ULTRAKILL is the FPS that you imagined your cool older brother was playing in the 90’s. It bleeds personality, bringing a refreshing meanness to the boomer shooter revival. The game laughs at you when you die. It will give you a D-rank when you win. Not since Crash Bandicoot has a game been this much of a dick to you post-level. But it does all this out of love for the FPS. It has teenage meanness that suffused in early Id games, not out of sadism, but of playful mockery. It expects you to dish it back.
Each new layer expands the technically Early Access ULTRAKILL as the levels get meatier and meaner. Layer 7, the newest level pack, has levels that reach beyond 30 minutes for a player of my (limited) skill. 7-1 is coloured in a blistering white, where the player explores an angelic church. The church is not spotless for long, as the blood splatter from your fights organically paints the level red. Blood-as-paint is a theme continued in 7-3, where the player must feed trees with blood in order for them to bloom. Red petals fall from the full trees and stars dot the night sky, showing ULTRAKILL’s surprising and quiet beauty.
The other two levels in Layer 7 focus on war. 7-2 is a war zone reminiscent of the Blitz on London. Night sirens blare and searchlights blind the sky as bombs fall from heaven, collapsing a Big Ben style clock tower. The best ULTRAKILL levels feel texturally similar to metal music. Great levels look like Iron Maiden album covers, this being no exception. In 7-4, the climax, the player fights against an titanic EARTHMOVER. It’s one of my favourite flavours of boss fights: where the boss itself is a level, seemingly uncaring about your ascension until you kill it from the top. Like Mario Galaxy’s Megaleg or Shadow of the Colossus’ final Colossus. ULTRAKILL continues to take inspiration from many fields in order to synthesise a fully amazing FPS.
I’m not good enough at the game to be an authority on the gunplay. What I can attest to is the sight and sound of ULTRAKILL. For me, the aesthetic peak of ULTRAKILL is when the noise of battle is too much for the engine to handle, usually when firing the automatic rail gun. The audio cuts out, as if your speakers are clipping, only the gun’s firing bap-bap-bap is audible. Brian Enospoke to the newness created in the failure of the old:
Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit —all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure.
Clipped audio is a failure of audio, but what could make a player feel more powerful than by their own gun breaking the game? No AAA animation can match the euphoric feeling of player induced breakage. ULTRAKILL bathes us in the failure of blood.