Possibly the most elegant FPS devised. Every element serves a purpose. From the scraping dry laughter to the red glint of gems. Devil Daggers is lo-fi poetry in motion.

The eponymous weapon combines doom 2's double barrel shotgun and Hyperblaster into a single devstating instrument of death. The movement system is straight out of Doom, Quake and Painkiller. Strafe running, strafe jumping, bunny hopping, it's all there. But don't let that speed go to your head. While you can accelerate faster, the enemy has higher top speeds. But their swarms cannot turn as fast. The demonic swarm also has exploitable behaviors, notably they will try to avoid your daggers. This allows you to carve paths of destruction, splitting the demonic hordes as you punch through. With sharp target prioritization, skillful shooting and the grace of a satanic, bullfighting ballerina you can eke out extra seconds of life as you climb the leaderboards. And speaking of the leaderboards, they have a wonderful demo feature. Every scoring run is recorded. Probably the best anti-cheat feature possible for a leaderboard, as well as a wealth of information and techniques.

Sure to fall flat with the cinematic shooter crowd, this is a love letter to ID's glory days, right down to the gritty textures of the low poly models and the palettes that color them. There is no story to tell or goal to achieve except the tale of your own mastery. A total emphasis on skill, no margin for error and absolutely zero downtime (even death holds no loading screens) is this game's hallmark. Devil Daggers demands nothing less than your total attention, and while razor sharp reflexes will serve you well, you need to have an even sharper grasp of position and target priority. Hell has many lessons to teach. It communicates so well there is no need for a HUD. All the information you require is in the motion of your enemy, the sound of bone scraping on stone, your own momentum as you strafe the edges of this platform suspended in the void.

Devil Daggers is a purposeful distillation of what made the greats so compelling.