It certainly does look pretty. I like the big tentacle obelisk things and the giant spider. Those die in satisfying ways too, while the skulls and hornskulls only sort of pop out, though I can imagine they would obscure things too much if they had spectacular explosions.
The weapon is fine. Lots of projectiles firing fast is cool, though they don’t make much noise or splash when they hit. The game seems very quiet, maybe I turned my sound down too much? Was fun so far, but I don’t really see anything super compelling in there. Everything so far is just swarms - the obelisks make lots of skulls, the giant spiders make smaller spiders.
Checking the keyboard bindings allows me to discover how to reliably use the shotgun blast effect (I was trying to use left + right mouse buttons together, but you only have to tap the left mouse). I also discover that right mouse apparently does homing, but I have no idea what that means in-game or how to trigger it. Holding this homing button along with shooting didn’t seem to do anything.
I remain uncertain about what the red crystals do. I think they might give you extra attacking power? At one point in a game, my screen turned very saturated and some special sound effects were playing, but I died moments after, and then my clicking of the attack button skipped me out of the post-game summary before I could check anything. This is annoying - I can understand people wanting to get back into the game quickly, but there’s already a shortcut for that! No need to make it so easy to skip that post-game screen.
When you’re in the flow it is an exciting experience, and you can feel quite skilled when there’s enemies everywhere and you’re dancing through, taking out obelisks while barely evading the skull swarms. Turning up the sound also helped a lot with making it feel more exciting - however, it does seem like some monster sounds play too loud, making it feel like there’s something right behind you when it’s actually across the other side of the arena.
I reached a new milestone of sorts with the sighting of a big bone snake thing. I don’t think I managed to kill it, but it didn’t seem as dangerous as the swarms of stuff anyway. I find the experience of Devil Daggers a little too fast paced perhaps. There really are no moments of respite where you can pause to appreciate the chaos and destruction around you, and the pressure is always on. For me I think that’s draining the excitement a little bit, and the game starts to feel more like a grind than a battle.
The degree of randomness in the game also makes me curious. It sort of seems like it might be the same enemies appearing in random locations, but I swear sometimes things seem relatively quiet with less foes. Perhaps the spawn locations have that much impact. It does help if you’re strafing around and a tentacle obelisk appears in your path - not too close so that you’ll get caught in the initial shower of skulls, but the right distance to dodge or kill those skulls and immediately take down the obelisk itself.
No score increase this time, didn’t even get close in fact. I’m not feeling on top of my game, but I’m also losing interest. I’m tired of getting killed by the same skull swarms because they happened to spread out too widely, or because I just missed killing one of the horn skulls, or because of bad spawn locations. If I was having fun at a basic level these things wouldn’t matter so much, but I’m not getting much joy from the shooting anymore. It’s like mopping up dirt for the most part, albeit annoying moving dirt that will kill you. Maybe I’ll go back, and I’ll update this more if I do, but it doesn’t seem likely in all honesty. I don’t feel like I’m getting better at the game, mostly just getting lucky here and there. And since nothing changes, there’s no motivation for me to keep playing.