ULTRAKILL

There’s a certain purity to the shooters of the 1990s—an unapologetic focus on speed, aggression, and raw mechanical skill. For years, that design ethos felt like a relic, a fossil preserved in the amber of nostalgia. Then came ULTRAKILL. Developed by Arsi “Hakita” Patala and published by New Blood Interactive, this title radically reinterprets the shooters it loves. It asks a simple, brilliant question: what if DOOM had the combo meter and stylistic swagger of Devil May Cry? The result is an explosive, blood-fueled ballet that feels like a jolt of lightning to the genre.

The premise is elegantly simple, almost an afterthought to the carnage. Mankind is extinct. Earth is populated by machines running on blood. When the surface runs dry, the machines descend into Hell itself to find more fuel. This narrative framework is all the justification needed to throw the player, a machine named V1, into a relentless gauntlet of demons and corrupted automatons. ULTRAKILL’s market positioning is fascinating; it sidesteps the sprawling, narrative-heavy campaigns of modern AAA shooters and the battle royale trend entirely. Instead, it carves out a niche for itself as a pure, arcade-style experience. It targets a specific, almost underserved audience: the player who craves mastery, who sees a high skill ceiling not as a barrier, but as the entire point of the game. It doesn’t hold your hand; it throws you into the abyss and trusts that you’ll learn to fly on the way down.

• Blood is Fuel: The central health mechanic is a stroke of genius. Health doesn’t regenerate over time or come from medkits. Instead, players must actively shower in the blood of freshly gibbed enemies. This forces a relentlessly aggressive, close-quarters playstyle that is the absolute antithesis of modern cover-based shooters.
• Style-Based Scoring: Every action—from headshots to mid-air ricochets—is graded. Killing with flair builds a combo meter that rewards points, which are then used for weapon upgrades. This system transforms combat from a simple act of survival into a performance, encouraging creativity, precision, and risk-taking.
• Extreme Mobility: The player is equipped with a suite of movement abilities—dashing, wall-jumping, sliding—that make the environment a playground. The sheer speed and aerial agility serve as a core defensive and offensive tool, essential for dodging projectiles and setting up stylish kills.

ULTRAKILL is not a game you simply play; it’s a discipline you practice. Its interlocking systems create a gameplay loop so tight, so ferociously compelling, that it borders on hypnotic. The core design pillars—health-as-aggression, style-based scoring, and extreme mobility—feed into one another in a brilliant, self-reinforcing cycle. To survive, you must get close to your enemies to heal from their blood. To get close without being obliterated, you must master the high-speed movement system. To thrive, you must do all of this with precision and creativity to rack up style points for upgrades. It’s a design that relentlessly pushes the player forward, punishing passivity and rewarding bold, decisive action.

The Blood-Soaked Dance

The moment-to-moment gameplay is a frantic dance of death. An encounter isn’t a static firefight; it’s a three-dimensional ballet of bullets and bodies. Players might slide under a projectile, launch into the air, switch to the revolver, ricochet a coin-shot off a wall to kill a sniper, and land in a shower of blood, ready for the next target. This flow is the game’s greatest achievement. The design pairs responsive controls with immediate feedback, so the barrier between player intention and on-screen action dissolves completely. The game demands a high degree of mechanical skill, but in that “flow state,” it feels less like a challenge and more like an extension of the player’s own will. This is a game that respects the player’s intelligence, providing a deep, complex set of tools and trusting them to discover the emergent strategies that arise from their combination.

An Arsenal of Brutality

The weapon design mirrors this philosophy of depth and creativity. The arsenal starts with familiar archetypes—a revolver, a shotgun, a nailgun—but each comes with multiple variations that fundamentally alter their function. The standard revolver can be flipped to fire a single, high-damage piercing shot. The shotgun can be overcharged to create a projectile-destroying explosion. The real magic happens when these tools are combined. A shotgun blast can be punched mid-air with the feedbacker arm to create a high-speed, explosive flak-shot. A group of nails can be launched and then magnetized to a single target for devastating focused damage. The game never explicitly tells players to do these things; the joy is in the discovery, in the “what if?” moments that lead to a new, brutally effective technique.

Aesthetically, ULTRAKILL embraces a “retro FPS” look reminiscent of the original PlayStation or Quake era. Textures are low-fidelity, and models are chunky and polygonal. But this is no lazy nostalgia play. This is a deliberate, functional art style. In a game that moves this fast, with this many projectiles and enemies on screen, visual clarity is paramount. The minimalist aesthetic ensures that enemy silhouettes are instantly recognizable, and incoming attacks are clearly telegraphed. A 2D-sprite-and-low-poly game of this scope is also light on hardware, a choice that is absolutely correct for the experience it delivers: it prioritizes performance and readability over graphical fidelity.

On Steam, ULTRAKILL makes the case for the enduring superiority of mouse and keyboard for high-speed first-person shooters. The level of precision required for a flick-shot with the revolver or to track a fast-moving enemy while airborne is simply not feasible on a controller. The game’s entire design—its emphasis on skill-shots, rapid weapon switching, and 360-degree spatial awareness—is built around the raw speed and accuracy that only a mouse can provide. This is a PC-ass PC game, and it is all the better for it.

ULTRAKILL is a monumental achievement in independent game development. It is a stunningly confident and fiercely focused game that knows exactly what it wants to be and executes on that vision with near-perfect precision. It strips the modern shooter of its bloated cutscenes, its hand-holding tutorials, and its obsession with cinematic realism, boiling the genre down to its exhilarating essence: movement, mayhem, and mastery. It is a demanding, sometimes punishing experience, but for those willing to meet it on its own terms, ULTRAKILL offers one of the most rewarding, electrifying, and utterly unforgettable experiences in gaming today. We rate it Outstanding. It’s a retro revival that reinvents the form.