[Extreme Demon] Devils Disco by SoDaZ
Whoops, beat this a few weeks back but forgot to upload. I’m taking kind of a break from this game, it’s getting a bit exhausting.
I've had my eyes set on this one for a while now and I gave it a brief shot about a year and a half ago, but I was turned away after five minutes of the ending, so here was my second attempt! I would have beaten this sooner had I remembered this level.
I think this level is fantastic. It's super consistent, super fair, and even though it's really learny and pretty click-heavy which can be a bit draining, both physically and mentally, I never found myself very frustrated at the level itself. My experience with this level was pretty much identical to Maverick (except maybe a tad bit luckier), practicing took a while but the level got very consistent, but then for whatever reason, that consistency kind of dwindled when playing from zero and the level ended up taking longer than initially planned to beat, although, with this, I did manage to "fluke" from 71 so it still didn't end up taking more than an hour, which I was grateful for since I was getting tired. I think this means the level took me less time than Maverick, which I'm pretty happy about since it demonstrates some improvement!
But this level isn't perfect, there are a few spots that annoyed me personally, and I do think Maverick is probably an overall more well-rounded level, but this is still way more enjoyable than most other extremes I play these days. Anyway, gameplay rundown:
Beginning (0-22): Some parts were a bit awkward to practice at first but this part gets insanely consistent, no complaints. This part isn't easy in the slightest, and there is a lot of muscle memory and a good understanding of the gameplay required, but hey, this level is extreme for a reason. Also, this part looks absolutely incredible, it's easily one of my favorite parts in any extreme demon in the game, it's just phenomenal. Unfortunately, the level does degrade a bit quality-wise in terms of visuals as it goes on, but still... this is definitely SoDaZ's best-looking part so far in my opinion. But enough about visuals, back to the gameplay:
Buildup (22-53): Definitely the hardest section of the level skill-wise. The first spider is pretty trivial, it's actually surprisingly easy to mess up but it's still pretty much just a bunch of buffer clicks. The next UFO would also be really easy if it wasn't for the pink orb at 30 which is actually surprisingly difficult and very easy to mess up. Not only do you have to time the pink orb itself quite late, but you need to make sure you jump into the pink orb at a higher angle, and all in all it's just not easy and a bit awkward to pull off. Then you have the ship at 34, which honestly has a pretty jank click pattern but not necessarily in a bad way, it was just pretty hard to learn at first and get consistent with, although I will say I do wish the orbs were made a bit bigger since it's surprisingly easy to miss them here. Then you have a pretty easy but also very chokable wave since it's actually quite hard to see where exactly everything is, which made this part mostly muscle-memory based. Then, you have some annoying cube jumps; they're not hard honestly but they disappear on you sometimes which screws with my brain, so I managed to die here two or three times.
Drop (53-100): This is where most of my attempts went, but it definitely got very consistent by the end. The first slope ball is pretty easy, I died here a few times from not being careful but once you know the click pattern it's not very hard. The dual at 59 is really hard for me for some reason and it's the only part of the drop I never found to be totally consistent, you have to do this really weird click pattern in the second half of the dual and there is just a lot of timings to pay attention to which I found to be pretty overwhelming. I could never really get the muscle memory down for this part either so I always had to rely on my head, which definitely made things much harder if I couldn't catch up with the gameplay. After this, the gameplay is tough but fair pretty much all the way to the end. You have this really confusing spider/ball combo section from 64-69 which took a really long time to learn but felt very smooth once I knew what I was doing. Then at 69, you have a somewhat wonky ship where you need to pay attention to your trajectory going into each portal, but again, it gets consistent with enough practice. Finally, we have the last 25% with the funny fast robot clicks, this part is also pretty difficult to learn, but again, it gets extremely consistent once you understand the gameplay so although I'm happy I didn't end up dying here from 0, it's not really a surprise either. Super fun either way.
And that's that, this is a really good level, and I'd 100% recommend it to those up to the challenge.
Gameplay: 6.0/7
Deco: 2.8/3
Total: 8.8/10
Personal Difficulty: Very easy extreme demon (5A)