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.
To reach eternity through deicide.
watching gameplay makes hyper demon look insanely confusing. but once i actually played it, i could tell that it's a very carefully designed game. it's even kind of straightforward, actually. understanding enemy behavior is essentially all you need to be able to parse what's going on in your screen
but this game is still hard as hell, though. it's EXTREMELY fast and an assault on all of your senses. it's also mechanically delicate and complex, despite only having like two bindings that cover everything other than walking.
since you gotta move the mouse literally all the time, i basically can't play this because it makes my fucked up wrist hurt badly. it's a shame though, this game is right up my alley and the eternal arcade high-score grind seems fun to me
but this game is still hard as hell, though. it's EXTREMELY fast and an assault on all of your senses. it's also mechanically delicate and complex, despite only having like two bindings that cover everything other than walking.
since you gotta move the mouse literally all the time, i basically can't play this because it makes my fucked up wrist hurt badly. it's a shame though, this game is right up my alley and the eternal arcade high-score grind seems fun to me
This game is cool but I'm only two hours in and already about the first two minutes of each run is basically autoplay, and in a game where you die incredibly often that adds up
A nightmare in an extravagant hell
Seeing the main menu and overall shader design for this game reminded me of Beach House's self titled album. Translucent diamonds in an sepia space filled with expensive jewelry. HYPER DEMON provides a simple gameplay loop at first glance but there's so much at play, it's hard to completely condense in the two hours I've played of this alone. A visual trip from beginning to end, no ramp up as you're in the heat of it from the first second of gameplay and provided some gameplay improvements to the genre I didn't really think was possible.
If you played Devil Daggers, it should feel familiar. Trying to get the highest score possible but saying the gameplay loop is that simple and leaving it at that would not be the complete picture. Aiming and movement feels completely fluid as can possibly be. Bunny hopping, dagger (rocket) jumping, and dashing feel great to pull off. Being able to translate some of my decades of first person experiences made me feel right at home with this title and managed to get a pretty high enough score to see the boss and man it's a visual spectacle in itself. What will probably grab your attention immediately is the visuals. The whole game feels like an RTX demo in itself with how some of the lights reflect off the enemies and the floor at times combined with how the game perceives peripheral vision pretty well makes for a visual light show when performing well. The enemies each have specific ways to beat each of them and some of them are harder to pull off but makes for faster kills which does increase the skill ceiling too. The better you do, the more gnarly it gets and the more likely you're going to end up with a visual induced migraine after an hour of play.
It almost feels like a human didn't even design this game. There's a lot of small yet complex decisions to make in every second of gameplay, it lends itself to being replayed an extreme amount of times with each accomplishment and improvement being visually shown on the leaderboard with a victory cry of sorts. The combination of peripheral vision, light reflection and haunting sound direction which feels like cries and energy dissipating. I remember watching a demo of getting far and I don't even remember how I pulled some of the stuff off to begin with. It takes you elsewhere. Your true potential.
Seeing the main menu and overall shader design for this game reminded me of Beach House's self titled album. Translucent diamonds in an sepia space filled with expensive jewelry. HYPER DEMON provides a simple gameplay loop at first glance but there's so much at play, it's hard to completely condense in the two hours I've played of this alone. A visual trip from beginning to end, no ramp up as you're in the heat of it from the first second of gameplay and provided some gameplay improvements to the genre I didn't really think was possible.
If you played Devil Daggers, it should feel familiar. Trying to get the highest score possible but saying the gameplay loop is that simple and leaving it at that would not be the complete picture. Aiming and movement feels completely fluid as can possibly be. Bunny hopping, dagger (rocket) jumping, and dashing feel great to pull off. Being able to translate some of my decades of first person experiences made me feel right at home with this title and managed to get a pretty high enough score to see the boss and man it's a visual spectacle in itself. What will probably grab your attention immediately is the visuals. The whole game feels like an RTX demo in itself with how some of the lights reflect off the enemies and the floor at times combined with how the game perceives peripheral vision pretty well makes for a visual light show when performing well. The enemies each have specific ways to beat each of them and some of them are harder to pull off but makes for faster kills which does increase the skill ceiling too. The better you do, the more gnarly it gets and the more likely you're going to end up with a visual induced migraine after an hour of play.
It almost feels like a human didn't even design this game. There's a lot of small yet complex decisions to make in every second of gameplay, it lends itself to being replayed an extreme amount of times with each accomplishment and improvement being visually shown on the leaderboard with a victory cry of sorts. The combination of peripheral vision, light reflection and haunting sound direction which feels like cries and energy dissipating. I remember watching a demo of getting far and I don't even remember how I pulled some of the stuff off to begin with. It takes you elsewhere. Your true potential.
playing this for about half an hour and then watching the current top time/score's replay was like playing with fire without understanding how to even start one - flailing in the dust before touching the monolith - and then witnessing god/aliens descend from the blazing sky in incomprehensible fractals. i will never be that good at this, and some people mastered it in an afternoon. absolute fuckin warlocks
incredible game (?!)
incredible game (?!)
Hyper Demon is basically just Doom Eternal for people who liked Eternal’s shift towards being a ‘game-y game’ but didn’t like how it executed its mechanics.
Both games try to combine Ninja Gaiden’s high difficulty and hyper aggressive enemy design with fps combat, creating stylish action games focused on RAW EFFICIENCY - killing enemies faster than they can kill you. Whereas Eternal took influence from MMO combat with cooldown management, infinitely replenishing resources, frequent healing, and damage rotations - Hyper Demon takes influence from minimalist arcade games, focusing on simple tactical trade-offs, routing, and long term risk/reward with a small but multi-faceted toolset.
An easy example is by looking at the first enemy you meet in the game - a Spawner (don’t know the official names, sorry). You can instantly kill the Spawner with a long-range laser, kill it with a melee attack to grant an instant speed boost, or kill it with your daggers to drop an item box.
If it drops an item box, you have 3 options -
1. Destroy the box with a laser to spawn a large swarm of homing daggers, automatically killing any nearby enemies
2. Destroy the box with a dash for a speed boost
3. Destroy the box with your daggers to spawn GEMS
Anyone familiar with Ninja Gaiden’s essence system knows exactly how this works. Pick up theessence gems to level up your weapons (HD does this automatically, no need to buy things from a menu) or destroy the essence to charge up a UT high damage super attack (in this case a big-ass laser beam). You’re balancing the short-term value of laser attacks vs the long-term value of powering up your weapons. And it’s not like you can stockpile these lasers - just like NG, you either use it or lose it.
BUT THEN, you have to consider aiming the laser directly at an enemy vs aiming the laser at the ground, splitting the shot to stun multiple enemies simultaneously.
The other enemies are also interesting to fight against! Larvae are trivial if shot from afar but function as jump pads if you dash into them, giving you a reason to get close. Spider enemies are annoying because they absorb any essence you leave on the ground, but if you deliberately leave them alive for long enough, they‘ll spawn explosive canisters that can be shot to decimate waves of enemies (and the explosions are bigger if you use a laser). There are also Snakes which are mostly harmless, but if you leave them alive for too long, they’ll block access to slow-mo power-ups by surrounding them with impenetrable steel tails (and the power-ups themselves can be sacrificed in place of Essence if you want to shoot a fat laser). Enemies spawn in large groups, so you always have to consider ‘What enemy should I keep alive? Who’s my biggest priority right now?’ There are even more enemy types in the game, but those will be a surprise for anyone who can survive for more than 2 minutes (much harder than it sounds!).
I’m not gonna list every decision you make in a run (I haven’t even talked about all of the movement options like bunny-hopping, fakes, or shotgun jumping) or go over its commitment to fairness (great sound design + spherical projection provide near perfect information) but hopefully you can see how every interaction is about making a deliberate trade-off that can subtly snowball over the course of a run. Routing what enemies you want to kill and how you want to kill them has a lot of depth! And this is all tied together with a simple scoring system where you lose points every second but regain points anytime you kill an enemy, forcing you to play as aggressively as possible if you want to maintain a high score. I’m absolutely in love with this game, and can see myself chasing high scores for the rest of the year. If Eternal rubbed you the wrong way (or you just want an alternative to Ultrakill’s Cyber Grind), then I highly recommend Hyper Demon!!!
Both games try to combine Ninja Gaiden’s high difficulty and hyper aggressive enemy design with fps combat, creating stylish action games focused on RAW EFFICIENCY - killing enemies faster than they can kill you. Whereas Eternal took influence from MMO combat with cooldown management, infinitely replenishing resources, frequent healing, and damage rotations - Hyper Demon takes influence from minimalist arcade games, focusing on simple tactical trade-offs, routing, and long term risk/reward with a small but multi-faceted toolset.
An easy example is by looking at the first enemy you meet in the game - a Spawner (don’t know the official names, sorry). You can instantly kill the Spawner with a long-range laser, kill it with a melee attack to grant an instant speed boost, or kill it with your daggers to drop an item box.
If it drops an item box, you have 3 options -
1. Destroy the box with a laser to spawn a large swarm of homing daggers, automatically killing any nearby enemies
2. Destroy the box with a dash for a speed boost
3. Destroy the box with your daggers to spawn GEMS
Anyone familiar with Ninja Gaiden’s essence system knows exactly how this works. Pick up the
BUT THEN, you have to consider aiming the laser directly at an enemy vs aiming the laser at the ground, splitting the shot to stun multiple enemies simultaneously.
The other enemies are also interesting to fight against! Larvae are trivial if shot from afar but function as jump pads if you dash into them, giving you a reason to get close. Spider enemies are annoying because they absorb any essence you leave on the ground, but if you deliberately leave them alive for long enough, they‘ll spawn explosive canisters that can be shot to decimate waves of enemies (and the explosions are bigger if you use a laser). There are also Snakes which are mostly harmless, but if you leave them alive for too long, they’ll block access to slow-mo power-ups by surrounding them with impenetrable steel tails (and the power-ups themselves can be sacrificed in place of Essence if you want to shoot a fat laser). Enemies spawn in large groups, so you always have to consider ‘What enemy should I keep alive? Who’s my biggest priority right now?’ There are even more enemy types in the game, but those will be a surprise for anyone who can survive for more than 2 minutes (much harder than it sounds!).
I’m not gonna list every decision you make in a run (I haven’t even talked about all of the movement options like bunny-hopping, fakes, or shotgun jumping) or go over its commitment to fairness (great sound design + spherical projection provide near perfect information) but hopefully you can see how every interaction is about making a deliberate trade-off that can subtly snowball over the course of a run. Routing what enemies you want to kill and how you want to kill them has a lot of depth! And this is all tied together with a simple scoring system where you lose points every second but regain points anytime you kill an enemy, forcing you to play as aggressively as possible if you want to maintain a high score. I’m absolutely in love with this game, and can see myself chasing high scores for the rest of the year. If Eternal rubbed you the wrong way (or you just want an alternative to Ultrakill’s Cyber Grind), then I highly recommend Hyper Demon!!!
I don't get it, it's literally the same thing every time, why do I have 7 hours on this already?
The scoring system is a great improvement form devil daggers. It increases when you kill, and decreases over time. The higher the score, the more enemies will appear. In DD, the waves of enemies were locked behind staying alive for some time, but in Hyper Demon you can ramp up the action very fast if you know what you're doing. There's a lot less grind. Likewise, the game will not throw everything at you if you're having trouble. It still has the small problem of games feeling the same at the beginning, but they're not as dragged out now.
It also adds tutorials, which is appreciated. Go through them once and you know everything there is to know, you have all the tools for beating the game. Whilst with DD I had to look up mechanics in order to know how you're expected to play.
Visuals and sound are aggressive and flashy but they seem more of a hindrance to playing than they actually are. It's not long until you are used to them. Plus, flashes and sound cues are used to warn about enemy attacks, always giving you a chance to dodge; and your dodge slows down time for a bit so you can focus. Usually for me deaths were from being swarmed, by not being fully aware of what was around me, or by failing to kill enough stuff that it overwhelms you.
I wish they had added a bit more to the formula, this feels like a 2.0 of devil daggers which is fine as it does everything better, but I also feel it doesn't do much new.
It also adds tutorials, which is appreciated. Go through them once and you know everything there is to know, you have all the tools for beating the game. Whilst with DD I had to look up mechanics in order to know how you're expected to play.
Visuals and sound are aggressive and flashy but they seem more of a hindrance to playing than they actually are. It's not long until you are used to them. Plus, flashes and sound cues are used to warn about enemy attacks, always giving you a chance to dodge; and your dodge slows down time for a bit so you can focus. Usually for me deaths were from being swarmed, by not being fully aware of what was around me, or by failing to kill enough stuff that it overwhelms you.
I wish they had added a bit more to the formula, this feels like a 2.0 of devil daggers which is fine as it does everything better, but I also feel it doesn't do much new.
windows media player visualizations in 2022
Quick review: My aim is so bad it's unreal. FOV gimmick is incredible and makes you feel like you have eyes in the back of your head. I love that the 4 main enemies have enough unique traits to make each require totally different techniques to deal with. I don't like that enemies still sound quiet similar but maybe it's better if you're wearing headphones. I'm surprised this game isn't getting more hype. lol
if this game came out 20 years ago videogames would be banned in every civilized nation.
every decision in this game is designed to make you lean closer and closer to the screen until you die, then you do a three second lean back & adjust shoulders before hitting restart again
Devil Daggers but take it to the club - feels positively blissed out in comparison! Ludicrously addictive from the get go, few other games in recent memory come to mind with movement this satisfying and I've barely scratched the surface of the tech on offer. The dynamic leaderboard where you watch your name scroll up the list with every new personal best score is exactly the kind of feedback I wish more games provided as reward for performance too...anyway get in on the ground floor this is GOTY material easy.