DaggerHell does Devil Daggers in Doom

You know how it goes. Developer releases genre-defining FPS in 1993. Another developer releases stripped-down homage to said shooter 23 years later. Someone inevitably creates modification to combine the two, thus completing the cycle of death and bringing about the end of the universe.

It’s the classic fable of PC gaming, and one that’s retold in style by DaggerHell, a mod that recreates the blistering FPS play of Devil Daggers in the Doom engine.

The launch trailer above shows the game in action. As in Devil Daggers, the player shoots flames from their fingertips (or in DaggerHell’s case, the fireball sprites originally flung by Doom’s imps) in either a shotgun or machine gun-style fire mode, while Doom’s demonic hordes attempt to alleviate you of your flesh. Both the player speed and the enemy count has been dramatically increased to resemble Devil Daggers’ relentless pace, while enemies now drop energy crystals used as ammunition, in order to help maintain momentum.

The original version of DaggerHell launched early in September. But its creator, mindlord_17, wasn’t entirely happy with the result. The above trailer is from the latest version of the game, titled “DaggerHell: Overkill”. Released yesterday, mindlord describes Overkill as “A more faithful incarnation of DaggerHell, closer to my original vision.” Despite being out for less than 24 hours, DaggerHell: Overkill has shot up the Moddb charts, currently sitting as the 24th most popular mod on the site.

You can download DaggerHell: Overkill here. It’s currently incompatible with other monster mods for Doom, although mindlord is hoping to add compatibility for a variety of other modifications. If you want to try the original DaggerHell, there’s a link to the most recently patched release here. The trailer for the first iteration of DaggerHell is below, so you can compare the two.

Rick has been fascinated by PC gaming since he was seven years old, when he used to sneak into his dad's home office for covert sessions of Doom. He grew up on a diet of similarly unsuitable games, with favourites including Quake, Thief, Half-Life and Deus Ex. Between 2013 and 2022, Rick was games editor of Custom PC magazine and associated website bit-tech.net. But he's always kept one foot in freelance games journalism, writing for publications like Edge, Eurogamer, the Guardian and, naturally, PC Gamer. While he'll play anything that can be controlled with a keyboard and mouse, he has a particular passion for first-person shooters and immersive sims.