TLDR - Give Hakita and New Blood your money NOW
Apologies for the longer review. I really love this game and have been meaning to dump my thoughts somewhere, just so happens to be 4am once again on a day off, after another playthrough up to the end of Act 2. Spoilers for the little story this game has, characters, some secrets and some bosses. Don't expand this review if you don't want to know.
The most effective ADHD medication ever created.
No, in seriousness - this game fucks. It fires on literally every single cylinder. The movement is full of well-designed and great feeling mechanics that flow together like water. Restoring health through blood splatter is genius and encourages the player to play aggressive, which literally all of the mechanics of the game are based around, to stay alive. The weapons are all incredibly creatively designed, feel like God himself gave you them and allow a shitload of player expression with many, many interactions between weapon variations, let alone other weapons entirely. The enemy design is well-tailored around your abilities so you can't just completely autopilot, and nearly all of them feel amazing to fight. Every single sound in this game is visceral, distinct, and quickly implants a clear image of what's going on into your brain at all times. The atmosphere, graphical style and level design, while obviously taking heavy influence from PS1 games, are strikingly memorable, distinct and look really damn beautiful overall. There's a lot of secrets, some being simple powerups, some being new weapons, some of them entire secret missions that are love letters to other games and even genres as a whole, some are unique experiences using the game's mechanics to it's advantage; one is even a very touching talk with a Mirage of V1 about nihilism and depression, taken straight from Hakita's (lead developer and creator) own experiences, in the form of a visual novel. The OST is some of the most adrenaline pumping, heart pounding, and insanely memorable music I've ever heard in a game - and that's not even mentioning the game's narrative, a factor I feel a lot of people don't talk about much.
I don't know what it is about Ultrakill's admittedly lowkey and simple narrative, but I've never felt so engrossed to characters that have such low screentime yet such high impact. Gabriel is a prime example. He shows up twice, yet he's quickly rocketed into a favorite of mine. Sure, part of it is his voice actor - Gianni is really funny outside of the game and has some INCREDIBLE talent inside, some of those voicelines during Gabriel II gave me chills before he beat my ass - but Gabriel has a surprising amount of history behind him that you naturally discover as you tear through Hell.
I feel like that's a really big catch with it's narrative; V1 is not the protagonist. Gabriel is. V1 isn't the one trapping once respected leader's souls in flesh prisons for stepping out of line. V1 isn't the one blindly following a Council of Angels pulling the wool over his eyes. V1 isn't the one that reconsiders his place in the world after 2 fights. V1 is not the one slaughtering the Council for having a tyrannical rule over Heaven, a paradise even echoing real world problems, after God seemingly left them all behind. V1 is just tearing through hell to keep it's fuel going. You just wake behind Gabriel's path as he tries to rend apart everything that lead up to what's happening in both Heaven and Hell, making your own blood-covered trail in the process as you try to keep serving V1's purpose as a war machine.
It feels like this narrative, while simplistic and could probably be done outside of games as a medium; it's something about you controlling the bloodthirsty machine, the completely brutal and absolutely merciless killer, the deadly rival and main threat to someone trying to use his potentially final 24 hours to serve what he believes is long-needed justice to Heaven as he comes into his own, and you know you're gonna completely dunk on his ass, alongside Heaven's prisoners in Minos, Sisyphus and whoever the 3rd Prime Soul ends up being - it just makes it surprisingly compelling to me at least, what with the main incredible gameplay being nothing but a backdrop as V1 and Gabriel push forward to further their own goals. The Right Hand of God putting an end to a system that his master has long abandoned, serving as an immovable beacon of what he thinks is right; and an unstoppable war machine only programmed to kill anything and everything in it's way, any means necessary, only interacting with beings like demons and angels because it's programmed to constantly kill and refuel itself - you. It's no highbrow subversive genre-bending story that'll get thrown around as such, but I love thinking about it and I constantly come back to about how this story might end, because it can go so, so, so many different ways.
Maybe I'm reading way too much into this incredibly violent, admittedly silly game and my meathead side is showing bright as day but I genuinely can't help but feel like this game is up there in terms of "greatest games of all time", at least for me. While I won't pretend it's flawless (some enemies are not so great to fight but are rare or even a one time occurrence in the main game, there's a handful of weapon variations feel redundant and/or useless if we count alternate versions, some levels can have really rough patches, etc.) - no game really is flawless. There's only a few games out there that even come close to replicating my feelings for this game. And this game hasn't even fucking finished development yet.
Mankind is dead.
Blood is fuel.
Hell is full.
Apologies for the longer review. I really love this game and have been meaning to dump my thoughts somewhere, just so happens to be 4am once again on a day off, after another playthrough up to the end of Act 2. Spoilers for the little story this game has, characters, some secrets and some bosses. Don't expand this review if you don't want to know.
The most effective ADHD medication ever created.
No, in seriousness - this game fucks. It fires on literally every single cylinder. The movement is full of well-designed and great feeling mechanics that flow together like water. Restoring health through blood splatter is genius and encourages the player to play aggressive, which literally all of the mechanics of the game are based around, to stay alive. The weapons are all incredibly creatively designed, feel like God himself gave you them and allow a shitload of player expression with many, many interactions between weapon variations, let alone other weapons entirely. The enemy design is well-tailored around your abilities so you can't just completely autopilot, and nearly all of them feel amazing to fight. Every single sound in this game is visceral, distinct, and quickly implants a clear image of what's going on into your brain at all times. The atmosphere, graphical style and level design, while obviously taking heavy influence from PS1 games, are strikingly memorable, distinct and look really damn beautiful overall. There's a lot of secrets, some being simple powerups, some being new weapons, some of them entire secret missions that are love letters to other games and even genres as a whole, some are unique experiences using the game's mechanics to it's advantage; one is even a very touching talk with a Mirage of V1 about nihilism and depression, taken straight from Hakita's (lead developer and creator) own experiences, in the form of a visual novel. The OST is some of the most adrenaline pumping, heart pounding, and insanely memorable music I've ever heard in a game - and that's not even mentioning the game's narrative, a factor I feel a lot of people don't talk about much.
I don't know what it is about Ultrakill's admittedly lowkey and simple narrative, but I've never felt so engrossed to characters that have such low screentime yet such high impact. Gabriel is a prime example. He shows up twice, yet he's quickly rocketed into a favorite of mine. Sure, part of it is his voice actor - Gianni is really funny outside of the game and has some INCREDIBLE talent inside, some of those voicelines during Gabriel II gave me chills before he beat my ass - but Gabriel has a surprising amount of history behind him that you naturally discover as you tear through Hell.
I feel like that's a really big catch with it's narrative; V1 is not the protagonist. Gabriel is. V1 isn't the one trapping once respected leader's souls in flesh prisons for stepping out of line. V1 isn't the one blindly following a Council of Angels pulling the wool over his eyes. V1 isn't the one that reconsiders his place in the world after 2 fights. V1 is not the one slaughtering the Council for having a tyrannical rule over Heaven, a paradise even echoing real world problems, after God seemingly left them all behind. V1 is just tearing through hell to keep it's fuel going. You just wake behind Gabriel's path as he tries to rend apart everything that lead up to what's happening in both Heaven and Hell, making your own blood-covered trail in the process as you try to keep serving V1's purpose as a war machine.
It feels like this narrative, while simplistic and could probably be done outside of games as a medium; it's something about you controlling the bloodthirsty machine, the completely brutal and absolutely merciless killer, the deadly rival and main threat to someone trying to use his potentially final 24 hours to serve what he believes is long-needed justice to Heaven as he comes into his own, and you know you're gonna completely dunk on his ass, alongside Heaven's prisoners in Minos, Sisyphus and whoever the 3rd Prime Soul ends up being - it just makes it surprisingly compelling to me at least, what with the main incredible gameplay being nothing but a backdrop as V1 and Gabriel push forward to further their own goals. The Right Hand of God putting an end to a system that his master has long abandoned, serving as an immovable beacon of what he thinks is right; and an unstoppable war machine only programmed to kill anything and everything in it's way, any means necessary, only interacting with beings like demons and angels because it's programmed to constantly kill and refuel itself - you. It's no highbrow subversive genre-bending story that'll get thrown around as such, but I love thinking about it and I constantly come back to about how this story might end, because it can go so, so, so many different ways.
Maybe I'm reading way too much into this incredibly violent, admittedly silly game and my meathead side is showing bright as day but I genuinely can't help but feel like this game is up there in terms of "greatest games of all time", at least for me. While I won't pretend it's flawless (some enemies are not so great to fight but are rare or even a one time occurrence in the main game, there's a handful of weapon variations feel redundant and/or useless if we count alternate versions, some levels can have really rough patches, etc.) - no game really is flawless. There's only a few games out there that even come close to replicating my feelings for this game. And this game hasn't even fucking finished development yet.
Mankind is dead.
Blood is fuel.
Hell is full.