I want to take a bite out of this game like its a giant cartoon haunch of meat.

The presentation is amazing, it looks good, it feels good, it plays good. Visually, it has a pleasing palette, and a great artstyle, while keeping everything readable. The areas have a continuity and clear progression to them that I like a lot, and I think it’s really neat that you get to return to the area shown in the main menu and opening cutscene.

Levels are pretty long, but you can save and come back at any point without issue. There's a mix between more open areas and tighter corridors, and sometimes multiple routes you can take. Exploration is rewarding, there's plenty of secrets, and you'll never be short on ammo as long as you don't rush through everything. When going at my own pace and trying to be mostly thorough I found about half of the secrets.

You can approach combat in a more methodical way, or much faster if you know what you're doing. Either way, you can't play like an idiot and expect to get away with it for long. Situational awareness is vital. Take stock of your enemies, use what’s available to you, and aim for the head. Headshots in this game are some of the meatiest, most gratifying ones out there. It's got some fun movement tech as well, but I think it’s better to get the hang of things first before looking that up.

The weapons are all really fun and satisfying to use. They're upgradeable, and you'll find the weapon parts necessary in the normal environment and secrets. None of them become obsolete later on, your pistol will be as reliable a tool as everything else, no need for it to waste inventory space like some other games. The hatchet is one of my favorite melee options in an fps, not only because it can be thrown (and you can hold 10 at a time), but because you can use it to headshot close enemies if you charge a strike and aim just a bit up. This is a beautiful thing and I’m angry that more games don’t do things like this. I'm a hatchet fan until the day I die.

Sometimes the enemy AI can be a bit dumb, especially around doors. Also, molotovs can feel like they can end fights too easily, but they do come with the very real risk of setting your own self on fire if you aren't careful and/or you’re in a tight space, so I wouldn’t call it a free win by any means.

The threat from the two bossfights mainly comes from normal enemies spawning in the arena, while you try to manage both them and the bosses themselves. I don't think they're done poorly, but mechanics wise they don't stand out much from the rest of the fps genre. They do have good buildup leading from the preceding levels, and nice presentation.

None of the negatives are significant enough to really hamper my experience, and the positives come together in a way that makes this an incredibly solid game. One of the best of the recent retro fps revival, in my opinion. There's a demo to try if you're on the fence, it's what pushed me over the edge to buy it. I got about 3 ½ hours on my first playthrough, and 14 after spending time in the endless mode and achievement hunting. Considering the quality of the game, I think it's well worth the price.

Ultrakill is inspired by plenty of good games, and successfully both builds on the past and brings new things to the table in a great way. Like the store description says, Quake, Doom, and DMC are a good place to start if you’re familiar with those games. But I don’t like to linger on comparisons because they can sometimes just end up being reductive.

Freedom of movement is integral to Ultrakill’s combat. You start off with a reasonably fast walkspeed, but you’re given plenty of ways to maintain constant, high-speed motion. Sliding, slide jumping, slide dashing, wall jumping, slam bouncing, there’s a lot of options. It has such a degree of verticality that I don’t often see in other shooters, you get to approach and evade enemies from essentially every angle, and the level design accommodates this well.

The arsenal is appropriately sized, and there’s no useless weapon. Everything fulfills it’s own niche, and is introduced at a good pace. Variants can be unlocked in whatever order the player wants, though not too quickly as to be overwhelming. Everyone talks about the weapon interactions so much because it’s something really special and exciting. It feels good to pull off a railcoin, or discover projectile-boosting for the first time. Not a lot of other games can say they offer this level of depth with five guns. The enemies are varied, and there’s not a lot of “wrong” ways to kill them. Not to mention, Ultrakill is a rare FPS with good bosses. They’re more than just glorified bullet sponges, and their movesets pose a genuine threat that keeps the player on the run.

The level design is top-tier too, and it’s a shame I see it left out of a lot of people’s reviews. I love all the extremely red, fire and brimstone type hells as much as the next guy, but sometimes it all starts to blend together and get tiresome. Ultrakill’s levels are refreshing, unique, and memorable. They’re clearly in line with what’s described in Inferno, but it never limits itself on what hell “should” look like. I can, at a glance, identify every layer. I can even do the same for majority of the levels individually, it’s not just 2 or 4 straight levels of the exact same shit back to back. Prelude’s levels can kind of visually blend together though, because they were the earliest ones made, and there are 5 of them. The trailers and screenshots on the store seem to deliberately exclude a lot of glamour shots from the full game, and don’t include most of the layers at all, for good reason. It’s a far better experience going in blind here. Looks-wise, I know some people just aren’t about this style of graphics, and that’s fine. But I’ve always rejected the idea that extremely high-fidelity graphics have anything to do with good art direction.

Related is the music, which I’m safely putting in my unsorted top 10 game OSTs ever until the end of time. There are no misses. I said that every layer is visually distinct - and I also think that’s also true audially. Limbo’s music is completely distinct from Heresy’s, which is distinct from Wrath’s, which is distinct from Prelude’s, and so on. Yet no song ever feels like it belongs to a different game - everything is uniquely Ultrakill. On it’s own the music is amazing, but combined with the adrenaline and joy of playing, it’s elevated to a godlike feeling. 6-1, Jesus fuck. Hakita is clearly a skilled composer, and so are his guest artists.

Storywise, it would be stupid for a game this action focused to force the player onto rails to pay attention to its lore. So it doesn’t. If you want lore, you can choose to pay attention to your surroundings and read text entries from terminals and sparsely placed books. There are a few voiced characters, and what they say gives more meaning and context to the world. But you don’t need to comb through every piece of information to understand the larger story. The very beginning of the game has the 3 most important sentences you need to know. The most this game does is a short text-based cutscene at the end of each act, to serve as an intermission and give the player a break. So far, there’s good characterization, interesting worldbuilding, and compelling themes that approach real-world parallels with maturity and nuance. The voice actors have also done such amazing performances, and they clearly enjoyed their time on the game.

And this is kind of an aside, but when people make claims or jokes about how gay a piece of media or art is, I always assume it’s playful exaggeration. I went into Act II assuming it would be kind of gay. I was a fool. This is potentially the gayest game I own. I was shocked into silence by how homosexual this shit is. So, if you are gay, you should buy this game.

I have a minor nitpick, so I’ll talk about it briefly. I think there can be a lack of explanation for some things, moreso tech. Much of the problem of people missing out on basic mechanics is because gamers are illiterate and don’t read the terminals, and that’s their problem, not mine. But a little bit more information on intermediate-advanced play could be beneficial in the future, for people who don’t think to seek out community resources but do actually read. There’s obviously higher priorities than this, though.

Overall the most important thing to keep in mind is that it’s still in early access. Things will be changed. It’s important to try to give constructive feedback without losing it because the dev decided that in practice a feature wasn’t working the way he wanted. In this age developers are much more able to take players’ ideas into consideration, but some people seem to think that means they know what’s best for the game, when they really don’t. Early access also involves experiencing the game in a way that’s different than at release. If played straight through with no waiting periods between updates, there’s no time to get really good and learn every obscure, hard to pull off tech before the next act drops. Some people prefer an uninterrupted experience, but I like playing during the development cycle.

Try it out. There’s a demo for a reason. If you’re worried about not being good enough, there are plenty of difficulty and accessibility options. There’s a handful of people who will try to shame you for playing a certain way or coerce you into playing different, but they’re dumb. We like to talk up the crazy shit but it’s not necessary for fun. Likewise, secret levels and Prime Sanctums are for people who go out of their way to play them. Prime Sanctums in particular are for the utterly deranged, and you don’t have to play or beat them to enjoy the game or be a real fan. You also don’t have to get a good ranking either.

I’ll update this once the full game releases and I have time to write.