“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.

Devil Daggers is an FPS where players shoot monsters in an arena to score points that’ll push them up the scoreboards. There you go. Simple. It’s got double-jumping, bunnyhopping and a form of rocket-jumping, which is nice. I do like a zippy FPS with plenty of movement tricks. But my guts, man, here, watch and listen to this new trailer:



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Those wibbling, booming, hissing, roaring, wobbing, warbing, whistling, howling noises aren’t just nice touches for the trailer, that’s what it sounds like. Gets you right in the guts, doesn’t it? And I adore the hard-pixelled ‘early 3D FPS’ look, complete with wobbling vertices, paired with monsters far too intricate and organic to have ever come from that era – undulating skeletal hoversnakes, hoverskulls moving as swarms. It looks and sounds beautiful.

And yep, I am certainly keen to circle-strafe shooting at endless skelemonsters and chasing high scores. I may be rubbish at Geometry Wars but circle-strafing I can do.

Devil Daggers will launch on February 18th, developers Sorath announced last night. It’ll be £3.99/$4.99 on Steam.

This and Thumper, man. The guts, you hear me? The guts.