 So I'm still going to do that video on the temptation of saves coming and games like Dishonored because I think it's an interesting topic. But this week I was looking through my wish list and I noticed that Ultra Kill had released into Early Access. I am a big fan of New Blood Interactive, the indie developer collective behind some of my favorite games the last few years. Dusk, Amid Evil, the demo for the retro, Fief-like Gromwood and others. In fact I think Dusk and Amid Evil are two of the best shooters of the last few years. Now I'm not quite sure how this collective works, they don't even have a Wikipedia page, but it seems like it's a loose group of individual developers who pool resources to handle publication and marketing. So people making games kind of like it's 1996 or something. This structure must obviously come with benefits for the devs who are involved and as a former punk rocker who knows people that got screwed by major labels, I get the desire to try to keep things small. But this approach does carry one risk. And the risk is that a game might release that's so damn good it should be a massive, heavily supported hit, but resources will leave it reliant on word of mouth and ultimately it might sell less than it should have. Dusk managed to break through into the mainstream to a certain degree because it was just that good. But then a game like Amid Evil, which is also pretty damn good itself, probably doesn't get the love it deserves because it's relying on a very niche audience to generate positive buzz. Well, the new Early Access game, Ultra Kill, isn't just a good retro shooter and it's not even just a great indie game. Ultra Kill is one of the best games I've played this year and one of the best shooters I have ever played. It is so good it deserves to sell 3 million copies, it is that damn good. What Dusk is to the late 90s shooters, Ultra Kill is to Doom Eternal. So today I want to let you guys know about this game because it's the kind of thing that anyone who likes shooters should buy immediately. And as usual, if you like what I have to say, well how I sound saying it, do me and you a favor and like, share, subscribe, yadda yadda yadda. Ultra Kill, after the logo. Doom but Cheaper. When you buy retro looking indie games on Steam, you're basically flipping a coin. As something of a shooter connoisseur, I end up buying lots of indie FPS games with a retro aesthetic and for most of them, that look is the only notable thing about the game. And simply having a retro aesthetic isn't enough to make a game memorable. Dusk isn't great because of that retro look, it's great because it's fast paced, mechanically tight and features cleverly designed levels and enemies. That retro look is merely a fun homage that also conveniently allows for lower production costs. Dusk would work with any art style, a medieval is the same. But for as much as I love those two games, and I really do, they're likely games with a baked in limit on their appeal. Shooters like a medieval that are really just a string of disconnected levels without any story context may be fine for those of us who love old style shooters but the genre has left that behind and mainstream audiences need a bit more coherence in the design. Dusk managed to break out because it's far closer to a modern shooter with old school elements than the other way around. But it still had something of a limited market because it wasn't particularly innovative or fresh, it was just really really great at what it was trying to do. Ultra Kill is not a retro style shooter. There's almost nothing retro about it in fact, sure it pays tribute to games from a different era in its art style. But mechanically, Ultra Kill isn't just fresh, it is entirely innovative and modern in a way that very few games are. That doesn't mean its influences aren't clear, it's just that those influences are obviously thoroughly modern. Ultra Kill is basically what would happen if Titanfall, Quake 2, Devil May Cry and Doom Eternal had a baby. It has a retro look and a classic level structure, but it's the rare bird that takes several influences and mixes them so artfully and thoughtfully that one comes out the other side is an entirely fresh work of art. And that's what makes it one of the very best shooters I've ever played. It's not looking back, it's looking forward. The perfect counter example to this is Serious Sam 4. SS4 takes a retro gameplay style and simply updates the graphics and adds an appalling amount of cutscenes. Instead of updating the gameplay, it just updates the appearance. Now, SS4 is fine. It's basically another Serious Sam game, but it perfectly shows the difference between retro mechanics and retro graphics. Ultra Kill is not Serious Sam 4, it is not a retro game, it just looks like it is. The Holy Trinity. There are three legs to great shooter design. Enemies, weapons and movement. Now, obviously other things can be important too. Art design and level design make a big difference. And if you're making a different kind of shooter, progression, story, set pieces and characters matter. But when it comes to the mechanic of making a shooter feel great to play, it's enemies, weapons and movement. Ultra Kill doesn't just succeed at these three pillars, each of those key components is literally perfect. They're all of unparalleled quality. I sincerely doubt the guy who made this realizes how perfect the design of these central FPS tenants is here. As someone who's done a lot of creating, I've come to realize it's eventually impossible to judge what you've made because every little flaw pisses you off so much it starts to taint everything after a while. This is why people who make music never listen to themselves. I don't even own half the shit I've ever recorded or written. Ultra Kill obviously takes some heavy design influences from the new Doom games. In fact the first few hallways of the game seems to be a clever homage to Doom 2016, but where the two new Doom games are masterpieces at slowly ramping up and teaching the player, Ultra Kill throws you in the deep end very quickly. I will take this in the order of awesomeness. Enemies A game like this that relies heavily on mechanical depth and the joy of mastery needs enemies that are individually easy to understand but become difficult based upon their location, spawn, and mixture. There are less than a dozen regular enemies here and all the rank and file types have predictable behavior. The difficulty lies in how these enemies layer their attacks together and the need to quickly prioritize dangerous enemies first while leaving enough fodder for health regeneration. Oh, one of the most important and well-implemented systems in the game is that Ultra Kill uses a kind of glory kill system to regenerate health, but instead of using an animation, you simply heal by allowing the blood of enemies to spill on you. As the game says, blood is fuel. This simple addition means that you can't play all at one range or use only one weapon. It is a constant dance between you and the enemies as you circle the arenas taking out priority targets and occasionally switching to weaker enemies you've left alive for the purpose of killing them up close and bathing in the gore. And it produces intense moments when you're forced to get close in to very dangerous enemies to heal up. Ultra Kill has enough enemy types that things never get boring and all of them fill very specific roles. There's no hit scan bullshit or cover peeking in Ultra Kill. The game seems like it's about halfway done, but it almost certainly doesn't need any more enemies. Every role is already filled and basically every enemy from Doom has an analog here as well as several that are totally unique. You've got your flying turret, your charging melee fodder, dangerous flame throwing enemies and then a variety of heavies that all have huge damage, but slow attacks that need to be dodged. In addition to the regular campaign, Ultra Kill includes an endless wave based mode called the Cyber Grinder and it's here that the enemy variety really shines. Even more than the carefully designed levels, the wave based mode shines a light on how excellent this game is at training the player to quickly identify and react to enemies. By wave 20, the game is throwing dozens of regular enemies and multiple bosses at once and the game of movement and target priority puts the player into like a trance-like state. No enemy feels like bullshit and that is a tremendous accomplishment man. Pew pew. A great shooter needs weapons that feel great to use. There's obviously some secret special sauce that makes guns feel good in games because certain games have it and others do not. Ultra Kill has it. It's some alchemy mixture of variety, utility, animation and sound design. If any one of those things is lacking, you feel it and this is often the biggest issue with these retro style shooters. There's not a huge variety of guns here, but everyone is useful. This game is apparently made by a single developer so one would expect mediocre animations and sound design as well as standard weapon design so that more attention could be put onto the other things but that is not the case. Instead the weapons on offer are unique, well animated, they sound great and as in all great shooters they fill a very specific role in the combat puzzle. Just listen to the sound and watch these animations man, I mean. In most shooters you only really use the starting pistol until you unlock something better, but in Ultra Kill, much like in Doom Eternal, you need to use every weapon. I really love that the combat kind of defaults to using the revolver as your main weapon and switching to others for particular enemies or situations. Now there's nothing innovative about a revolver, shotgun, minigun and BFG, but what is innovative here is the alt fire modes on these weapons. The revolver variants are a ridiculously powerful charge shot or, and this is genius man, flipping a coin in the air that you then shoot so it splits in half and crits the two nearest enemies. For the shotgun you've got a grenade launcher or an overcharge that rants up the damage and eventually acts as a rocket jump. And then there's the nail gun that either lets you put a magnet into a target so you don't really have to aim or a burst mode for healing. These alt fire modes sound amazing, they are fresh and unique and they fit so damn well into the combat design that each is totally necessary. The weapons in Ultra Kill are a perfect example of thoughtful, careful design. Everything is perfectly implemented to fit a specific role. It all looks great, it's animated great, it sounds great, it is one of the most satisfying FPS arsenals I have ever used in a game. The lack of great movement systems is one of my primary complaints with modern shooters. If you're making Metro or a game where stealth and tactics matter then certainly a slow movement speed is appropriate. But other than Doom, Destiny and Titanfall, FPS designers seem to have totally forgotten that movement is actually a game mechanic. With nearly perfectly designed enemies, levels and weapons, Ultra Kill would already be a great shooter. But it's the third leg of the design that elevates it to one of the best shooters ever. Ultra Kill is fast, like ridiculously fast. The game has the deepest and smoothest movement system I've ever used in a game, and I mean of any genre. I have never encountered a better movement system in any game I have ever played. I've been saying all year that Doom Eternal is the best shooter ever mainly because the movement system is so great. The addition of the dash completely changed the combat, making defense an active skill beyond just circle strafing. Ultra Kill takes the base Doom Eternal movement system and ramps up the complexity. There's a slide, a ground pound that you can then chain into another jump, a jump that lets you get tremendous height and then jump three more times off of walls. There are three dashes on a refilling stamina cooldown, so stamina management is now involved. Chaining these skills together isn't just difficult, it's the entire game. The first time through, a player who's played FPS games can expect to beat it relatively easily, aside from a few boss fights that will require restarts. But to get S and perfect ratings, a player needs to totally master this movement system until they all work together, especially on the violent mode. Once you get comfortable with this system, you will almost never touch the ground. And the need to master this movement system is where the Devil May Cry influence is pure genius as a feedback loop system. The game smartly uses a scoring system to give instant and constant feedback to the player. If it didn't have that scoring system, you would just make your way through killing enemies, beat the levels and think, yeah that was a great game. But once you have a constant stream of reinforcement on the screen, players like me will keep going until they can never stop moving. Your multiplayer starts going down when you're still or get hit and it rises when you're moving in the air or sliding. This game movement system and scoring system drives a player until they're getting so good it looks almost impossible. And it's so intense that it literally hurts my wrist to play sometimes. Every single encounter is a stylish contest between the player, the enemies, the combo score and that movement system. This interplay becomes more and more critical as you progress. If you play the great endless wave mode, you simply cannot survive more than a few waves without fully committing to this game's movement. Finally, and I do not say this lightly, these are the best boss fights I've ever seen in an FPS game. My one complaint with Eternal was that the boss fights were good but not great and focused more on ad control than on the bosses themselves. Ultra kills bosses require you to learn the fights and execute. The current final boss Gabriel is designed in such a way that dash spamming will kill you and healing requires carefully learning the boss's moveset so that you do not approach at the wrong moment. It's that kind of careful design that shows how intelligently this thing is put together. Gabriel has several attack chains that require you to dodge, wait, dodge, wait and dodge again. If you dodge three times in a row, you will get hit and killed every time. If you try to heal off him before he finishes a combo, you will be killed. Every single boss combines the frenetic improv that makes the game's movement system a thing of beauty with a careful pattern recognition that makes all great boss fights memorable. Wrapping up. I don't want to spend too much time in this yet because the game isn't done. It appears to be a little more than halfway finished and there's no roadmap to give any indication on how long we can expect to wait for more. It's apparently, again, one single person developing so I assume it'll be a little while. But what's already here is easily amongst my very favorite games of the year. I have put in over 50 hours because I can't stop playing it. First I beat it on normal, then I beat it on violent, then I went back and got all A's, then I went back and got all S's and now I'm just about finishing up getting all Ps on every difficulty level. I never do this in games. That's how great it is. And I have spent a ton of time in the endless mode getting as far as wave 23 when things start getting truly insane. And the most amazing thing is that I still feel like I'm dying because I'm making mistakes, not because the game is unfair. And even better is that I feel like I'm getting a little bit better every time. In its current state only normal and the equivalent of ultra violence are implemented, but I think these two difficulties are fine for most shooter players. A person who doesn't play many FPS games might have some trouble as they adjust, but if you have any experience with shooters, the difficulty options here are fine. It's already got over a dozen levels. I believe it has about eight different boss fights and the endless mode on its own is worth buying. This game deserves to be on everyone's mind. It deserves a tremendous marketing push and coverage from all the mainstream sites and YouTubers because even if nothing else was added, it would be one of the finest shooters ever designed. I read on the games itch.io page that multiplayer is unlikely because it would be too much work. And while I totally get that, this game is so damn great that a multiplayer mode with the same weapons and movement would be an utterly unique game that would be one of the very best multiplayer shooters around. And it would be a tremendous hit, at least until a new Titanfall game is released. Ultra Kill is a work of art. Its design is careful and thoughtful and it's basically a tour de force. It is very, very rare for something to feel so coherent. It is incredibly rare for something to feel so polished. This kind of careful design deserves to be praised loudly. All right, if you like FPS games, I highly recommend you buy Ultra Kill and then tell all of your friends and then tell them to tell all of their friends. It is not just a great indie game. It is one of the best games I've played in years. It is that good. All right, saves coming a dishonored and how games should encourage players to engage with stealth systems is up next. Thanks for coming. I'll see you next time. Bye.