Devil Daggers

{Devil Daggers} should be on the national curriculum, an exam for everyone to take when they graduate from shooter school, or homework from the twitch tutor. Sorath has crafted a brutal FPS that offers no quarter, no respite, and judges your performance down to the millisecond. If you're after a game to test your skills with a mouse and keyboard, look no further that this.

If you know your {Quake} then this survivalist shooter is probably already on your radar, but in case it's not, this FPS is as simple as they come, but it's all the more satisfying for it. You could criticise the lack of content, but that would be to miss the point. This is focused to such an extraordinary extent that it released last month with just one mode. Survival. And even that will kill you dead in seconds, at least for the most part. This is a game that wants you to scratch out a living from next to nothing, where within seconds of starting waves of flying skulls will descend on you relentlessly and kill you with just one hit. It's tough, and certainly not for the faint of heart.

The deliberately low-fi visuals scream {Quake}, and id's seminal shooter has obviously been a huge inspiration for Sorath. {Devil Daggers} has you strafing, firing, spinning, jumping; all the while avoiding the growing wave of demonic beasts that float after you as if on a tractor beam. It's fast and floaty and furiously frantic. Your enemies will be on you in seconds, launching forth as they do from towers that spit out waves of them at regular intervals. Staying alive is an impossible task. It's just a matter of time before death takes you.

The length of time you can stay alive is at the heart of the matter, and {Devil Daggers} is a game that wants you to work hard for every single second you survive. At first it's punishing beyond belief, although once you get to grips with the basic controls it won't be long before your side-stepping your way out of danger for at least thirty seconds. From then on it's onwards and upwards, and with every extra second you can carve out you're climbing up the online leaderboards.

After a while a meta game emerges from the carnage, and you're balancing the need to blast away the skulls that pursue you, with taking out the towers that unleash them. Tower positioning is constantly on the move, so there's no learning attack patterns here, although you can develop an understanding of typical behaviours, so although you can get a handle on how things are going to play out, you can't predict anything reliably.

There's only limited space to manoeuvre around in this shroud of darkness, and falling off the edge of the platform is a real danger if you don't stay on top of your overall positioning in the arena. However, slowly and over time you gain an understanding of your environment and the things that live within it, that along with honed skills and strengthening muscle memory, will keep you alive a few precious seconds longer.

If the idea of squeezing extra seconds out a game like this appeals, and you're partial to a leaderboard and chasing personal bests, then {Devil Daggers} is for you. It's even better if you go in armed with a friend or two who are posting scores for you to aim for. This might be a solo endeavour, but it's got a competitive edge that just begs to be augmented by friendly banter and personal rivalry.

But the reason why it works as well as it does is the purity of the concept, and the deliberateness of its execution. Each game has you wafting through hordes of enemies thanks to balanced controls, and as you go you fire daggers (perhaps we should have mentioned that earlier, given the title) from your fingertips into the faces of hellish adversaries. It's streamlined to the point where it doesn't carry an ounce of fat (some might even argue that it's too lean), with simple controls and a functional arena, retro graphics and haunting audio.

All of its component parts coalesce into a simple yet effective whole, a honed and challenging shooter experience. {Devil Daggers} wants to see exactly what you're made of, and its ever lengthening leaderboard will quite clearly mark your progression and give you something new to aim for every time you beat your own previous high score. It might not come fully stocked with modes and options, but it does offer a focused and tightly controlled blast of frag-filled fun, and for that alone it's worth the relatively modest price of admission.