Game looks p. cool men. I mean as good as it could get in today's world and still make money. A shame game companies are not Nonprofits.
for all the excuses people have been making for nuDoom being at least decent for current year standards, none of them seem to have played
Devil Daggers which came out early this year
a FPS which would rival the classics if it were not for its small scale
So other than having no levels, scale, interesting arsenal nor visual diversity, it can rival the games famous for their levels, scale, interesting arsenals and visual diversity.
I'm not saying that what it does have is not nice, I'm saying that what it does have is orders of magnitude too little to matter.
that's pretty much what I was saying
the reason I believe Devil Daggers has a strong concept and execution is because it establishes a higher sense of unity and coherence than most games released this year
with that I mean that the sound, visuals, atmosphere, controls and gameplay all strive together to achieve something unique, take one away and the entire package is ruined
it's still a Serious Sam first-person mobile tower defense game at heart, meaning it's more about crowd control and methodical movement, yet circlestrafing and infinite backstepping won't help you survive for long
Because it's a first-person game about crowd control, the sound design serves to give you a good indication of what is happening in the other 250 degrees around you, with each monster type emitting its own unique sound, yet all of them are designed in such a way you can even tell one apart from the other in the hottest of situations. The overall sounds are subtle yet discernible, meaning it's unlikely that your ears will get overwhelmed until the very last moment when you fucked up.
The visual designs also achieve a good sense of variety while fitting in with the atmosphere, with each enemy being able to stand out from the other through use of shape and color. There's also red crystals, which serve as both weak points for the enemies and are the main means through which you can power yourself up. You either collect them through walking over them, or by simply not shooting, which will cause all nearby red crystals to be pulled towards you like magnets. Yet pausing to shoot stuff just so you can grab crystals can be risky considering the enemies are generally faster than you, as you'll have to find the right moment to do so. Every tier of twenty crystals or so your shot is powered-up, while the next tier will earn you homing daggers and later ones cause you to temporarily enter a bullet time state so you can create some more breathing room, so in general there is some risk and reward present. The enemies also come in great variety and are USED in great variety (*cough* Painkiller *cough*), from massive worms which prevent you from seeing the entire field, bugs which suck up the aforementioned red crystals, different kinds of spawners, and so on. Unlike most first-person mobile tower defense games, accuracy is not a given. You don't have a crosshair, and you need to learn how to lead your shots, on top of knowing when to fire your shotgun blast and when to use your homing daggers (there's a limit to how many can be active at once, and it's a bad idea to use them against resistant enemies with small weakpoints). The enemies actually make you aim up and down unlike most shooters, so there's that. Movement and gaining speed is also important in order to outrun the dangerous hordes, and there's a skill ceiling involved to a lot of this.
Now, a lot of what I described is not new or innovative at all, and it's not some grand savior of the FPS genre nor what all future shooters should aspire to be. It takes an existing concept and executes it greatly while putting its own unique spin on things, and voila, you have a good game which manages to be unique on its own. Quake's gameplay mostly comes down to basic moving and shooting, but it's
executed well thanks to its levels. Descent is pretty much Doom in full 3D space but it stand out on its own because it takes great advantage of its freedom of movement. However, that does not mean Quake-style or Descent-style levels are the end-all-be-all design style for every other FPS. The keyword here is
execution, as in realizing the concept in many different ways. That's what level design in FPS is largely for, but level design is more than elaborate layouts. For all the shit Serious Sam gets for not having real levels, those criticisms were answered in the first half of Serious Sam 3 where you were fighting traditional Serious Sam enemies in small and tight environments, which turned out to be really easy for the most part because you were only fighting a handful of enemies at once given the small amount of free space. Halfway through it goes back to its roots by pitting you against hundreds of enemies at a time, and it becomes more interesting as a result, while still not entirely abandoning layout and physical obstacles. The point being, the levels should serve the gameplay, not the other way around. Else you end up with Super Turrican 2.
And that brings us to Devil Daggers and what it isn't, or what it could've been. Which leads me to ask the following: is it fair to criticize a game for what you think it should've done rather than what it did? Is it fair to criticize the lack of of stage hazards in Touhou as lacking level design or criticize the lack of interesting bullet patterns in Gradius as lacking level design? Is it fair to criticize an arcade game for its lack of content? Is it fair to criticize dungeon crawlers for not having enough C&C as it is for cRPGs having shoddy dungeon designs? Is it fair to criticize dogs for not being cats?
To iterate again, Devil Daggers is not a game for everyone. It is a short game where you are expected to get good, replay a 5-minute game for 15 hours until you've mastered it, and chase highscores, a concept completely foreign to many role-playing game players and most Western players in general (I'm not being condescending here, I'm actually rather depressed about this). It doesn't abide to the Golden Standards, it does nothing with its layout and prefers to spawn in enemies at random at an increasing rate, it has no unique weapon arsenal, no singleplayer campaign, and quite frankly, why should it? Why are we assuming that Quake and Doom should be
the core of every future not-serious FPS when so many have deviated to create something interesting on their own? It's a limiting way of thinking, and one that forgoes experimentation. If you want to see the results of this mentality, look no further than the arena shooter genre. A genre dead save for the games that kickstarted it into popularity, whereas new entries in the genre are only clones with superficial differences which barely offer anything new which Quake 3 and UT don't.
There's a lot more things Devil Daggers could have done, but
whether those things like more weapons and different arena layouts would be an actual improvement to the present core gameplay is not something easy to predict considering Devil Daggers
is designed around what little it has. If you were to add shit like more weapons, it'd upset the existing balance at which point the base game is
changed rather than
improved. It's not necessarily a bad change, but MOAR WEAPONS in itself is not necessarily a good change either. Could there have been different arenas with differing layouts without too many problems? Yeah, sure. Would it improve the game? Not noticeably, considering the amount of playtime a game like Devil Daggers can offer you depends on how much effort you decide to put into it, because you can never truly win, only be better than others by beating their records.
Devil Daggers is one of my favourite games released this year because it sets out to do something and does it well while being solid in terms of design and being unique enough on its own. It explores its own concept well enough even if some factors are not taken into consideration, which is more than I can say about the majority of games released this year or past years.