Daedalus - No Escape Reviews

My friends and I have taken to calling this game "Tremor". Daedalus is Quake 3 Arena put through a blender and distilled to its core elements. It's great for quick bursts of action gaming, with games usually only lasting 5-10 minutes. Hence the moniker, as it's a mini-Quake. It's a lot of fun, and has a map editor and various game modes to keep it interesting. A recommendation for new players: The default control scheme is set to "FPS" mode, where the view rotates in the direction your character is facing. I found this control setup to be clunky and difficult to use. I recommend switching the control mode to "Classic" and checking the "Always face crosshair" option. This locks the view rotation, and the movement keys move you in an absolute direction, not a relative one. I.e., W will move towards the top of the screen, regardless of which way you're facing. It's much more intuitive for me. Always face crosshair allows you to more precisely control your character's facing, which is useful as you can fire faster, you move quickest when facing the same direction you are travelling in, and visibility is always a concern. Another thing that's not made explicitly clear: Hit 'F' to turn on your flashlight. It's a bit of a double-edged sword, though. It'll illuminate darkened rooms and corridors, but it will also cause you to stand out to anybody else in the area. I recommend using it short bursts. Turn it on, survey the room, turn it off, and then immediately reposition.

[h1]Just Super Awesome, Fun, Challenging and Rewarding shooter![/h1] Very awesome skirmish shooter / Alienbreed + Unreal Tournament / Quake with a great set of game-mechanics that simply work. And the exploding arena's is a really added bonus which also makes for more interesting gameplay! Really try this one!

This game is basic but its so dang fun. It's reminiscent of those hours I spent back in the day killing bots in different games - and that's what you'll be doing in this game. It's got a highscore mode for the official maps and a skirmish mode as well as tons of user-created maps that you can download in-game.

This is a top-down multiplayer shooter with play style reminiscent of Unreal or Quake (but in 2d, obviously). There's a decent variety of weapons from plasma guns to flame throwers to rocket launchers and the line of sight mechanic is pretty well executed. Overall, technical execution is good. On the flip side, the game play doesn't hook me. I like shooters like 1942 and enjoy a ton of bullet hell shooters and such, but I don't really enjoy playing this one. Aside from weapon effects, the colors are pretty dark and the visuals are somewhat drab. I tend to get stuck on walls quite a bit -- not really the fault of the designers, just a quirk of the gameplay style or map design I guess. Some of the pathways are pretty narrow. With the tight corridors and limited field of view, a lot of battles end up as whack-a-mole as you strafe in / out of a hallway, circle strafing or spinning your mouse around to fight in a larger room. It's kinda disorienting and anyone trying to watch you play is going to get sick. Unreal Tournament introduced a lot of Z-axis action (jumps, multiple elevations, vertical maps, etc.) to try to make the FPS experience a bit more dynamic and I think with only 2 axes you miss out on the opportunity for really cool environments and varied pathways to fight in.

[h1]Fast and fun top down shooter, sadly empty servers[/h1] The game is great, the gameplay reminds me a lot of Teleglitch, but faster and with a bigger bang. Sadly I've never found anyone on a server, and playing solo grows old quick. [b]So, buy the game and log in, so I have someone to play with[/b]

Imagine Quake Live and Unreal Tournament having a baby, then imagine it being top-down 2D, that's when you get Daedalus - No Escape. This game is, like the announcer often says in-game, wicked sick. It's an arena shooter played from top-down view, with great AI for single-player and also with multiplayer although I haven't really played with people yet so I can't say much about that. I was really enjoying myself playing the single-player challenges which pretty much consisted of beating high scores on maps with a fixed timer, made it to the first place on quite a few of them today! Totally hooked, very addicting, so I'll just talk about some aspects of the game that I've explored so far and give feedback which will both be positive and negative. I will often refer to Unreal Tournament and Quake Live because I have quite some experience in those games, they will be abbreviated with respectively UT and Quake. [b]Gameplay:[/b] You spawn, run around picking up guns, and blast your opponents with them, like in every other arena shooter. There are health pickups, you can pick them up even if you have 100 HP, but it will only stack up to 125, where health rot will occur like in Quake (slowly drops to 100). There are also big power-ups, such as shield (can be compared to the shield belt in UT) and "Power Charge", which is basically the equivalent of the Amplifier/Quad-damage in UT and Quake. There's no ammo or armor, you get ammo from the weapon pickups themselves. There is only one issue: no spawn-protection. This means that you will be raped if you get a bad spawn, which often happens in the harder maps. It makes the game rely more on randomness like this, which is something that should be addressed imo. This will definitely cause issues in multiplayer once people start playing in large quantities. On the challenge maps, your scoring is determined by the damage you deal, the kills you make, the times you die, the damage you receive and the skillshots you make with the rocket launcher and the railgun. I think skillshots are shots you make either from a great distance (railgun), or one-shot kills with the rocket launcher while the enemy is still in the fog. I could not immediately understand how to make them, so I'll look that up some time. Would be cool if the game explained this somewhere before starting, or if it had hover-tooltips on the scoring screen! EDIT: I found out that you can access the high scores via the little icon at the upper right of the map screenshots on the map selection menu, it will display all scores and stuff, very nice :) Haven't tried multiplayer yet, so I can't tell much about the CTF mode that is in the game yet, will add to my review once I go through that :) [b]Graphics:[/b] The game looks great for a 2D game, for me these type of games don't need to look better than this. Some of the environments tend to be a little bit too dark, where it becomes hard to distinguish other players/bots, but maybe this is intentional so I don't mind it, adds some difficulty. I love the occlusion, which is basically the equivalent of not being able to see enemies behind a wall in 3D - shooters, it looks and feels natural and even gives you hints when an enemy is nearby (you'll see some lighting changes). Power-ups and weapons look clean and are clearly visible, health pick-ups strangely deviate a bit from this and can be hard to see on certain maps, maybe they need some glow or maybe they could be iconized like every other pick-up as far as I know. Weapon FX are really awesome, and enemies gib as you frag them, definitely making the game very appealing to play. The HUD and menus are very nice, clean and readable.. And I think that's about it. Great stuff! [b]Weapons:[/b] There are nine guns in the game that are pretty well balanced in terms of ammo, damage, fire-rate and spread (one is a super-weapon). I only think that rocket splash damage could be decreased slightly, and railgun fire-rate could be increased. I also have trouble using the shotgun effectively, but I have this problem even in Quake and UT (with the flak cannon), so it's probably personal. I think they could use even more variety though, I haven't seen anything like a grenade launcher or a mine-layer in the game yet, and a more powerful version of the machine gun would be also pretty cool to have. On larger maps the weapons tend to become spammy, especially the "Hot Stuff" gun is powerful at both short and long range despite the spread, given that there's plenty of ammo for it on the map (which is thankfully not the case usually). The railgun becomes harder and harder to use on busy maps, to the point where it slowly becomes useless because it won't kill things as fast as the other guns anymore and with the punishing charge-time on the weapon it will only be good for very close range encounters while walking into new rooms (where it becomes the more powerful equivalent of melee), or for camping long hallways. [b]Bots:[/b] The bots seem slow and predictable at the start, but you'll discover that this is not true once you try the harder maps. They do however have some scaling issues. In the first duel map, bots are extremely good with the rocket launcher (the Disperser) and also are very annoying with that spread gun called "Hot Stuff", but they can't aim at all with the railgun. They also seem to have almost instant reflexes with the melee attack when you get in close range, and they seem to be very powerful with the shotgun as well (or maybe I just suck with it). Other than all this, these are some sneaky and smart bots that will definitely surprise you, great challenge! [b]Sound and music:[/b] The game has solid sound effects, nothing mind-blowing but they definitely do the job and they do it well. The weapons sound punchy and satisfying, killing enemy players as well. There's positional sound, so you can predict where your enemy spawns on the map by listening to item pickups and footsteps, which is a huge plus in my book. The music.. When I first heard it I knew immediately that it must've been a French composer because of the typical style! Turns out that the French dev himself indeed composed it. The music serves its purpose as background music that fits with the game, but is nothing too special or memorable like the music in the UT series. [b]Announcer:[/b] The announcer sounds a bit weak-sauce, but I think this was done intentionally. I'd love to hear some voice-over of it with a more powerful sound. Also, for people coming from UT this game might confuse you a bit with the reward system. The announcer rewards you for making kills after each other without dying, so it doesn't depend on how quickly you kill, see it like a "killing-spree!" for every kill you make, different message for every number up to 20 or so I think. Once you die, it resets again. [b]Options[/b] The game has a good options menu with plenty of customizability. You can change graphical settings like resolution, quality, fog of war, occlusion, particles, etc. You can also change things related to your view and crosshair, gameplay settings and such. Sound settings are in there, and you can also adjust mouse settings, smoothing (I hate that so I turned it off immediately) and properly rebind everything the way you want in-case you're somebody that likes to play with convenient binds. [b]Conclusion[/b] Fantastic game! Did I mention that it's made by one person? If you love arena shooters this will definitely be a refreshing experience. It might have less depth than full 3D shooters, but we've seen plenty of those by now. :) I really hope the game will continue to receive updates even though it is out, maybe addressing some of the things I mentioned in this review. Go buy it, especially at this price tag.

[h1]Go get this now. There's no escape![/h1] This game impresses me greatly. It manages to capture the pace and feel of an arena shooter better than I would have thought possible in the top-down perspective. I was quite sceptical about the perspective turning with the mouse at first, as from videos it seemed both distracting and counter-intuitive - I was pretty sure I'd get motion sickness from it after playing a while. However I was mistaken, the way the camera turns with the mouse not only feels great and emulates the feel of a firstperson arena shooter, it is also practical in that it allows you to see further in the direction that you most care about, the one you are facing. The traditional, fixated, perspective is still in there - however it could be thrown out by now for all I care. It just works [u]that[/u] great. Coming from Quake mostly and noy much of an UT player, I did find the game in general most influenced by the latter, UT that is, in terms of gameplay, weapons arsenal and pacing. Not that that is a bad thing, mind you! The dashing lends pretty well to the top-down perspective and I almost get the feel I can speedjump around a bit, albeit more in a UT sense. Would have loved to see more traditional Quake weapons with their cons and pros, as well as jumping and/or some movement possibilities similar to speedjumping/strafejumping. That's just more my cup of tea however and vision for what I'd like to see, in all honesty the direction chosen for Daedalus by the creator was still so right on the money that these aspects fly right over my head when sticking it into this fantastic game. Well done with creating [b]a unique and fantastic game[/b], dev. I commend you for your well executed efforts. Big applauds and thumbs up!

Unless you want to play against soul-less bots in a dark and dreary arena style deathmatch, this game will offer you absolutely nothing. No campaign, no decent gameplay, no depth. Nothing. So bad, I have permanently removed it from my library.

This game looks good and feels good, but has one really big issue that I didnt like, and as such I can not recommended it to anybody. It does not have single player mode (unless you want to arena fight bots), but really, there is no story, no anything, they could have at least make some effort and make 5 hours go-trough single player sotry mod. Without it, for me it is waste of time and money....

It's a 2D top down adaptation of quake team arena basically and it's great. But like most of these indy multiplayer based games it needs more players. Failing that the single player isn't half bad and there are high score challenges that pit you vs ai bots and the better you perform the higher you score to compete in the global rankings.