To me games like DUSK and Ion Maiden feel like attempts to recapture what made the old games they’re based on good, like most retro games. Which makes for good games sometimes, but it’s still just redoing something that exists. ULTRAKILL feels like a game that snuck in from another universe where the realism trend in FPS never existed and they just continued evolving in the mold of Doom. It’s of the same genealogy, but almost unrecognizable. It’s really amazing.
I have to disagree about DUSK. DUSK is taking all the best ideas from all of those old FPS games, refining them with new technology, and creating the platonically ideal boomer shooter
I'm glad that so-called "Boomer Shooters" are back in town. I've always DESPISED modern military shooters. As for the overuse of Hell as a setting, well, when said Hell is directly based on Dante's version of the Inferno, with each circle being different in tone and setting from the last, I think we can cut Ultrakill some slack on that regard.
ULTRAKILL definitely does more with hell as a setting than some other games, that was just a little quip about how these games often turn to the demonic for their fantasy inspiration.
Also, it throws an interesting take. When most protagonists enter the land of heck. They usually do so on someone else's request or to fulfill some duty. But V1 is entirely there for selfish reasons. He only really wants blood.
Something that I think doesn't get talked about enough when talking about Ultrakill's style meter is the fact that it actually tells you what's earning you style points. When I play DMC5, it feels like I'm pretty much just mashing buttons. The style meter doesn't tell me what I'm doing that's stylish. And if I do something that nets me a lot of points, I have no way to know that doing that was good. Meanwhile, if I do something cool in Ultrakill, such as getting a split reflect on 2 different streetcleaner fuel tanks. The game tells me "Hey, that thing you just did was sick as fuck. you should do it more often". This further reinforces the drive to do all those stylish maneuvers, which is great, because those maneuvers are often your best source of damage in the game.
Well dmcs style meter is a lot more simple Vary your attacks and use specials = s rank Specifically use specials that do low damage but net high combos
Also sometimes it explains you "what the hell just happened" - like when you one-shot mindflayer with explosive a moment after she casted homing bolts at you, with a bunch of "friendly fire" lines, hinting that you exploded those bolts into her with that explosive Which in turn might give you more ideas about "friendly fire" on other enemies...
Or the little pause the game does when doing something cool, it’s like those scenes in nime where tereally powerful hitconnects, a flash of light comes up and then the enemy goes flying. Reflecting an enemy projectile, getting the freeze frame and the having even enemies explode is incredibly satisfying, or the chunk-chunk-boom of getting multiple coin splits combined with the scoreboard going apeshit really drives the style home
DMC's style meter isn't hard to learn at all. Its literally based on how well you combo moves together. Every move/combo you land gets a cool down timer after it's done. The meter is meant to encourage you to swap between different weapons/combinations to achieve a higher score. The reason you dont understand the style meter is because you mash buttons
another excellent aspect of the game, outside of its gameplay mechanics and aesthetics, is its writing. like the enemy logs, that grant small, methodical peeks through the curtains of its world in a way that leaves you with a sense of great intrigue. or, the character lines or narration, which consistently invoke some absolutely fucking raw wordsmanship; "If the machines seek blood, he would give it freely; and with such fury, even metal will bleed" that line gave me goosebumps when I first read it.
I do enjoy the writing in the game quite a bit, but perhaps what I like the most about it is how unintrusive it is. Doesn't hit you over the head often, but the logs are great!
@@iamerror I love le logs since, unlike lots of other games, each one of them is rich in lore and the like without being stupidly long or giving you 50 to collect and read all at once. There are a few you can go out of your way to read at the end of secret levels, but for the most part you can just read the enemy description for that boss you just beat to cool down before the next area.
I think what also makes Ultrakill stand out from other boomer shooters is that it takes lots of direct inspo from character action games like DMC, which extends beyond the style meter. I've seen people describe this game as a first person character action game rather than a boomer shooter at times. A good hack n slash has a low skill floor but a high skill ceiling with lots of hidden mechanical depth that rewards players for reaching it. Unlocking the P doors or pulling off a bunch of coin tricks scratches that same itch. To get big damage and style, you need to be familiar with timing and patterns for certain enemies and your attacks fighting game-style, on top of mastering the movement mechanics to pull them off, which Ultrakill does in spades. It's a long time coming for someone to finally merge the two genres, and the game made me realize how similar boomer shooters and character action games are. The campiness, movement, dodging/parrying attacks, weapon switching, enemy/boss types--heck, V2 is the rival who's meant to mirror the protag, and Gabriel straight up has moves from Vergil and Credo. It'd be great if this can help bring together fans of both genres and get them to check out great games they might've missed out by getting a taste of what the other side is like.
V2 isn't a rival, bit welp, this comment was a year ago and if u have played the greed layer, you probably know who the protagonist is and who the rival is by now
I'm surprised I got reccomended this. Prolly from watching so much ultrakill content. Ultrakill has been my favorite game that I've bought this year. I love how simple it is. The whiplash arm that came out with the greed layer made me fall I love with the game even more. So far I've P ranked everything but P-1, and I'm slowly getting to the point of doing it. Personally, I think boomer shooter is a perfect name for older shooters such as wolfenstein, doom, hexen, etc. because they are the grandfathers to the genre. If I'm explaining ultrakill, I'd call it a doom-like, and if I'm explaining dusk I'd call it a quake-like. Also good job making it into the top 1k in cyber grind. I used to be in that club before the reset
Those distinctions make sense. It's hard to exactly place the New Blood Interactive games, but what is certain is that they are amazing. Ultrakill is probably my favorite game I've bought/played this year too (though there are a lot of contenders!).
The beauty of Ultrakill lies in just about every aspect of it. No two levels are alike in either design, soundtrack, or function, so every new level gives you that feeling of wonder for what's in store. The mechanics are made more for the player's enjoyment, and both Hakita and the community realize that. The style meter, the Marksman's coins, the various functions of the arms, all of it blends together to give you something that can only be described by this Steam Review: "Ultrakill is better than sex." And unlike Doom, you aren't forced into the Doom Dance, you're able to experiment, and the game rewards you for finding something new with that boost to your style meter. Also let's be real, a game that lets you throw a coin into the air and bounce a *RAILGUN PROJECTILE* off of it has to be the best thing ever.
Speaking of “you’re able to experiment”, did you know that projectile boosting aka the act of *punching your shotgun rounds to make the hit harder* , which in and of itelf is a concept and a half, was not intally an intended feature? Hakita saw people do that and thoght “fuck it, that’s cool” and mad it a mechanic. The amount of wacky bullshit that exists both as cool exploits and incredibly niche mechanics, such as slide-dash jumping, slam storage, core eject nukes, and *oneshotting the hardest boss in the game with a coin* is so cool and my god is is the idea of like 8 weapos with 4 mods each exciting
“Forced into the doom dance” The doom dance is literally infinite combinations of experimentation and your own personal style expressed through ripping and tearing. Don’t act like you don’t have as much freedom as you do in Ultrakill. I love both games but seriously don’t slander my boy
@@deathvideogame aw yeah that's why I'm incentivized to always get in close and GLORY KILL for them ammos and HP. I LOVE ANIMATION LOCKING IN A MOVEMENT SHOOTER.
I fell in love with this game the very moment I watched Markiplier play it. The graphics are pure gold, I find the music to be beyond amazing, and the mechanics never get old for me! Despite the Hell setting being overused to the moon and back, I still really like it, and ULTRAKILL has the most unique Hell setting that I've ever seen.
In the cyber grind whenever it gets to around round 17 mindflayers start to spawn. And I find it a necessity to do a slam storage into the air to fight the flayers by themselves a mile up from the actual arena so I don't die, which is extremely cool cause you're actually fighting an enemy while in the air and it's often the best strat for them.
I just die to them regardless, teleporting slashy bitches get me every time :( although it is fun to throw a few coins and absolutely demolish one with the hard hitter revolver special, it's just such a chonkin time pause.
I agree! What's I particularly love about it is that initially it seems to be a weakness of the player-character, but once you get the hang of it, it becomes a great strength since you don't have to scrounge for bullets/health, just wisely zoom up to an enemy and pop them with a shotgun blast to the face!
It looks like huge evolutional leap from Doom 2016's glory kills - somewhat clunky first steps, when you look at it after playing ULTRAKILL - now you don't need arbitrary blinking stagger state, you're not locked in the same 3 repeating animations, you're not protected from other enemies while doing it by i-frames, you literally just bathe in blood in real time to get your health back. I love it
@@LeonserGT Also it ties with your style as well, don't forget that. The more damage you take, the more hard damage you obtain, thus temporarily weakening yourself to be a squishier target, but by getting high style rankings, hard damage either goes away really quickly, or gaining that amazing ULTRAKILL, all your hard damage is gone entirely.
To add to the (small) graphics portion of the video, there is actually an in lore reason as to why V1 sees everything as a PS1 game, it's basically the same reason why you see pro eSports players playing on the lowest graphics in their respective games, for faster response times and more FPS and the new sentry enemies you fight in wrath see the game world as photorealistic doom for precision aiming
The first time I heard about ultrakill was when a person would post their P ranks in the gaming channel on a discord server. I then heard versus in an isaac video by real guy who is real. After hearing it I decided to check it out. I told people in another server about my interest and they dm’d me and told me that ultrakill was great. When I got home from vacation I got the game. I didn’t regret it. It’s the definition of adrenaline and one of if not the most intricately designed game period.
Tell me what YOU think of ULTRAKILL and retro shooters down here. Does the fact that ULTRAKILL and DOOM have to be typed in all caps say more about the "boomer shooter" genre than anything I said in the video above?
if i see five users casually type/chat "ultrakill" i think "that sounds like a cool game" but if i see five users type "ULTRAKILL" i think "that sounds like THE game"
I see a lot of people talking about how DUSK and Ultrakill are nostalgic for them, but as someone born in 2004 I don’t have those nostalgic feelings, that being said, retro-shooters kick ass and actually run on my potato of a computer and am completely obsessed with Ultrakill
@@dumbfuk7701 I definitely don't think one needs nostalgia to enjoy these games, because, as you said, they absolutely do kick ass. As someone who studies and makes videos about games though, I like to draw a line from the past until now, which is what I attempted to do in this video. But the past be damned, ULTRAKILL is great on its own! (Though I do recommend that you check out DOOM, it's an amazing game and holds up!)
@@iamerror yeah, making comparisons helps create a picture of how the media has changed and what has stayed the same, also I managed to play a flash emulator of classic doom on my schools computers, it was pretty fun, if a bit clunky
@@iamerror Very true, I think my first shooter was one of the COD games, maybe Black Ops 2, but I've gotten hours of enjoyment out of ULTRAKILL, and I'd maybe even go as far as to call it my favorite of all time
Oh man, I can't believe you've spent so much time on the Cyber Grind without ever playing Devil May Cry. My feelings towards it are the same as the Bloody Palace mode from DMC that inspired it. Fantastic stuff.
doing a combo and seeing that giant spew of words with each one of them making the "ULTRAKILl" rank beat like a heart fills me with a desire to keep doing that just to keep seeing that spew of words like +INTERRUPTION +ULTRARICOSHOT X4 +MAURICED +FRIENDLY FIRE +DISRESPECT +COMBO HEADSHOT X3 +ARSENAL etc frequently appearing on that small, dopamine generator box on the sides
Simply beautiful video essay on a not-so-simply beautiful game. I've been immersed in ULTRAKILL to the point where I've been falling asleep to a loop of the song Take Care. In my dreams I'm dashing and sliding around and using the grappling arm to traverse the environment around me. In other FPS games I've started viewing my distance from the enemy entirely differently than I used to. I haven't had a game impact me this much since the time I got super into Tetris when I was a kid. ULTRAKILL revitalized my love of video games. It has gorgeous slow moments juxtaposed with insane violence at unbelievable speed. It has weapons that all feel new and creative. Everything about this game is made with love and it's obvious from the moment you pick it up. Booting up the game, I heard nothing. The game showed some old pixelated text telling me to adjust audio settings. As I turned up the sound effects and heard the audio buzzing, and as I raised the music to the point where I could hear the melancholy track "The Fire is Gone," I knew this game was going to be something special. ULTRAKILL has never given me a dull moment since then, and it's been my go-to game to play ever since. I put off playing it for WAY too long, and I can't recommend it enough. This is what high-energy video games are meant to be. This, to me, feels like the pinnacle of gaming. *And it's still in early access.* The devs are still working on new weapons, levels, and features. This is one of the best moments to be a gamer since 2006, if only for this revival in engaging and fun games with fun movement mechanics. I haven't had this much fun moving around since Titanfall 2, and before that Team Fortress 2, and before that, good ol' Super Mario 64. ULTRAKILL is truly revolutionary and it makes me not just excited to see what else New Blood has to offer, but also what the future of gaming in general could be. I haven't seen so much potential in a game in years, and it's a breath of fresh air. If you're reading this and you enjoy fast paced shooters but haven't bought the game, you're only hurting yourself. ULTRAKILL is genuinely incredible and you won't be disappointed.
Ultrakill encourages you to think outside the box, and I like that. I can go crazy with the guns and the lazers and the what-have-you's, and the music just adds to the vibe of running in with absolute reckless abandon. Plus, the Cybergrind is *perfect* for practicing combos
Hi i just wanted to say that i am a zoomer (15 years to be exact) and one of my favorite thing about ultrakill is the graphics for a few reasons While i did not grow up with games with this style but it has always been intresting to me And with the better and better graphics have gotten, my computer has struggled with newer games even if they are not as complex as some AAA are, This has made me play older games like mario world or quake and newer games like ultrakill and dusk. Anyways great vid, loved it :]
It's worth noting that the progression from Doom's "largely horizontal" experience and Quake's (and Marathon's and Dark Forces') increasingly vertical experience stems from a very simple hard limit on Doom's game engine. Doom (and its predecessor, Wolfenstein3D) is a 2d game. There's long videos that discuss this technique, but basically the game keeps track of where the player is and where they're facing on a 2D plane, then calculates a series of vertical lines of pixels to display as an illusion of a 3D environment. It's a fascinating trick and it works really well, especially since they can change where the camera appears to be vertically based on where you are on that 2D plane. It does result in a couple of issues, though: most obviously that aiming vertically literally doesn't matter, your crosshair, if the game had one, would be an entire vertical line in the middle of the screen. It also results in things like every map being displayable at once without ever overlapping, and, as far as I can recall, no means of jumping. Marathon, Dark Forces and possibly Quake (it's a bit later than the period I tend to hear discussed at this technical level) all independently worked out ways of managing a fully 3D environment, though at a cost of massively increasing the storage use. Doom's an astonishingly compact game that achieved success largely through digital distribution in the days when 56k internet was a *good* connection, Dark Forces came on a CD. Also, this is the first time I've ever heard Boomer Shooter. I've heard retro shooter, action shooter, etc. And honestly given its rather...nonexistent... connection to the platonic ideal of a boomer as conceived by those who use that term, I'd argue that perhaps the term Boomer here refers more to what these games sound like. A constant stream of booms as projectiles and often enemies explode all around you.
Honestly Ultrakill is akin to Crosscode in that it doesn't try to replicate the past, but rather the idea of what made the past so great with the lens of what has been learned in game design since then, in turn EVOLVING the genre in new ways by stylishly blending old and new, and you've captured that aspect perfectly. and while i know i'll never be the best at Ultrakill, it'll be a satisfying as hell ride to the finish.
Many games these days are a product to be sold to the masses, a far cry from the older days when games were made by groups of enthusiasts for other enthusiasts. Ultrakill has clearly been made with the spirit of older games, where appealing to as many people as possible wasn't the goal. Rather, it appeals as much as possible to the select few who enjoy what it has to offer. Outside of even being a game, it's easy to tell that it's a labour of love.
Amazing vid, subbed. This comment is out of left field, but one of my favorite ultrakill mechanics is the fact that when you slide during a dash, you get to keep i-frames during the whole slide. So what you can do is overcharge your explosive shotgun (the second one) and blow enemies on top of you while sliding, and you don't take any damage. It's so satisfying to pull off. One thing that makes it obvious how much Hakita respects his influences (DMC and Quake) is that while he took all of the amazing things from old shooters and iterated on them (updated the ID arsenal around making it the most satisfying to use possible rather than balanced, took movement ideas and gave you even more control and freedom to emphasize what a killing machine you are, added massive secret sections for players who are deep into the game etc) to make them truly modern and groundbreaking, he also took the essence of Devil May Cry and imbued it into the genre that was not built for it. Games like Doom are built to get into that 'flow' state of mind through your mind working incredibly fast to be as efficient as possible, by using the right tool in the right situation you are a killing machine and untouchable. In many situations in doom eternal there's 2-3 truly optimal actions that you can take, and it makes the game feel focused and amazing at what it does. But what DMC is all about is having a variety of equally useful strong tools at any time and letting the players express themselves through the actions they are going to take. If you look at the game like DMC 4, the game with no sequel for 10 years, you could find a decently sized community that still posted combo videos showing off their playstyle and how they style on enemies using the games' endless mechanics. DMC is as much about self-expression as it is about mechanical skill. Hakita managed to mix those two so amazingly well. At any point in the game , let's say during cybergrind, you have like 10 different things you can do in order to stand out and truly make your own playstyle. Do you want to blow up the group by coining the back of a flamethrower guy? You can. Do you want to blow up the group by charging up the explosive shotty, hooking to a big enemy and iframing the explosion? You can. Do you want to lob a granade and explode it with the explosion laser? You can. Do you want to slide so that you line up the most of the group with a laser and hit some enemies far away as well? You can. What makes ultrakill special for me is that it's not only an amazing iteration on Quake and it's mechanics and movement, but the fact that the game captures the essence of DMC unlike any other game except DMC. Coincidentally throughout my childhood DMC and Quake were my favorite games, when I saw someone making a game and jokingly advertising it as 'devil may quake' i was so ready to hate on it, but the madman has pulled off what I thought was impossible and managed to fully pay proper respect and iterate on two of the most mechanically complex games out there.
@@iamerror Heck yeah that's what it felt like :) But on a serious note it just makes me really happy that a much wired audience gets to experience that flow that you get from DMC's freeflow combat, even though it's in another game, and no better audience to share that with than people who enjoy old school shooters!
Ultrakill even has some good and (sometimes complicated mechanics). Parrying can be enough for some people, but parrying your own shotgun shots ? And shooting a core eject grenade to make it explode mid air, the explosion from shooting a core eject grenade with the malicious railcannon, slam storage, damn. It's like discovering jump cancelling in DMC3 again.
@@lonelyshpee7873 yup It happened because projectiles of enemies can be deflected, and the shotguns projectiles behave in the exact same way and are slow enough to parry THUS projectile boosting was born from an oversight
Very good video! Aside from all the good game design analysis, I liked your little preamble at the start about over generalizing groups and disenfranchising opinions based on perceived undesirable aspects. I wasn't expecting that when I clicked on this video yet found it insightfully articulate. Keep up the good work boss :)
Honestly, I think ultrakill is one of my favorite games. PERIOD. It has so much to explore and learn. so many different quirks and tid bits that, if we didnt have the internet, no one would know of them. For example, if you shoot your shotgun and punch with the blue arm straight away, you get to make the bullets explode. I will never forget the first time i experiecened V2.
I must have some genetically transmitted nostalgia or something, I love boomer shooters, 3d platformers, novels, and mob movies. None of these are too high up in "modern entertainment" rn lol
I definitely think you can enjoy these things without having nostalgia for them, remember, there is a reason people are nostalgic for them (i.e. they good)
@@iamerror Definitely, they can be extremely good at times, and you don't need to have nostalgia to enjoy tf out of Super Mario Odyssey and Ultrakill. I just thought it was strange that nobody in my personal environment barely recognize their existence (yes, seriously). Anyway, I think it's proof that games and their genres CAN be timeless, when they're not going for what I'd call "blind modernism". Went on for unnecessarily long lol, have a nice day
ive dumped 230 hours into this game and am still not bored with just the sheer amount of things you can do i cannot wait for the rest of the weapon variants, the last alternate weapon in the last act, and the last fist so many more things to see what interacts with what
Also worth mentioning is how your parry possibilities are always a lot more varied than you may think when looking at all enemies you find. Remember that big straight punch from the Minos Colossus? Y E S. The map's challenge is literally Parrying a punch. V2's attacks that flash yellow? Y E S. Swordmachine's Triple Slash? Y E S. If the attack doesn't flash blue, you can probably parry it. And that is L I T. Not only are you insanely powerful fighting with just your guns at point blank range, the game rewards Bold Attitude against the enemies - Especially with parrying. There's even a +DISRESPECT bonus to your Style Rank!
The term "boomer shooter" comes from the fact that people would talk about these old FPS games with that sort of "back in my day" tone on /v/ for a while
Votre âme est un paysage choisi Que vont charmant masques et bergamasques Jouant du luth et dansant et quasi Tristes sous leurs déguisements fantasques. Tout en chantant sur le mode mineur L'amour vainqueur et la vie opportune, Ils n'ont pas l'air de croire à leur bonheur Et leur chanson se mêle au clair de lune, Au calme clair de lune triste et beau, Qui fait rêver les oiseaux dans les arbres Et sangloter d'extase les jets d'eau, Les grands jets d'eau sveltes parmi les marbres.
I love how when you do something extremely explosive like a full charge grenade from the shotgun or hit the coin and it ricochets into a weak spot that triggers a chain reaction, the game freezes for a moment as if the game actually has to process how sick your moves are.
It's an intentional effect, even if its a extremely short freeze, it lets the player process the absolute carnage they caused with that move. It definitely makes the player feel like death itself.
It took me more than 100 tries to beat V2 the first time around, But oh boy was I relieved when I killed that motherfucker and even more suprised when he cracks his knuckles at the end of the game for round 2.
Heres a trick that I used for killing him. You just switch to weapons all the time and do the most damage possible to him while also spamming the blue arm
15:54 yea the game takes a very large chunk of inspiration from devil may cry, hell it even has a secret encounter based off a boss in devil may cry, it even has a opposite color rival battle, 2 infact, aka the v2 rival battles, but unlike vergil and dante YOUR blue your rival is red.
DUSK is sort of like the platonically ideal boomer shooter. Takes all the best ideas from everything up through Half Life, puts them in one game, and refines them with more modern technology. Ultrakill is an evolution pulling from unconventional inspirations for a whole new sort of experience
sure, v2 as a metaphor for one's longing for the past and the growth they've experienced since then is pretty cool, but honestly I just like funny shoot gun at red robot better lmao
I played Doom 2016 sometime at the end of 2019, and it was good enough so I would preorder Doom 2020. It then procede to blow it predicessor out of the water, improving on already good gameplay, and fixing that which didn't work. Now I feel like Ultrakill is doing the same for Doom 2020. It may lack variaty in weapons or enemies, but considering that we have only half of the game right now that's expected. It clearly does boss fights better, healing from blood doesn't interupt gameplay the same way glorykills do, despite achieving the same goal, and it forces played to weaponswap through gameplay, rather the artificial lack of recourses. Maybe it's not The Best shooter right now, for me it's still Doom 2020, but it's going in the right direction.
The boss fights are absolutely wicked for sure. My favorite is probably the FLESH PRISON. I agree, ULTRAKILL is one of the best fps games I've played in years (and DOOM Eternal is up there too), though I am excluding Half-Life: Alyx from that discussion, a game which is arguably better.
My laptop won't run doom eternal and most games at above 25 fps but Ultrakill.... I can get a whole 100 fps, it is one of the only game that can max my monitor's refresh rate and DEFINITELY the most fun one. With ultrakill the only thing that limits me is myself, not how much I can spend a pc or console. Accessibility is extremely important and one thing I think a lot of newer games fuck up by requiring such insane hardware just to have a good experience.
I agree that the game is beautiful, but an easy criticism of the "boomer shooter" genre (that I might even have for some titles) is that they copy the look of the older shooters uncritically in the hopes to inspire nostalgia in an audience and sell units. I don't think this is the case here, but it is a way a person _could_ be cynical about the game's aesthetic if they were looking for something not to like.
@@iamerror Gotcha. Hopefully they'll be able to see past those biases. No nostalgia attached for me here. I'm a newbie gamer and this looks great on its own merit
Doom doesn't punch harder or especially faster than Quake. Ultrakill does because it adds a whole lot of grace frames and turns engine quircks into actual mechanics, leaving all the tactics of Quake while significantly lowering mechanical difficulty (not complexity tho)
I think leaving out the alternate revolvers and nailguns was not a great idea, I'd say they are one of the funnest parts of replaying the game. I'm assuming you haven't found them yet, and YOU DEFINITELY SHOULD! The alternate ricochet is unbelievably strong, and the saw blades are just cooler than the nailguns. also remember when you are running forward you can punch the shotgun shots with the default fist to shoot an explosion.
This video is a year old, the saw blade launcher wasn't out yet. I personally preferred the original revolver to the alternate, but maybe I should go try again.
I have a big callous on my hand that I didn't notice until I was sitting on the toilet one day. I thought it was because I draw but I don't draw often so I put the blame soley on this game.
Duck Hunt would not be classified as a First Person Shooter, despite you are in a first person perspective and you shoot things. It's a Light Gun game... a genre more commonly associated with Arcades and some ports to 90's consoles
It's probably called a boomer shooter, not because people can't conceptualise when the style was used, but because the word "boomer" has mostly just been used as a word for "older"
As far as I’m concerned Ultrakill is not a “Boomer Shooter”. While it shares some aspects of the aforementioned genre, I feel it has developed past that with the Devil May Cry influence. With the emphasis on skillshots, and maximizing effectiveness through the combination different parts of your arsenal I believe Ultrakill should be called a “gunslinger action” game.
I don't think "boomer shooter" fully captures what makes Ultrakill "ULTRAKILL" but its the best common phrase we have to describe it, and I think I do a good job describing its relationship to those old games in this video, but the influence of DMC cannot be denied.
"Boom Shooters" or Doom Clones are usually challenging, but with relatively simple mechanics. This doesn't play like that at all, it felt more like when I tried to play Descent or Bayonetta .
also my father is a boomer (I am a zoomer rised by a boomer, my father is 14 years older than my mother lol) and he look like the doom dev team when he was young in the 60s and you know, he used to be a hippie so yeah that guys look like they can be boomers to me) lol!
That whole "OK Boomer" spiel at the start is, itself, ignorant of wider cultural context. The term "Boomer Shooter" is rooted in the "30yo Boomer" meme, which portrays people who are reaching their 30s/40s in recent times, and thus played the original 90s shooters in their youth. It portrays them as well-humored and as nostalgic for the likes of Doom and Quake, thus Boomer Shooter. And like... Extreme violence? In OG Doom? Even by the standards of that era it wasn't particularly gory.
1. I'm am not unaware of the "30yo boomer" meme, or that the word "boomer" is short hand for older people in general in meme context. In my in video footnote, I specifically say that I like that the phrase is at least evocative, unlike "retro shooter." Regardless, I care about what the phrase "Boomer Shooter" means when an audience hears it. They will not have context, they will think "Shooters made and played by baby boomers." The whole thing is a little tongue in cheek, I'm playing humorous "old-timey" music and put a stupid grainy filter over the video. I wouldn't take the discussion too seriously, though I do stand by what I said. 2. There is literally a line on the wikipedia page "Doom was notorious for its high levels of graphic violence." It was also used as blame for the Columbine Shootings and other acts of real world violence by politicians, writers, and newscasters.Just like how DOOM wasn't the first shooter, but popularized shooters, it wasn't the first or most violent game, but popularized violent games. I was obviously referencing that cultural moment in context of letting a child play the game. Was I scarred by the experience? Absolutely not, but I found it humorous that for all that overblown discussion of DOOM's violence (and video game violence in general) a group of adults all thought it was perfectly fine to let me play DOOM. idk, maybe I shouldn't respond to comments like this, but I hope this helped explain my reasoning for some statements I made
Yes, there may even be a coin/railcannon combo in the video (not sure anymore). I didn't use them too much when I made this video a year ago, and they weren't *as* common in the culture of the game at the time.
ngl i thought boomer shooter just meant games with lots of explodey stuff, but specifically ye olde video game explosions i feel like an idiot now lmao
Yeah i like to think of ULTRAKILL as it's own thing, it's so original and refreshing that i cant compare it wirh other games
doom eternal?
@@АртемийПарилов too different, beside the movement options, ultrakill approach to combat is much more freeform than Doom eternal
@@manhphanhoang9555 what do you mean? You say that you can kill everything with whatever you like?
@@АртемийПарилов you can do whatever the fuck you want with whatever weapons you want in ultrakill
Blood is refreshing 😳😳😳
To me games like DUSK and Ion Maiden feel like attempts to recapture what made the old games they’re based on good, like most retro games. Which makes for good games sometimes, but it’s still just redoing something that exists. ULTRAKILL feels like a game that snuck in from another universe where the realism trend in FPS never existed and they just continued evolving in the mold of Doom. It’s of the same genealogy, but almost unrecognizable. It’s really amazing.
I completely agree! This was one of the primary points I was trying to get across in the video. I hope it lands for people unfamiliar with the game
I have to disagree about DUSK. DUSK is taking all the best ideas from all of those old FPS games, refining them with new technology, and creating the platonically ideal boomer shooter
@@rominesque2921 That's what "attempts to recapture what made the old games they’re based on good" means. I never said the attempt failed, did I?
I'm glad that so-called "Boomer Shooters" are back in town. I've always DESPISED modern military shooters.
As for the overuse of Hell as a setting, well, when said Hell is directly based on Dante's version of the Inferno, with each circle being different in tone and setting from the last, I think we can cut Ultrakill some slack on that regard.
ULTRAKILL definitely does more with hell as a setting than some other games, that was just a little quip about how these games often turn to the demonic for their fantasy inspiration.
Also, it throws an interesting take. When most protagonists enter the land of heck. They usually do so on someone else's request or to fulfill some duty.
But V1 is entirely there for selfish reasons. He only really wants blood.
@@memes_the_dna_of_the_soul5487 as selfish as a machine can get
@@memes_the_dna_of_the_soul5487 V1 is just there for the hell of it lmao
@@iamerror Easy excuse for interesting monster designs that you can also tear through by the hundreds more or less uncritically
Something that I think doesn't get talked about enough when talking about Ultrakill's style meter is the fact that it actually tells you what's earning you style points.
When I play DMC5, it feels like I'm pretty much just mashing buttons. The style meter doesn't tell me what I'm doing that's stylish. And if I do something that nets me a lot of points, I have no way to know that doing that was good.
Meanwhile, if I do something cool in Ultrakill, such as getting a split reflect on 2 different streetcleaner fuel tanks. The game tells me "Hey, that thing you just did was sick as fuck. you should do it more often". This further reinforces the drive to do all those stylish maneuvers, which is great, because those maneuvers are often your best source of damage in the game.
This is a great way of describing it! It certainly reinforces doing "cool" things, which in turn makes the game more fun!
Well dmcs style meter is a lot more simple
Vary your attacks and use specials = s rank
Specifically use specials that do low damage but net high combos
Also sometimes it explains you "what the hell just happened" - like when you one-shot mindflayer with explosive a moment after she casted homing bolts at you, with a bunch of "friendly fire" lines, hinting that you exploded those bolts into her with that explosive
Which in turn might give you more ideas about "friendly fire" on other enemies...
Or the little pause the game does when doing something cool, it’s like those scenes in nime where tereally powerful hitconnects, a flash of light comes up and then the enemy goes flying. Reflecting an enemy projectile, getting the freeze frame and the having even enemies explode is incredibly satisfying, or the chunk-chunk-boom of getting multiple coin splits combined with the scoreboard going apeshit really drives the style home
DMC's style meter isn't hard to learn at all. Its literally based on how well you combo moves together. Every move/combo you land gets a cool down timer after it's done. The meter is meant to encourage you to swap between different weapons/combinations to achieve a higher score. The reason you dont understand the style meter is because you mash buttons
another excellent aspect of the game, outside of its gameplay mechanics and aesthetics, is its writing.
like the enemy logs, that grant small, methodical peeks through the curtains of its world in a way that leaves you with a sense of great intrigue.
or, the character lines or narration, which consistently invoke some absolutely fucking raw wordsmanship;
"If the machines seek blood, he would give it freely;
and with such fury, even metal will bleed"
that line gave me goosebumps when I first read it.
I do enjoy the writing in the game quite a bit, but perhaps what I like the most about it is how unintrusive it is. Doesn't hit you over the head often, but the logs are great!
@@iamerror I love le logs since, unlike lots of other games, each one of them is rich in lore and the like without being stupidly long or giving you 50 to collect and read all at once. There are a few you can go out of your way to read at the end of secret levels, but for the most part you can just read the enemy description for that boss you just beat to cool down before the next area.
I think what also makes Ultrakill stand out from other boomer shooters is that it takes lots of direct inspo from character action games like DMC, which extends beyond the style meter. I've seen people describe this game as a first person character action game rather than a boomer shooter at times.
A good hack n slash has a low skill floor but a high skill ceiling with lots of hidden mechanical depth that rewards players for reaching it. Unlocking the P doors or pulling off a bunch of coin tricks scratches that same itch. To get big damage and style, you need to be familiar with timing and patterns for certain enemies and your attacks fighting game-style, on top of mastering the movement mechanics to pull them off, which Ultrakill does in spades.
It's a long time coming for someone to finally merge the two genres, and the game made me realize how similar boomer shooters and character action games are. The campiness, movement, dodging/parrying attacks, weapon switching, enemy/boss types--heck, V2 is the rival who's meant to mirror the protag, and Gabriel straight up has moves from Vergil and Credo. It'd be great if this can help bring together fans of both genres and get them to check out great games they might've missed out by getting a taste of what the other side is like.
Great comment, looks like I'll have to try out some more character action games!
V2 isn't a rival, bit welp, this comment was a year ago and if u have played the greed layer, you probably know who the protagonist is and who the rival is by now
I'm surprised I got reccomended this. Prolly from watching so much ultrakill content. Ultrakill has been my favorite game that I've bought this year. I love how simple it is. The whiplash arm that came out with the greed layer made me fall I love with the game even more. So far I've P ranked everything but P-1, and I'm slowly getting to the point of doing it.
Personally, I think boomer shooter is a perfect name for older shooters such as wolfenstein, doom, hexen, etc. because they are the grandfathers to the genre. If I'm explaining ultrakill, I'd call it a doom-like, and if I'm explaining dusk I'd call it a quake-like. Also good job making it into the top 1k in cyber grind. I used to be in that club before the reset
Those distinctions make sense. It's hard to exactly place the New Blood Interactive games, but what is certain is that they are amazing. Ultrakill is probably my favorite game I've bought/played this year too (though there are a lot of contenders!).
How'd p ranking p-1 go and if you've done it can I have some pointers cause I've only S ranked it(7 gods dammed seconds off P)
@@triton8583 kill him faster
The beauty of Ultrakill lies in just about every aspect of it. No two levels are alike in either design, soundtrack, or function, so every new level gives you that feeling of wonder for what's in store.
The mechanics are made more for the player's enjoyment, and both Hakita and the community realize that. The style meter, the Marksman's coins, the various functions of the arms, all of it blends together to give you something that can only be described by this Steam Review:
"Ultrakill is better than sex."
And unlike Doom, you aren't forced into the Doom Dance, you're able to experiment, and the game rewards you for finding something new with that boost to your style meter.
Also let's be real, a game that lets you throw a coin into the air and bounce a *RAILGUN PROJECTILE* off of it has to be the best thing ever.
Speaking of “you’re able to experiment”, did you know that projectile boosting aka the act of *punching your shotgun rounds to make the hit harder* , which in and of itelf is a concept and a half, was not intally an intended feature? Hakita saw people do that and thoght “fuck it, that’s cool” and mad it a mechanic. The amount of wacky bullshit that exists both as cool exploits and incredibly niche mechanics, such as slide-dash jumping, slam storage, core eject nukes, and *oneshotting the hardest boss in the game with a coin* is so cool and my god is is the idea of like 8 weapos with 4 mods each exciting
“Forced into the doom dance”
The doom dance is literally infinite combinations of experimentation and your own personal style expressed through ripping and tearing. Don’t act like you don’t have as much freedom as you do in Ultrakill. I love both games but seriously don’t slander my boy
@@deathvideogame aw yeah that's why I'm incentivized to always get in close and GLORY KILL for them ammos and HP. I LOVE ANIMATION LOCKING IN A MOVEMENT SHOOTER.
@@GentlemanNietzsche do you not have to get close to heal in ultrakill?
while yes he does have to get close to heal he isnt locked into an animation to heal or get ammo back
I fell in love with this game the very moment I watched Markiplier play it.
The graphics are pure gold, I find the music to be beyond amazing, and the mechanics never get old for me!
Despite the Hell setting being overused to the moon and back, I still really like it, and ULTRAKILL has the most unique Hell setting that I've ever seen.
I think they really took the "Nine layers" part of the mythos and ran with it in a really stylistic and unique way, and I love it!
@@iamerror Yeah. As far as I've seen, the Wrath layer is my favourite! Hakita gave us the first look at it a few days ago.
In the cyber grind whenever it gets to around round 17 mindflayers start to spawn. And I find it a necessity to do a slam storage into the air to fight the flayers by themselves a mile up from the actual arena so I don't die, which is extremely cool cause you're actually fighting an enemy while in the air and it's often the best strat for them.
I just die to them regardless, teleporting slashy bitches get me every time :( although it is fun to throw a few coins and absolutely demolish one with the hard hitter revolver special, it's just such a chonkin time pause.
@@aarepelaa1142have you learned the insta-kill trick?
@@froyoreal yeah, not very consistent with it, dunno if projectile boosting with the shotgun or shooting with the rocket launcher is better.
That blood mechanic is ingenious!
I agree! What's I particularly love about it is that initially it seems to be a weakness of the player-character, but once you get the hang of it, it becomes a great strength since you don't have to scrounge for bullets/health, just wisely zoom up to an enemy and pop them with a shotgun blast to the face!
It looks like huge evolutional leap from Doom 2016's glory kills - somewhat clunky first steps, when you look at it after playing ULTRAKILL - now you don't need arbitrary blinking stagger state, you're not locked in the same 3 repeating animations, you're not protected from other enemies while doing it by i-frames, you literally just bathe in blood in real time to get your health back. I love it
@@LeonserGT Also it ties with your style as well, don't forget that.
The more damage you take, the more hard damage you obtain, thus temporarily weakening yourself to be a squishier target, but by getting high style rankings, hard damage either goes away really quickly, or gaining that amazing ULTRAKILL, all your hard damage is gone entirely.
@@corvusgaming2379that wasn't the case 2 years ago my guy lol
@@matex_e I only got the game this year man, a month or so before they added the sharpshooter and srs.
To add to the (small) graphics portion of the video, there is actually an in lore reason as to why V1 sees everything as a PS1 game, it's basically the same reason why you see pro eSports players playing on the lowest graphics in their respective games, for faster response times and more FPS and the new sentry enemies you fight in wrath see the game world as photorealistic doom for precision aiming
The first time I heard about ultrakill was when a person would post their P ranks in the gaming channel on a discord server. I then heard versus in an isaac video by real guy who is real. After hearing it I decided to check it out. I told people in another server about my interest and they dm’d me and told me that ultrakill was great. When I got home from vacation I got the game. I didn’t regret it. It’s the definition of adrenaline and one of if not the most intricately designed game period.
Tell me what YOU think of ULTRAKILL and retro shooters down here. Does the fact that ULTRAKILL and DOOM have to be typed in all caps say more about the "boomer shooter" genre than anything I said in the video above?
if i see five users casually type/chat "ultrakill" i think "that sounds like a cool game" but if i see five users type "ULTRAKILL" i think "that sounds like THE game"
I see a lot of people talking about how DUSK and Ultrakill are nostalgic for them, but as someone born in 2004 I don’t have those nostalgic feelings, that being said, retro-shooters kick ass and actually run on my potato of a computer and am completely obsessed with Ultrakill
@@dumbfuk7701 I definitely don't think one needs nostalgia to enjoy these games, because, as you said, they absolutely do kick ass. As someone who studies and makes videos about games though, I like to draw a line from the past until now, which is what I attempted to do in this video. But the past be damned, ULTRAKILL is great on its own!
(Though I do recommend that you check out DOOM, it's an amazing game and holds up!)
@@iamerror yeah, making comparisons helps create a picture of how the media has changed and what has stayed the same, also I managed to play a flash emulator of classic doom on my schools computers, it was pretty fun, if a bit clunky
@@iamerror Very true, I think my first shooter was one of the COD games, maybe Black Ops 2, but I've gotten hours of enjoyment out of ULTRAKILL, and I'd maybe even go as far as to call it my favorite of all time
Oh man, I can't believe you've spent so much time on the Cyber Grind without ever playing Devil May Cry. My feelings towards it are the same as the Bloody Palace mode from DMC that inspired it. Fantastic stuff.
I really like ultrakill’s parry mechanic, since it can shred bosses and enemies. It allows a more risky play style that yields more damage.
I've been trying to learn how to do better with it recently, and I've got agree, it's a ton of fun!
V1, a small-ass robot, can parry the Corpse of King Minos's punches. If that doesn't get you to learn how to parry I don't know what will.
@@alivingdagger9915 trying to p rank Gabriel allowed me to practice parry better than minos. Since Gabriel has lot more attacks you can parry.
@@therecruitboi6973 i recently p-ranked Gabe after a lot of hair-pulling and incredibly frustrating tries lmao, i finally got all P-ranks in ACT I
@@therecruitboi6973 oh yeaah not that minos, i though you were talking about a different minos there for a moment.
Love this video, but all i can think of in the v2 segment is "bro chill its just Virgil from devil may cry"
Fair enough!
doing a combo and seeing that giant spew of words with each one of them making the "ULTRAKILl" rank beat like a heart fills me with a desire to keep doing that just to keep seeing that spew of words like +INTERRUPTION +ULTRARICOSHOT X4 +MAURICED +FRIENDLY FIRE +DISRESPECT +COMBO HEADSHOT X3 +ARSENAL etc frequently appearing on that small, dopamine generator box on the sides
Simply beautiful video essay on a not-so-simply beautiful game. I've been immersed in ULTRAKILL to the point where I've been falling asleep to a loop of the song Take Care. In my dreams I'm dashing and sliding around and using the grappling arm to traverse the environment around me. In other FPS games I've started viewing my distance from the enemy entirely differently than I used to. I haven't had a game impact me this much since the time I got super into Tetris when I was a kid.
ULTRAKILL revitalized my love of video games. It has gorgeous slow moments juxtaposed with insane violence at unbelievable speed. It has weapons that all feel new and creative. Everything about this game is made with love and it's obvious from the moment you pick it up.
Booting up the game, I heard nothing. The game showed some old pixelated text telling me to adjust audio settings. As I turned up the sound effects and heard the audio buzzing, and as I raised the music to the point where I could hear the melancholy track "The Fire is Gone," I knew this game was going to be something special. ULTRAKILL has never given me a dull moment since then, and it's been my go-to game to play ever since. I put off playing it for WAY too long, and I can't recommend it enough. This is what high-energy video games are meant to be. This, to me, feels like the pinnacle of gaming.
*And it's still in early access.* The devs are still working on new weapons, levels, and features. This is one of the best moments to be a gamer since 2006, if only for this revival in engaging and fun games with fun movement mechanics. I haven't had this much fun moving around since Titanfall 2, and before that Team Fortress 2, and before that, good ol' Super Mario 64. ULTRAKILL is truly revolutionary and it makes me not just excited to see what else New Blood has to offer, but also what the future of gaming in general could be. I haven't seen so much potential in a game in years, and it's a breath of fresh air. If you're reading this and you enjoy fast paced shooters but haven't bought the game, you're only hurting yourself. ULTRAKILL is genuinely incredible and you won't be disappointed.
A wonderful comment, I wholeheartedly agree with your praise of the game and I'm glad my video helped communicate some of these ideas!
Ultrakill encourages you to think outside the box, and I like that. I can go crazy with the guns and the lazers and the what-have-you's, and the music just adds to the vibe of running in with absolute reckless abandon. Plus, the Cybergrind is *perfect* for practicing combos
I love how it takes 8min to actually start talking about ultrakill, it reminds me of how ultrakill has these badass intros for all the bosses
Hi i just wanted to say that i am a zoomer (15 years to be exact) and one of my favorite thing about ultrakill is the graphics for a few reasons
While i did not grow up with games with this style but it has always been intresting to me
And with the better and better graphics have gotten, my computer has struggled with newer games even if they are not as complex as some AAA are, This has made me play older games like mario world or quake and newer games like ultrakill and dusk.
Anyways great vid, loved it :]
It's worth noting that the progression from Doom's "largely horizontal" experience and Quake's (and Marathon's and Dark Forces') increasingly vertical experience stems from a very simple hard limit on Doom's game engine. Doom (and its predecessor, Wolfenstein3D) is a 2d game.
There's long videos that discuss this technique, but basically the game keeps track of where the player is and where they're facing on a 2D plane, then calculates a series of vertical lines of pixels to display as an illusion of a 3D environment. It's a fascinating trick and it works really well, especially since they can change where the camera appears to be vertically based on where you are on that 2D plane. It does result in a couple of issues, though: most obviously that aiming vertically literally doesn't matter, your crosshair, if the game had one, would be an entire vertical line in the middle of the screen. It also results in things like every map being displayable at once without ever overlapping, and, as far as I can recall, no means of jumping.
Marathon, Dark Forces and possibly Quake (it's a bit later than the period I tend to hear discussed at this technical level) all independently worked out ways of managing a fully 3D environment, though at a cost of massively increasing the storage use. Doom's an astonishingly compact game that achieved success largely through digital distribution in the days when 56k internet was a *good* connection, Dark Forces came on a CD.
Also, this is the first time I've ever heard Boomer Shooter. I've heard retro shooter, action shooter, etc. And honestly given its rather...nonexistent... connection to the platonic ideal of a boomer as conceived by those who use that term, I'd argue that perhaps the term Boomer here refers more to what these games sound like. A constant stream of booms as projectiles and often enemies explode all around you.
Honestly Ultrakill is akin to Crosscode in that it doesn't try to replicate the past, but rather the idea of what made the past so great with the lens of what has been learned in game design since then, in turn EVOLVING the genre in new ways by stylishly blending old and new, and you've captured that aspect perfectly. and while i know i'll never be the best at Ultrakill, it'll be a satisfying as hell ride to the finish.
Amazing how one person can make such a great game
Adding onto that opening monologue, all of that, and “Gen-X Shooter” or “X-Shooter” just sounds WAY more awesome.
Many games these days are a product to be sold to the masses, a far cry from the older days when games were made by groups of enthusiasts for other enthusiasts. Ultrakill has clearly been made with the spirit of older games, where appealing to as many people as possible wasn't the goal. Rather, it appeals as much as possible to the select few who enjoy what it has to offer. Outside of even being a game, it's easy to tell that it's a labour of love.
Amazing vid, subbed.
This comment is out of left field, but one of my favorite ultrakill mechanics is the fact that when you slide during a dash, you get to keep i-frames during the whole slide. So what you can do is overcharge your explosive shotgun (the second one) and blow enemies on top of you while sliding, and you don't take any damage. It's so satisfying to pull off.
One thing that makes it obvious how much Hakita respects his influences (DMC and Quake) is that while he took all of the amazing things from old shooters and iterated on them (updated the ID arsenal around making it the most satisfying to use possible rather than balanced, took movement ideas and gave you even more control and freedom to emphasize what a killing machine you are, added massive secret sections for players who are deep into the game etc) to make them truly modern and groundbreaking, he also took the essence of Devil May Cry and imbued it into the genre that was not built for it.
Games like Doom are built to get into that 'flow' state of mind through your mind working incredibly fast to be as efficient as possible, by using the right tool in the right situation you are a killing machine and untouchable. In many situations in doom eternal there's 2-3 truly optimal actions that you can take, and it makes the game feel focused and amazing at what it does.
But what DMC is all about is having a variety of equally useful strong tools at any time and letting the players express themselves through the actions they are going to take. If you look at the game like DMC 4, the game with no sequel for 10 years, you could find a decently sized community that still posted combo videos showing off their playstyle and how they style on enemies using the games' endless mechanics. DMC is as much about self-expression as it is about mechanical skill.
Hakita managed to mix those two so amazingly well. At any point in the game , let's say during cybergrind, you have like 10 different things you can do in order to stand out and truly make your own playstyle.
Do you want to blow up the group by coining the back of a flamethrower guy? You can. Do you want to blow up the group by charging up the explosive shotty, hooking to a big enemy and iframing the explosion? You can. Do you want to lob a granade and explode it with the explosion laser? You can. Do you want to slide so that you line up the most of the group with a laser and hit some enemies far away as well? You can.
What makes ultrakill special for me is that it's not only an amazing iteration on Quake and it's mechanics and movement, but the fact that the game captures the essence of DMC unlike any other game except DMC.
Coincidentally throughout my childhood DMC and Quake were my favorite games, when I saw someone making a game and jokingly advertising it as 'devil may quake' i was so ready to hate on it, but the madman has pulled off what I thought was impossible and managed to fully pay proper respect and iterate on two of the most mechanically complex games out there.
What a great, in depth comment! Thank you
@@iamerror Heck yeah that's what it felt like :)
But on a serious note it just makes me really happy that a much wired audience gets to experience that flow that you get from DMC's freeflow combat, even though it's in another game, and no better audience to share that with than people who enjoy old school shooters!
coin juggling by repeatedly punching a coin off of enemies so you can instant kill multiple giant demons is certainly a highlight of gameplay
I need to learn how to do that!
@@iamerror you can also juggle a coin off of a wall but the damage multiplier caps out until you start juggling it off of enemies
Ultrakill even has some good and (sometimes complicated mechanics).
Parrying can be enough for some people, but parrying your own shotgun shots ? And shooting a core eject grenade to make it explode mid air, the explosion from shooting a core eject grenade with the malicious railcannon, slam storage, damn.
It's like discovering jump cancelling in DMC3 again.
Clair de Lune's analysis may be my favorite take on Ultrakill ever. Thanks a lot for your words!
ultrakill deserves its own catagory called ultrakill
the biggest thing that i love about the UK is the possible depth
like, how in the world Projectile Boost even has hit the Developer's mind, just WHOA
It does feel like they thought of everything and more in development!
Pretty sure the projectile boost was a bug, which was made into a feature because it's both fun and doesn't break game balance.
@@lonelyshpee7873 honestly, that just keeps the boomer shooter trend of " if it's good, it's not a bug"
@@lonelyshpee7873 yup
It happened because projectiles of enemies can be deflected, and the shotguns projectiles behave in the exact same way and are slow enough to parry
THUS projectile boosting was born from an oversight
@@joaopedrosambatti2474 And it's a damn good trend. Imagine the world without rocket jumping!
Very good video! Aside from all the good game design analysis, I liked your little preamble at the start about over generalizing groups and disenfranchising opinions based on perceived undesirable aspects. I wasn't expecting that when I clicked on this video yet found it insightfully articulate. Keep up the good work boss :)
Thanks!
Honestly, I think ultrakill is one of my favorite games. PERIOD. It has so much to explore and learn. so many different quirks and tid bits that, if we didnt have the internet, no one would know of them. For example, if you shoot your shotgun and punch with the blue arm straight away, you get to make the bullets explode. I will never forget the first time i experiecened V2.
I must have some genetically transmitted nostalgia or something, I love boomer shooters, 3d platformers, novels, and mob movies.
None of these are too high up in "modern entertainment" rn lol
I definitely think you can enjoy these things without having nostalgia for them, remember, there is a reason people are nostalgic for them (i.e. they good)
@@iamerror Definitely, they can be extremely good at times, and you don't need to have nostalgia to enjoy tf out of Super Mario Odyssey and Ultrakill. I just thought it was strange that nobody in my personal environment barely recognize their existence (yes, seriously). Anyway, I think it's proof that games and their genres CAN be timeless, when they're not going for what I'd call "blind modernism". Went on for unnecessarily long lol, have a nice day
I'm surprised no one has mentioned the official website, it's literally "Devil May Quake" paying homage to it's inspirations!
ive dumped 230 hours into this game and am still not bored with just the sheer amount of things you can do
i cannot wait for the rest of the weapon variants, the last alternate weapon in the last act, and the last fist
so many more things to see what interacts with what
Also worth mentioning is how your parry possibilities are always a lot more varied than you may think when looking at all enemies you find.
Remember that big straight punch from the Minos Colossus? Y E S. The map's challenge is literally Parrying a punch.
V2's attacks that flash yellow? Y E S.
Swordmachine's Triple Slash? Y E S.
If the attack doesn't flash blue, you can probably parry it. And that is L I T.
Not only are you insanely powerful fighting with just your guns at point blank range, the game rewards Bold Attitude against the enemies - Especially with parrying.
There's even a +DISRESPECT bonus to your Style Rank!
One of the most important thing i love from most boomer shooters is that i can run them on my laptop
The term "boomer shooter" comes from the fact that people would talk about these old FPS games with that sort of "back in my day" tone on /v/ for a while
Great video! Super interesting focus on actions per minute - I don't usually think about that metric outside of strategy games.
Me neither, but it's useful for helping quantify how much engagement a game expects from its players!
Omg I already own Ultrakill and you've sold me again
Great video!!
I'm glad I could be of service
One of my favorite moves is slamming the enemies up and then boosting my own shotgun shell into them creating a pretty firework from blood mist
Votre âme est un paysage choisi
Que vont charmant masques et bergamasques
Jouant du luth et dansant et quasi
Tristes sous leurs déguisements fantasques.
Tout en chantant sur le mode mineur
L'amour vainqueur et la vie opportune,
Ils n'ont pas l'air de croire à leur bonheur
Et leur chanson se mêle au clair de lune,
Au calme clair de lune triste et beau,
Qui fait rêver les oiseaux dans les arbres
Et sangloter d'extase les jets d'eau,
Les grands jets d'eau sveltes parmi les marbres.
I love how when you do something extremely explosive like a full charge grenade from the shotgun or hit the coin and it ricochets into a weak spot that triggers a chain reaction, the game freezes for a moment as if the game actually has to process how sick your moves are.
It's an intentional effect, even if its a extremely short freeze, it lets the player process the absolute carnage they caused with that move. It definitely makes the player feel like death itself.
Excellent video, surprisingly good for a channel of this size. Had to sub
Thanks, I'm glad you liked it
@@iamerror them*
I'm on a massive binge lol
It took me more than 100 tries to beat V2 the first time around, But oh boy was I relieved when I killed that motherfucker and even more suprised when he cracks his knuckles at the end of the game for round 2.
Heres a trick that I used for killing him.
You just switch to weapons all the time and do the most damage possible to him while also spamming the blue arm
15:54 yea the game takes a very large chunk of inspiration from devil may cry, hell it even has a secret encounter based off a boss in devil may cry, it even has a opposite color rival battle, 2 infact, aka the v2 rival battles, but unlike vergil and dante YOUR blue your rival is red.
just a question have do you know about the P door? if not you should try it out. it is a blood bath.the P door the hardest challenge in ultrakill
Yup! I manged to even beat it (after many attempts!). Probably my favorite secret in the game.
By Gabriel ultrakill is so fun, cyber grind even more so
DUSK is sort of like the platonically ideal boomer shooter. Takes all the best ideas from everything up through Half Life, puts them in one game, and refines them with more modern technology.
Ultrakill is an evolution pulling from unconventional inspirations for a whole new sort of experience
sure, v2 as a metaphor for one's longing for the past and the growth they've experienced since then is pretty cool, but honestly I just like funny shoot gun at red robot better lmao
Both are certainly valid
ultrakill in 5 words or less: simple yet complex and style
I love how masterfully written this video's script is written. fantastic work
20:50 "I'm you but better" you watched the funkE video didn't you >:)
I think I picked that phrase up from someone else's video, if the phrase is in that video, then that's probably where! (though the meme is quite old)
I love this video! Keep up the great work!
In ultrakill lore, there is a reason why everything is pixilated it is for the machine to work faster
I played Doom 2016 sometime at the end of 2019, and it was good enough so I would preorder Doom 2020. It then procede to blow it predicessor out of the water, improving on already good gameplay, and fixing that which didn't work. Now I feel like Ultrakill is doing the same for Doom 2020.
It may lack variaty in weapons or enemies, but considering that we have only half of the game right now that's expected. It clearly does boss fights better, healing from blood doesn't interupt gameplay the same way glorykills do, despite achieving the same goal, and it forces played to weaponswap through gameplay, rather the artificial lack of recourses.
Maybe it's not The Best shooter right now, for me it's still Doom 2020, but it's going in the right direction.
The boss fights are absolutely wicked for sure. My favorite is probably the FLESH PRISON. I agree, ULTRAKILL is one of the best fps games I've played in years (and DOOM Eternal is up there too), though I am excluding Half-Life: Alyx from that discussion, a game which is arguably better.
My laptop won't run doom eternal and most games at above 25 fps but Ultrakill.... I can get a whole 100 fps, it is one of the only game that can max my monitor's refresh rate and DEFINITELY the most fun one. With ultrakill the only thing that limits me is myself, not how much I can spend a pc or console. Accessibility is extremely important and one thing I think a lot of newer games fuck up by requiring such insane hardware just to have a good experience.
i need a boomer shooter to be genre listed in steam so i can find a damn good game
I couldn't agree more!
Just look at what games got showcased at realms deep lol
Pretty much the closest thing we have to an actual tag
@@iamerror is ultrakill worth playing on the steam deck im thinkin buyin it for my steam deck
about
@@stevenjohnson8736 I don't have a steam deck, sorry!
If i could summarize ultrakill in a sentence, it would be "You can do alot with a little, and it gives you alot to do it with"
Beautiful essay, thank you!
Thank you for the beautiful comment!
My parents don’t let me play doom but don’t care if I play ultrakill 💀
devil daggers is one of my favorite games of all time
didnt even know there was a third skull in claire de lune.
wait. at the V2 bossfight you didn't just shoot the window? that's what i did. huh
Oh man, I guess I'll have to try that.
I was just confused why you were saying this game's aesthetic is divisive. Every second I've seen of it looks beautiful
I agree that the game is beautiful, but an easy criticism of the "boomer shooter" genre (that I might even have for some titles) is that they copy the look of the older shooters uncritically in the hopes to inspire nostalgia in an audience and sell units. I don't think this is the case here, but it is a way a person _could_ be cynical about the game's aesthetic if they were looking for something not to like.
@@iamerror Gotcha. Hopefully they'll be able to see past those biases.
No nostalgia attached for me here. I'm a newbie gamer and this looks great on its own merit
Doom doesn't punch harder or especially faster than Quake. Ultrakill does because it adds a whole lot of grace frames and turns engine quircks into actual mechanics, leaving all the tactics of Quake while significantly lowering mechanical difficulty (not complexity tho)
history lesson & life story ends at 10:04 (im sorry if this is kinda rude but it is a little true)
I think leaving out the alternate revolvers and nailguns was not a great idea, I'd say they are one of the funnest parts of replaying the game. I'm assuming you haven't found them yet, and YOU DEFINITELY SHOULD! The alternate ricochet is unbelievably strong, and the saw blades are just cooler than the nailguns. also remember when you are running forward you can punch the shotgun shots with the default fist to shoot an explosion.
This video is a year old, the saw blade launcher wasn't out yet. I personally preferred the original revolver to the alternate, but maybe I should go try again.
ULTRAKILL puts the “boom” in “boomer shooter”
Ultrakill feels like an entirely different shooter of its own tbh
I have a big callous on my hand that I didn't notice until I was sitting on the toilet one day. I thought it was because I draw but I don't draw often so I put the blame soley on this game.
21:55 "and then you take his goddamn ARM!"
Duck Hunt would not be classified as a First Person Shooter, despite you are in a first person perspective and you shoot things. It's a Light Gun game... a genre more commonly associated with Arcades and some ports to 90's consoles
have you checked out dooms modding scene? its amazing!
Spoilers for final level of Layer 4:
V2 returning with its own marksman gun and fucking STYLING on _ME_ with my OWN COINS-- fuckin floored me lmfao
I love V2, sad he's dead... or is he?
you said magnum and im like wha and then look at when this was made and suddenly that makes sense
18:01 LMAO Doki Doki Ultrakill club?
You know it!
The secret levels in Ultrakill are something else
It's probably called a boomer shooter, not because people can't conceptualise when the style was used, but because the word "boomer" has mostly just been used as a word for "older"
In my mind I alway thought the name Boomer shooter just meant that a game was super fast paced unlike modern shooters.
As far as I’m concerned Ultrakill is not a “Boomer Shooter”. While it shares some aspects of the aforementioned genre, I feel it has developed past that with the Devil May Cry influence. With the emphasis on skillshots, and maximizing effectiveness through the combination different parts of your arsenal I believe Ultrakill should be called a “gunslinger action” game.
I don't think "boomer shooter" fully captures what makes Ultrakill "ULTRAKILL" but its the best common phrase we have to describe it, and I think I do a good job describing its relationship to those old games in this video, but the influence of DMC cannot be denied.
"Boom Shooters" or Doom Clones are usually challenging, but with relatively simple mechanics. This doesn't play like that at all, it felt more like when I tried to play Descent or Bayonetta .
ultrakill doesnt look like boomer shooter but it graphics really fits the game
It doesnt play like one either
I swapped guns every shot, lmao
This vid is so underrated
❤ I'm glad you like it!
also my father is a boomer (I am a zoomer rised by a boomer, my father is 14 years older than my mother lol) and he look like the doom dev team when he was young in the 60s and you know, he used to be a hippie so yeah that guys look like they can be boomers to me) lol!
Great video!
Thanks!
have you tried chargebacking
I have not, but holy shit I just looked it up and it sounds awesome!
I love punching coins and my own bullets
That whole "OK Boomer" spiel at the start is, itself, ignorant of wider cultural context. The term "Boomer Shooter" is rooted in the "30yo Boomer" meme, which portrays people who are reaching their 30s/40s in recent times, and thus played the original 90s shooters in their youth. It portrays them as well-humored and as nostalgic for the likes of Doom and Quake, thus Boomer Shooter.
And like... Extreme violence? In OG Doom? Even by the standards of that era it wasn't particularly gory.
1. I'm am not unaware of the "30yo boomer" meme, or that the word "boomer" is short hand for older people in general in meme context. In my in video footnote, I specifically say that I like that the phrase is at least evocative, unlike "retro shooter." Regardless, I care about what the phrase "Boomer Shooter" means when an audience hears it. They will not have context, they will think "Shooters made and played by baby boomers." The whole thing is a little tongue in cheek, I'm playing humorous "old-timey" music and put a stupid grainy filter over the video. I wouldn't take the discussion too seriously, though I do stand by what I said.
2. There is literally a line on the wikipedia page "Doom was notorious for its high levels of graphic violence." It was also used as blame for the Columbine Shootings and other acts of real world violence by politicians, writers, and newscasters.Just like how DOOM wasn't the first shooter, but popularized shooters, it wasn't the first or most violent game, but popularized violent games. I was obviously referencing that cultural moment in context of letting a child play the game. Was I scarred by the experience? Absolutely not, but I found it humorous that for all that overblown discussion of DOOM's violence (and video game violence in general) a group of adults all thought it was perfectly fine to let me play DOOM.
idk, maybe I shouldn't respond to comments like this, but I hope this helped explain my reasoning for some statements I made
you know that there are weapon combo's right? (such as coin to railcannon)
Yes, there may even be a coin/railcannon combo in the video (not sure anymore). I didn't use them too much when I made this video a year ago, and they weren't *as* common in the culture of the game at the time.
ngl i thought boomer shooter just meant games with lots of explodey stuff, but specifically ye olde video game explosions
i feel like an idiot now lmao
I like your head-canon more than the actual history!
ULTRAKILL is a boomer shooter, it's because your brain is the thing booming trying to compute the gameplay loop of ULTRAKILL
10:06 you're welcome for the timestamp to the actual video
Thanks
great video :)
Thank you!
When I hear Boomer I think about L4D
tbh i thought theyre called boomer shooters because everything explodes
subbed
i cringed when you called the marksman revolver the "magnum"
lol, fair