Absolutely one of the best FPS available right now. My personal favorite.

Taking influences from legendary games like DMC and Quake is a big deal and I thought that there is absolutely no way that someone can deliver that as a solo dev.

The game somehow manages to do that very competently. Quake influences are very obvious with a really amazing and skill expressive movement system that lets you build up insane amounts of speed and gives you even more freedom than Quake to zoom around the map, and a really smart take on the ID arsenal that I think gets overlooked when talking about this game. For example the classic way a railgun type weapon is handled in ID games is giving it a smallish cooldown while making it pretty strong. ULTRAKILL amps it to 11 and gives it about 10 (?) seconds of downtime and makes it BLAST. Every weapon is some sort of a variation of an ID arsenal counterpart, but amped to a crazy degree to allow for more skill and creativity expression and prompt actual gameplay choices on how to tackle every situation.

This kind of leaks into the even harder thing to do when wanting to deliver on DMC x Quake promise. Emulate DMC. I don't see this talked about at all and imo it's a much bigger task than emulating Quake. The whole essence of DMC is being able to be creative once you have mastery of the game and take challenges in a stylish manner. Unlike Doom and Quake which are very much about efficiency, DMC is much more about playing with your food and through a great amount of possibilities finding stylish and cool ways of dealing with an overwhelming amount of enemies. One really good DMC player will play it completely differently than another. It's kind of like playing an instrument because of the sheer depth of the game.

The dev obviously understood this and has added a bunch of really cool interactions with every single weapon and removed as many of the assumed game design rules as possible in order to give the player a feeling of freedom and power, letting skilled players do stuff like no damage runs by punching the hardest enemy in the game to death and a newbie die 50 times to the final boss of ACT I. It's such a delicate balance to hit and Hakita did it the best I've ever seen outside of DMC. I kind of had to go on a rant because when DMC influences are talked about for ULTRAKILL, most people don't go beyond the style meter, which is a cool addition, but not what makes ULTRAKILL an amazing DMC inspired game.

To elaborate a bit more with an example - ID games usually assume a cooldown timer which doesn't let you switch weapons until it's 'recovery frames' are over. DMC gives you creative ways to go around that and do combos that are as fast your fingers are by employing different animation cancels. ULTRAKILL does the same, weapons have some sort of internal cooldowns, but you can bypass them if you have good mechanics and switch as soon as you shoot and know properties of each weapon and the variation, which lets you think of your own different combos for every single situation. Mix that with a cuh-ray-zee movement system, insane amount of inter-weapon interactions and the game gives a skilled player enough choice not to look like other players while playing while also encouraging the player constantly to get better.

As someone who has played Quake for thousands of hours and DMC 3 and 4 for 13 years, all I have to say is - Thank you for an amazing game Hakita!

And I've made a video review too, with different talking points :)

https://youtu.be/jdNk0-gGknA


TL;DR - PLAY ULTRAKILL

Absolutely one of the best FPS available right now. My personal favorite. Taking influences from legendary games like DMC and Quake is a big deal and I thought that there is absolutely no way that someone can deliver that as a solo dev. The game somehow manages to do that very competently. Quake influences are very obvious with a really amazing and skill expressive movement system that lets you build up insane amounts of speed and gives you even more freedom than Quake to zoom around the map, and a really smart take on the ID arsenal that I think gets overlooked when talking about this game. For example the classic way a railgun type weapon is handled in ID games is giving it a smallish cooldown while making it pretty strong. ULTRAKILL amps it to 11 and gives it about 10 (?) seconds of downtime and makes it BLAST. Every weapon is some sort of a variation of an ID arsenal counterpart, but amped to a crazy degree to allow for more skill and creativity expression and prompt actual gameplay choices on how to tackle every situation. This kind of leaks into the even harder thing to do when wanting to deliver on DMC x Quake promise. Emulate DMC. I don't see this talked about at all and imo it's a much bigger task than emulating Quake. The whole essence of DMC is being able to be creative once you have mastery of the game and take challenges in a stylish manner. Unlike Doom and Quake which are very much about efficiency, DMC is much more about playing with your food and through a great amount of possibilities finding stylish and cool ways of dealing with an overwhelming amount of enemies. One really good DMC player will play it completely differently than another. It's kind of like playing an instrument because of the sheer depth of the game. The dev obviously understood this and has added a bunch of really cool interactions with every single weapon and removed as many of the assumed game design rules as possible in order to give the player a feeling of freedom and power, letting skilled players do stuff like no damage runs by punching the hardest enemy in the game to death and a newbie die 50 times to the final boss of ACT I. It's such a delicate balance to hit and Hakita did it the best I've ever seen outside of DMC. I kind of had to go on a rant because when DMC influences are talked about for ULTRAKILL, most people don't go beyond the style meter, which is a cool addition, but not what makes ULTRAKILL an amazing DMC inspired game. To elaborate a bit more with an example - ID games usually assume a cooldown timer which doesn't let you switch weapons until it's 'recovery frames' are over. DMC gives you creative ways to go around that and do combos that are as fast your fingers are by employing different animation cancels. ULTRAKILL does the same, weapons have some sort of internal cooldowns, but you can bypass them if you have good mechanics and switch as soon as you shoot and know properties of each weapon and the variation, which lets you think of your own different combos for every single situation. Mix that with a cuh-ray-zee movement system, insane amount of inter-weapon interactions and the game gives a skilled player enough choice not to look like other players while playing while also encouraging the player constantly to get better. As someone who has played Quake for thousands of hours and DMC 3 and 4 for 13 years, all I have to say is - Thank you for an amazing game Hakita! And I've made a video review too, with different talking points :) https://youtu.be/jdNk0-gGknA [b] TL;DR - PLAY ULTRAKILL [/b]