Thanks to Ratalaika Games for the review code

Title: Daggerhood
System: PS4
Price: $4.99
Release Date: 02/19/2019

Story

In this action game, you take control of a thief who ended up in a dangerous labyrinth. With the power to teleport to his dagger on command, it’s up to you and your faithful weapon to get out of the dungeon alive!

Presentation

Being a Woblyware game, this uses the same sort of 16-bit pixel art style that made League of Evil and Omega Strike look really good. Each world has a slightly different look to them and the animations look perfectly fine, although since each world has a bunch of stages the same background can drag on after a while. The audio is standard fare for a Woblyware title at this point, with nothing too memorable or worth mentioning.

Gameplay

Daggerhood is an action game where the main goal of each stage is to get to the end as soon as possible, using your dagger as both an attack and a method of transportation. You see, while you can try to do the standard fare of jumping with X and attacking with Square, you’ll come to a point very quickly where you’ll need to cross over a gap you just can’t jump normally, and that’s where the dagger comes into play.

This weapon will be your best friend, since pressing the square button a second time as the dagger flies in the air will teleport you to its location. That means if you can’t cross a gap, you can just throw the dagger over it and teleport past it. Likewise, you can use the dagger to get past tight gaps, find optional goodies, among other things, and the tight controls make it a very satisfying chain of events. There’s even some upgrades that you can get for the dagger, such as a hammer powerup that’ll let you break certain types of blocks among others that unlock as you go onto new worlds.

Of course, you could go at your own pace, only using the dagger to help with what’s required and playing it safe otherwise, but then you won’t be able to get the three star ranking for reaching the goal in a fast enough time, if you care for that stuff. There’s also five gems and a rare trophy to find in every stage, and sometimes it’s not even possible (or much, much harder) to get all of those and reach the goal at the same time, (akin to how you couldn’t get the briefcases and the par time together in League of Evil at times) so you may have to replay the stages a few times if you aim for 100% to make it easier on yourself.

The flow’s fine, the game is enjoyable and it’s a great time killer, so what are the problems that Daggerhood has, you may be wondering? Well, while it’s a very tight and enjoyable game, the aforementioned weirdness of having to do a level over and over again to truly 100% it due to the differing things you have to do is one irritation, but there are some moments where the game can just drag on. The worlds feel like they take forever despite the relatively short length of stages, which means you’ll be seeing the same backgrounds for quite a while, and the fact that the entire game takes place in a cave doesn’t help much either, even when bosses come to shake things up.

Heck, the game itself seems to know this as all the trophies are handed to you like candy in the first world of the game. Contrasted to League of Evil, where they actually tied into 100%ing the game, and it just feels like a really baffling design choice that makes this game feel as if it was pushed more as an easy Platinum than an actual game, which is a shame since this game has a fun concept that’s worth a look, even if you don’t want to get 100%.

Conclusion

In conclusion, Daggerhood is a decent action game and yet another solid offering from Wobblyware. With a good budget price and quite a bit of challenge if you want 100%, this is a very enjoyable platformer with a fun quirk that you may enjoy tinkering around with.

However, the oddity of the platinum trophy along with some minor design choices and overall repetitiveness can make this feel like a generic drag at times, which is a big shame, since the concept behind the dagger-teleport is the really interesting aspect that makes this game stand apart from the usual flood of platformers. Worth a look if you’re wanting something simple and cheap to play, but I feel these guys did it better with League of Evil.

I give Daggerhood a 6 out of 10.