Dagger Froggy

Genre: 2-Stick Shooter / Arcade / Roguelike

Players: 1

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Review:

Dagger Froggy, released in 2024 on PC, and then in 2025 ported to PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch, is an Arcade-style 2-Stick Shooter with Roguelike elements that somewhat resembles the “Bullet Heaven”-style games inspired by Vampire Survivors. This game has you taking the role of a frog who tosses daggers at incoming enemies. However, while Vampire Survivors had players attacking enemies automatically, Dagger Froggy’s main weapon requires players to manually fire it in the four cardinal directions… and then they need to go pick it up again.

It’s an interesting mechanic that has the potential to make the gameplay here interesting, but unfortunately the game only half-commits to it, as you’ll be getting multiple other pickups that fire automatically and simply have a cooldown timer, meaning that depending on the way you take your upgrades in a particular run, you could be fully-reliant on manually firing your main weapon, or almost-fully reliant on your automatically-firing additional weapons.

While this lack of commitment to the main gameplay conceit is a bit disappointing, to the game’s credit there are some interesting upgrade options here that can make for interesting runs. You can upgrade your dagger to automatically return after increasingly shorter intervals and get extra daggers so you can just keep tossing them out without pause, you can get upgrades that add area effect damage to places where daggers land to create areas that act as traps for enemies, you can stock up on automatic attacks… and there are even some decent synergies here.

However, the other unfortunate problem with Dagger Froggy is a terrible lack of content. There are only four “maps” whose only difference other than the background image used is the enemies you face… and many of these seem to be merely palette swaps of each other. I suppose you could argue that this game is only $5, but… well, so is Vampire Survivors, and that game is absolutely loaded with content.

As for the presentation, we have a 2D pixel art presentation with chiptune music that’s decent, but hardly anything extraordinary. It works well enough for the game, but isn’t anything super-memorable.

In the end, I think Dagger Froggy’s core mechanic does enough to set it apart in the “Bullet Heaven” genre, but the lack of commitment to that mechanic just leaves us with a decent Arcade-style game that doesn’t excel enough to truly set itself apart from the greats of the genre. If you enjoy this style of game, I think you’ll find this entertaining, but I also think you have multiple better choices for this sort of thing.

tl;dr – Dagger Froggy is a blend of 2-Stick Shooter with Arcade-style Roguelike that has similarities to “Bullet Heaven”-style games like Vampire Survivors. It has an interesting mechanic requiring players to pick up the daggers they toss, but it doesn’t commit to that mechanic strongly enough to truly highlight it. What’s left is a reasonably-entertaining but content-poor game that’s enjoyable but hard to recommend with numerous better options.

Grade: C+

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