Devil Daggers' cooler cousin, but the blistering pace combined with piling on new tech means a lot more salt. The hyper-aggresive scoring essentially repairs the frustrations of DD - Hyper Demon is entirely the climax of a DD run with none of the setup. In exchange, however, it's added a lot of new tricks & tactics to help you keep up with the new paradigm of aggression. This makes the skill ceiling seem higher, but also leads to drastically more frustrating or unreadable deaths. I'll elaborate for a bit:
- The dash / stomp keybinding takes a while to adjust, and you will be constantly misdashing into enemies.
- Scuttlebugs are a source of frustration, eating a lot of damage if you fail to stomp them out or rail laser them (and those misdashes will inevitably cause such an occurrence).
- Snakes are extremely difficult to read and have to be widely avoided when attempting to grab the powerup, which is made difficult by their flailing hitboxes.
- The dodge is interesting, but seems to fuzz up hitboxes or squeeze you out of unlivable situations, which leads to some uncertainty with what is lethal and what isn't.
- The triple-laser auto aim is just fuzzy enough to feel inconsistent, with no clear indication of range beyond a sound that I find occasionally hard to parse (it'll ding '3' times and only target one or two enemies).
- The rail laser itself is extremely precise and requires much harsher aim than anything else in the game.
- The mega-laser you get from holding rclick when you nab the powerup is almost totally useless without a green bomb or a big crystal.
- Spiders are meant to drop and become vulnerable when approached/dashed under, but the trigger / indication for their drop-invulnerable states is mediocre (a sound cue very late into their descent, and not much more than a leg flail when spawning a bomb).
- The arena's dim-lit wobbliness makes it hard to tell where any edge is when shit's gone wrong until you're already walking into it, and enemies completely disappear when outside the border.
- Loads of bullet-time slowmo + crazy ultra-bendy FOV nonsense makes gauging distances hard.
Since a lot of these are less "hardline issues" and more "control scheme and enemy handling fuzziness", I expect to care less about them the more I play. At ~200 seconds, I still find them decently frustrating, but it was distinctly worse as I was initially learning the ropes. That's more likely a consequence of Devil Daggers' extreme simplicity and my own expectations, though. That is to say - if anyone can correct/inform me on why these features act this way, please do. Even with a tutorial mode, this game is fairly obtuse.
The tl;dr here is that HD has managed to squeeze the best-est bits of DD's prime, but has lost a lot of the level-headed consistency and simplicity during the translation. I wouldn't disagree with anyone who thinks that's a good thing, but I think it means HD is less of a Devil Daggers replacement, and more of a fantastic accompaniment when DD's frustrations boil over (and vice-versa!)
I've not spoken much on the visuals because they can't really be conveyed thru anything other than gameplay. This game opens your third eye or some shit. It's pure magic. Play at 180 FOV and develop perfect vision.
- The dash / stomp keybinding takes a while to adjust, and you will be constantly misdashing into enemies.
- Scuttlebugs are a source of frustration, eating a lot of damage if you fail to stomp them out or rail laser them (and those misdashes will inevitably cause such an occurrence).
- Snakes are extremely difficult to read and have to be widely avoided when attempting to grab the powerup, which is made difficult by their flailing hitboxes.
- The dodge is interesting, but seems to fuzz up hitboxes or squeeze you out of unlivable situations, which leads to some uncertainty with what is lethal and what isn't.
- The triple-laser auto aim is just fuzzy enough to feel inconsistent, with no clear indication of range beyond a sound that I find occasionally hard to parse (it'll ding '3' times and only target one or two enemies).
- The rail laser itself is extremely precise and requires much harsher aim than anything else in the game.
- The mega-laser you get from holding rclick when you nab the powerup is almost totally useless without a green bomb or a big crystal.
- Spiders are meant to drop and become vulnerable when approached/dashed under, but the trigger / indication for their drop-invulnerable states is mediocre (a sound cue very late into their descent, and not much more than a leg flail when spawning a bomb).
- The arena's dim-lit wobbliness makes it hard to tell where any edge is when shit's gone wrong until you're already walking into it, and enemies completely disappear when outside the border.
- Loads of bullet-time slowmo + crazy ultra-bendy FOV nonsense makes gauging distances hard.
Since a lot of these are less "hardline issues" and more "control scheme and enemy handling fuzziness", I expect to care less about them the more I play. At ~200 seconds, I still find them decently frustrating, but it was distinctly worse as I was initially learning the ropes. That's more likely a consequence of Devil Daggers' extreme simplicity and my own expectations, though. That is to say - if anyone can correct/inform me on why these features act this way, please do. Even with a tutorial mode, this game is fairly obtuse.
The tl;dr here is that HD has managed to squeeze the best-est bits of DD's prime, but has lost a lot of the level-headed consistency and simplicity during the translation. I wouldn't disagree with anyone who thinks that's a good thing, but I think it means HD is less of a Devil Daggers replacement, and more of a fantastic accompaniment when DD's frustrations boil over (and vice-versa!)
I've not spoken much on the visuals because they can't really be conveyed thru anything other than gameplay. This game opens your third eye or some shit. It's pure magic. Play at 180 FOV and develop perfect vision.