Hyperdemon Review – Slayer

Doom may be the most famous shooter released in 2016, but the year also hosted another exceptional game, Devil Daggers. Focusing on the shooter’s most basic attributes, Devil Dagger shined with its extreme difficulty and extremely high skill his ceiling, allowing him to run around for hours on end. In many ways, developer Sorath’s next game, his Hyper Demon, is the logical next step for that formula. It’s harsh and engrossing in every way, with even more mechanics to wrap your head around during its intense but short run. to

Devil Daggers focused solely on survival, while Hyper Demon is all about aggression. Each round starts with his 10 second timer and starts ticking right away. Each enemy kill increases the timer by his 3 seconds, allowing you to string together kills in an elegant way to keep the action flowing. The game does not end when the timer reaches zero. Instead, your score is determined by the time on the clock when you die (or reach the game’s ending). Passive play, while technically much safer, will not improve your placement on the leaderboard.

Compared to Devil Dagger, it has an expanded repertoire of mechanics, so you can even increase the pace of action to suit new objectives. Each round is played on a limited floor space that can easily fall off, but you can move around much faster thanks to Air Dash and Chain Bunny Hop. Getting close to enemies and blowing them away is half the challenge, and the other is deciding how to kill them quickly. Like Devil Daggers, you can hold down the shot button to fire a steady barrage of bullets, or tap to detonate a more deadly close-range shotgun. These are enhanced with laser attacks that can be fired if you stop shooting long enough to manually absorb the crystals that drop when an enemy dies, giving Trouble an accurate, long-range option.

gallery

All of these options are easy to figure out individually, but in Hyper Demon you have to use them in harmony to really start climbing the leaderboards. , predicting where new enemies will appear is just as important as having high accuracy, but understanding each enemy’s behavior will help you defeat them more quickly. For example, the first enemy you encounter during each run is a floating well that spits out tiny skull enemies while you’re alive. It’s easy to dispatch with normal fire from your hand, but it’s usually not fast enough to keep other nasty enemies from spawning. The downside of doing so is that it no longer drops the same crystal on death. Otherwise, it can be pulverized to obtain an entirely new Laser Charge.

Each enemy in Hyperdemon has these little decisions you need to make when facing them. This becomes more difficult as you run around the arena to stay alive and stay aggressive. At first, it may seem strange that Hyper Demon only has four main enemy types, but it takes advantage of all the weaknesses found to speed up the process, turning one kill into the next. Understanding a new set of actions that can gracefully bounce to a kill is satisfying on a daily basis. You can identify the order in which they occur and find efficient routes through them.

Hyperdemon’s fantastical visuals can hinder this at first. and all its glowing appendages and flashing attacks become overwhelming. It’s easy to lose track of. But the more you get into Hyper Demon, the more you realize its visual design is a language you haven’t learned yet. That loudness needs to be identified, such as the brief blink of an enemy’s eye when they are about to launch an attack, or another ghostly red outline out of sight but trying to attack from behind. Many important details are also included. Much like learning to move around effectively, you quickly begin to understand each new layer of Hyper Demon’s visual presentation, and the closer you get to the end of your run, the more you realize how Adapt to how ridiculous.

gallery

Much of Hyper Demon’s complexity is revealed through the time spent running it, but the robust training mode is a great introduction to how the game works. Each one is a small self-contained puzzle that introduces you to mechanics before proving your understanding. This reduces confusion about how to play Hyper Demon and allows you to focus on honing your technique from the start rather than hunting around trying to figure out how to perform some of the basic tricks. It’s a great replay system to work with training. This will allow you to see a complete run from anyone on the leaderboard. While it’s daunting to watch the best times in the world (game progress can often look like a whole other game), learning from other players and mastering new strategies you can employ in your next run is rewarding. useful. Hyper Demon’s sole focus is climbing higher on the leaderboards, but replays almost feel like a collaborative effort helping everyone playing get better in the process.

The training stages and large number of player replays help make Hyper Demon feel much more relatable than Devil Daggers, albeit a much more mechanically complex shooter. It still takes time to get your head around it and even more time to start mastering it, but as you work with all that system knowledge and hone your skills with each new run, it’s a long way down the road. Adding a few milliseconds to your best time is extremely satisfying, and trying one new route after another just discovered through the game’s rich enemy types. attractive. Like Devil Daggers, Hyper Demon is a deeply satisfying distillation of deftly balanced shooter mechanics that will be hard to stop once you start.