Pros:

Daedalus - No Escape is a top-down skill-based arena shooter. It's fast, brutal, very satisfying and addicting. If you played and enjoyed Quake, Unreal Tournament and to a lesser extent games like Alien Breed, Expendable, Take no Prisoners, MageSlayer, Loaded, Cyberdogs etc. you will feel right at home.

First of all this is a proper, well-made PC game, it has a decent options menu, keys are rebindable, it's very well optimized it runs at a constant 144fps on my aging system (i7 920, 560ti). Loading times are very short.

The game supports dedicated servers, listen servers and even LAN.

Controls are excellent, movement is fast and precise, strafe-jumping is possible. (Don't forget to disable mouse smoothing though.)

Visuals are nice, they're very sharp and clean, I like the abundant use of colored lights, the soft shadows and the TrueSight-esque fog of war (think NOX, Teleglitch).

Sound effects are good and the soundtrack is fantastic. There are two in-game announcers.

Most of the game's weapons are projectile based, all of the weapons -feel- right and are an absolute joy to use, there is also a Gauntlet melee attack.

Gibbing and Quad Damage I mean Power Boost are present. Some parts of the terrain are explosive. There is splash damage but you can't aim rockets at the floor.

There are 4 multiplayer game modes: Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, Capture the Flag and Last Man Standing, these modes can all be played with bots, there is also a score attack single player mode called Highscore.

Bots are challenging even on the normal difficulty setting.

There are a lot of official arenas and the game comes with an easy to use editor, there are already some nice custom maps, these can be downloaded from within the game, there is no Steam Workshop support ATM.


Cons:

Not a lot of players online (yet?).

There are a lot of maps but all of them seem to be of the "Base" and "Spaceship" variety. Some more environments would be great.

Some more player characters would be good. Dev patched in some nice new player characters.

Mutators would be very cool. Daedalus needs an Instagib mode. There are now Instagib and Dark mode mutators.

TLDR: If you like Quake and UT you will certainly like Daedalus, the game need more active online players but playing with bots is possible and very enjoyable. Hosting servers is a breeze.

I highly recommended this game.


PS you can find a playable demo on the game's official website, I have no idea why it's not available on Steam:
http://daedalus-thegame.com/download.php

Demo is now available on Steam.

Daedalus is an awesome arena shooter : It's fast, it's nervous, it's thrilling!

All the game is very clean, very elaborate. Both graphics and musics are consistent with the gameplay and the whole thing is just perfect.

The game comes with a complete and user-friendly map editor which allows you to create fresh new and creative maps for all the different game modes.

I highly recommand this game !

OMG - This is a must have - Pretty awesome game, like intersteller marines but top down and you find new guns with limited ammo, and shields / upgrades around the map .... There is limited visibility like you only see enemy players within a certain field of view around you. User made maps as well . Single player and multiplayer - Love it - with achievements to boot.

A beautiful game from a passionate developer. A top down action shooter, plain and simple. 10/10

I followed the game since I first came across it in alpha and I must say that the developer has done a great job. It had been my most anticipated game for over a year and I must say that it hasn't dissapointed me.

One of the great things about this game in my opinion are the features that come with it, you can run your PC as a dedicated server, or just play host to some friends as you play with them. You can hop onto one of the official servers and try your luck against other players and the AI. You can even make your own maps in the map editor which comes with the game free of charge and share them with the community, or host a match using one of your own maps for your friends to enjoy.

Below you'll find a video and written impression on the game.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qSsEV4j8rgc
Daedalus does a fantastic job at translating the visceral game play of twitch shooters such as Unreal Tournament or Quake, into a top town perspective. You'll find the same skill ceiling, frantic precision, and chaotic battlefields you would in the previously mentioned games. I would say Daedalus has room to be competitive, and is probably one of the deeper top down shooters I've played.

Daedalus does almost every thing right, but does have one glaring flaw from my experience. Spawn camping. This isn't an issue in many game modes, but particularly in death match, spawn camping is a huge issue. The spawns points aren't randomized, rather they are in set locations, and those points aren't even gated off in any way. Even bots spawn camp in certain game modes. Another thing to note is that Daedalus is a smaller game, and with many smaller games, it'll usually have a smaller community. There will most likely be times of the day where you won't find many, or any players online. Luckily the game comes with servers filled with bots to play with while waiting for human players to get online.

Overall Daedalus does an incredible job at emulating twitch based FPS game play in a top down shooter. Fast, deep, and competitive, if you are a UT or Quake fan, this game is a no brainer.

Pros:
- Emulates frantic twitch FPS game play from a top down perspective perfectly
- Great visuals and audio
- High skill ceiling, perfect for it's target audience
- Easy to learn

Cons:
- Spawn camping can be an issue with some game modes
- This game needs a larger community

the game is awesome, but no one playing it!

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.


Gameplay:

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 ♥♥♥♥♥ 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 :)



Graphics:

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!


Weapons:

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.



Bots:

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!


Sound and music:

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.


Announcer:

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.


Options

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.


Conclusion

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.

Daedalus - No Escape is a pretty good game. Top-down 2d shooter with map creator and community map section in game, bots with multiple difficulty settings for solo and online play, steam, lan and direct connect multiplayer support, deathmatch, team deatchmatch, last man standing, ctf game modes - The game has everything you need to have fun in the arena ;)
You can pick up to 9 different weapons and a couple of power ups, so you can fully enjoy the carnage ;)
Obviously the game will be more fun in multiplayer, but if you decide to go solo - you can still have fun: There is highscore mode for each map, where you face bot/bots with predefined difficulty and you battle them for online ranking, as deaths/damage taken give you minus points, while kills and skillshots give you points. There is a skirmish mode as well, where you can play all your multiplayer modes with bots. The bots AI is pretty decent even in CTF mode.
Sadly, there are not many players online at the moment, as the Halloween sale is ongoing and compared to that, the price tag of the game seems really high.
TL:DR you can check my video overview of the game :
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=334646251

Fantastic top down shooter game, AND IT RUNS ON WINDOWS XP! Don't let the requirements fool you, this game could prolly run on a toaster and still run great. Just wish there was more people online to play against! So do your part, buy a 4 pack, and get your friends on it!

Good gameplay
Good music
Good graphics
Good level editor
I have noticed two spelling errors so far
Very few players
Fantastic game!!!

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 that 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 a unique and fantastic game, dev. I commend you for your well executed efforts. Big applauds and thumbs up!

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 and compete in the global rankings.

Its fun, its fast, and its simple.. what more do you want! :)
This is a great little top-down shooter for lans, or just getting some fustration out after a long day.. It's quite polished for its current stage.. runs smooth and lag free. I only wish it had 2 things.. 1) Larger player base.. Went online tonight and 0 people online to play with.. and 2) More interesting levels.. while they are FUN levels, they all sort of look similar so it would be nice for a few more enviroments.. minor nit-picks though, game is still great!

Certainly worth picking up a 4 pack to share with friends

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!

I've been playing since the Alpha; wonderful ambiance, sleek controls, a good dose of adrenaline, and a lot of fun to play with friends :)
Very glad to see this finally come out to Steam. Congratulations!

Just like the description: Alien breed top down experience mixed with an Unreal Tournament FPS arena gameplay. Also good for those 5 minute break instant skirmeshes with bots.

Double kill! Triple Kill! Rampage!

This is a pretty good game that's hilarously fun, with a lot of replay value! It's similar to Quake, and has a lot of game modes and options to spice it up for online play. It also has an easy map editor, and the bots are very challenging at higher levels! It has achievements that will take a while to get, but no badges.

The player 'line of sight' took some getting used to, because you can't see items/players outside of your characters line of sight (even though you can see the whole map). I request the devs add a gameplay option to toggle the 'character line of sight - yes/no', because that would make it even better!

Another thing that would have been nice is the ability to add bots to specific teams. We tried to get 2 vs 8 bots, but the best we could get was 2 vs 4 bots (the other bots joined our team). But it's not a huge deal with how difficult you can make the bots. *update: turns out you can set the server to 16 players, then you can make a team of 2 humans vs 8 bots!

7/10

This game is really fun. If you are a fan of Quake style arena play such as Quake Live or Q3A and like the idea of a top down game then you have found what you have been looking for.

- The action is fast paced.
- The game play is simple to pick up. Your first few mtaches will have your butt handed to you but you will be banking frags soon enough.
- There is a built in map maker so you create your own arenas
- You could play this for hours or play a quick match or two.
- Load times for matches are almost zero wait

This game is new but deserves a huge player base. If you want a fast paced arena shooter game, you need to get Daedalus - No Escape

So far I've only been playing this offline with bots due to lack of players, but here's a quick summary:

Good:

+You can use up to 15 bots (I would recommend using less though)
+Colours, music and SFX are great
+Alternative view settings (screen rotates with camera for an FPS feel or the classic fixed camera)
+Weapons are satisfying to use and visually appealing
+There is a simple melee attack
+It can actually be quite challenging (unless I'm just crap)
+There's a map editor

Bad:

-Good luck finding anyone online
-Map variation is just different ship interiors
-Can get repetitive. Best for 10-15 minute games every now and then.
-The 40% off sale price at £5.39 still feels pricey compared to other games. It's good, but there's not a lot to do.

Misc info:

> 9 weapons (Machine gun, shotgun, bounce baby, hot stuff, big mama, railgun, disperser, blaster, flamethrower)
> You can tweek the camera position (how far ahead or behind of you it is), toggle an aiming line and crosshair
> Skirmish mode has 4 game types; deathmatch, TDM, CTF and last man standing.
> Highscore mode pits you against one opponent. Shooting/killing him increases score, dying decreases it.
> Basic graphics, sound and control options - nothing special
> You have several player skins to choose from and a few other options
> It's a top down arena shooter, in case you missed that :)

Score:

8/10

I like it and think it has fine quality, but the price is a little steep for the amount of content/replayability. Great in short bursts.

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....