but which enemies appear and when defines Devil Daggers to such an extent that these mods almost feel like different games.
]]>The Steam summer sale is in full blaze. For a while it even blazed so hot that the servers went on fire and all the price stickers peeled off the games. Either that or the store just got swamped with cheapskates looking for the best bargains. Cheapskates like you! Well, don’t worry. We’ve rounded up some recommendations - both general tips and some newly added staff choices.
Here are the things you should consider owning in your endless consumeristic lust for a happiness which always seems beyond reach. You're welcome.
]]>I am dad, hear me whinge. Too many games, not enough spare time, for all my non-work hours are spent kissing grazed knees, explaining why you cannot eat the food in that cupboard, constructing awful Lion King dioramas out of toilet roll tubes and being terrified that the next jump from the sofa to the armchair will go fatally wrong. I'm lucky in that my job to some extent involves playing games, so by and large if there's something I really want to check out I can find a way to, but I appreciate that there are many long-time, older or otherwise time-starved readers for whom RPS is a daily tease of wondrous things they cannot play.
Now, clearly I cannot magically truncate The Witcher 3 into three hours for you, but what I can do is suggest a few games from across the length and breadth of recent PC gaming that can either be completed within a few hours or dipped into now and again without being unduly punished because you've lost your muscle-memory.
]]>I finally completed Dark Souls III [official site] last week, a world that I have been dipping in and out of between bouts of listlessness since its release in April last year. It didn’t grip me like the first revered Dark Souls, but it still made me sad to know it was all over. Where could I go now for my Souls fix? The answer, it turns out, is loads of places. The games industry is quietly reverberating with the series’ influence. From small games boasting “souls-like” combat, to bigger games doing weird things with death and player messages. Meanwhile, our PlayStation brethren got Nioh, which took the “pocket full o’ souls” idea and simply renamed them “Amrita”. There is a popular complaint that everything in the industry is now being compared to Dark Souls, and it's easy to forget that games embraced difficulty and strangeness long before the Bed of Chaos made you weep with frustration. Nevertheless, the mechanics and the tone of Miyazaki’s magnum opus is leaking into games everywhere.
That there's an influx of Soulsian disciples out there isn’t a problem to me. My problem is that they are learning all the wrong lessons. At least, they are neglecting the most important one. But first let’s look at what sly tricks are being lifted from the series, and who is lifting them.
]]>Here we are at last. What was the best game of 2016? What was the best hell of 2016? It's the same game. It's behind the final door of the RPS Advent Calendar, which lists our favourite games from across the year...
It's Devil Daggers!
]]>There was a GameBoy jam this week and everything has gone slightly green. Sprites have taken over the free games mines and are playing non-stop chiptune down there. I can barely show my face in all my regular cyberspots because I’m just not pixellated enough. It was difficult to get you a haul of free games this week, is what I’m saying. So you’d better appreciate this bag of goodies.
Here’s the first one – a hot mess of planet-jumping, bomb-throwing arcade action. It’s a passionate mash-up of Devil Daggers and Mario Galaxy. Don’t say I’m not at the top of my curation game, because I am the undisputed king. Look upon my warez, ye mighty, and despair.
]]>In case you've not picked up on all the hints: Devil Daggers [official site] is my favourite new game of 2016, and I'd say the best-looking game in yonks too. Devil Daggers is Geometry Wars thrown against a satanic altar in a darkened room made of Quake [see me -metaphors ed.]. I do recognise a leaderboard-climbing first-person shooter in skull-filled satanarena is a hard sell for some so here, look, it's in the latest pay-what-you-want Humble Bundle along with Prison Architect and more games. Maybe that makes it cheap enough for you to give it a try?
]]>New satanskulls are now roaming the darkness of Devil Daggers [official site], thanks to an update launched today. Along with new enemies, the 'V3' update has added a top-down viewing mode for replays, which makes the FPS's arena shoot 'em up stylings even clearer. It's both cool to look at and helpful, as finally I can learn about the horrors I only ever hear behind me. Also new: a Linux version.
]]>Hello, murder fans. We’ve already played DOOM and QUAKE and OTHERS, but the demand for caps-locked first-person shooters with gibs and chaos somehow seems to grow. So here is DUSK [official site], an FPS from publisher New Blood, which is paying tribute to the classics of the genre the only way it knows how: by killing everything in sight with shotguns, scythes and explosives. It looks like the hellish speed of Devil Daggers combined with a more traditional homicidal experience. If you're a fan of quick-paced killing, there’s a trailer down here.
]]>The last of the high-score events on the RPS Summer Games schedule is Devil Daggers [official site]. A glorious first person arena shooter with a graphical style determined to catapult us back into the nineties. I admired it from afar when it came out, but around half the staff got really competitive, sneaking off for "email" breaks which coincided with a "so-and-so is playing Devil Daggers Steam notification. Now it's time to see if those snatched minutes of training have paid dividends...
]]>It's been almost one day since we last posted about Devil Daggers [official site] and I agree with you: that is too long. And since then, developers Sorath have released a major update for the arena survival FPS. It brings two new enemy variants and fresh new leaderboards to accompany them, a field of view slider, a Mac version, and new ways for cackling skulls to become even more intimate with your ears. All this is good.
]]>We're awfully fond of Devil Daggers [official site] round here, full of quivering praise for the hellish arena survival shooter and in awe of how good some players are. It's a flipping great video game. But I know some of y'all have reservations - dear, sweet, naive reservations - about a leaderboard-climbing FPS with one mode and one level, and might have looked for it in the Steam summer sale. It wasn't there. But it is now today's Steam daily deal with a wee discount. You've gotta see these satans.
]]>Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.
So this might be a weird one as Devil Daggers [official site] only came out a little while ago but I'm asking because, alongside the question "Have you played?", I want to ask "Are you still playing?"
]]>We already knew that Valve was planning something called Steam Desktop Theater, in which non-VR games could be used within their Vive headset (and, indeed, any other headsets which end up supporting the SteamVR APIs), but I wasn't expecting to see it until the first giant boxes full of matte-black hardware arrived at pre-orderers' houses.
Turns out that Valve snuck out a beta update to Steam over the weekend, part of which was an early version of Desktop Theater. In like Flynn, me. The good news: it works. The bad news: I'm now more certain than ever that the hardware needs another generation or two before it's truly ready for the world.
]]>If the rest of us keep struggling to surpass the 90 seconds mark, it's because Devil Daggers [official site] wasn't made for me, or for you. It was made for them. Governmental agencies the world over are keeping track of the leaderboards, to identify the first humans to develop super-human abilities and try to contain them before they become self-conscious. Before it's too late.
And now DraQu is once again at the top of that list of names, and he's being kept under strict surveillance by all the competent authorities. He had already claimed the world record before, but after being surpassed by "weaksauce13" he felt the need to reclaim the spot. Let's watch his 612 seconds run.
]]>Devil Daggers is brilliant, as Adam explained in his review. It's a first-person arena shooter with shades of Quake. Part of its appeal is that it doesn't explain anything about how it's overlapping enemies and few systems work, meaning each life and death is a process of discovery. Another part of its appeal, however, is that you can press a button on its leaderboard and instantly be watching the replay of that person's session.
That means you can watch stages of the game far beyond where you've reached. They feel a little like spoilers, but they're also ways to learn and a big part of the reason why I'm enjoying the game. It's exciting to watch excellent in action. Which is why I've recorded the replay of the best time in the world and embedded it below, for you to watch if you so choose.
]]>Devil Daggers [official site] is a mystery to me. It's an arena of grinding bones and rattling insectoid limbs that I experience in 30-60 second bursts. I probably average around 45-50 seconds. That's survival time for an entire playthrough, which is also the metric by which the game ranks players on its leaderboard. Alice has topped two minutes, which leads me to believe she has sold her soul to the devil daggers. How else to explain such longevity?
]]>"Ah, man, I don't know how to start this Devil Daggers post," I grumbled in the RPS treehouse earlier. "I am excited about this game in a way I'm not usually. I often get excited by 'oh yeah, this game does that thing I like in a good way' but this is... it's in my guts, man." Solution: quote that watercooler muttering and roll from there.
Devil Daggers [official site] is an arcade FPS which may have parts familiar from '90s shooters but as a whole feels like nothing I've seen (or heard!) before. Now it has a release date and my guts, man, my guts.
]]>Hot dang, Devil Daggers [official site] is one of the best-sounding games I've heard in yonks! The circle-strafing, leaderboard-climbing FPS is a heck of a looker, sure, with creatures of tentacle and bone and unfiltered texture rearing out the darkness, but good grief you need to hear this too. Distorted abstract roars and screams and groans and gunshots all come together in a wonderful/terrible soundscape of ultraviolence. Slip on your headphones or turn up your speakers and tape your jaw shut for this:
]]>Dustforce is a fine platformer but what I've really wanted from developers Team Hitbox is their follow-up Spire, a first-person shoot-o-platformer with skill-based movement inspired by Quake III and all that. Well, now I'm also keeping an eye on Devil Daggers [official], a leaderboardtastic arcade-y FPS made by one Hitboxer and some of his other chums. Here, have a gander at this here trailer:
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