(I note this below, but I'll also mention it here: minor spoilers for Ultrakill in the video)

I was inspired to post this by a previous post from /u/OhWell about Quake 1. One of the things that's fascinated me in the past few years has been the retro-throwback revival, starting in earnest with Dusk and continuing with titles like Amid Evil, Ion Fury, Wrath, Viscerafest, and so on. (Some people will include the Doom reboots in this ranking, but I would consider that to be a mistake, for reasons I'll get into.)

I've played a fair number of these games, as this type of FPS is near and dear to my heart. One thing that I've been considering is how much these titles crib from their 90s and 00s inspirations versus how much they attempt to do something unique on their own right. Many of these are indie titles, so both because of their budgets and their nature as throwbacks, they often borrow from the aesthetics of older titles -- Dusk with a cross between Quake, Blood, and Redneck Rampage, Amid Evil with a bit of Heretic/Hexen and a bit of Unreal, Ion Fury with its obvious Build Engine design sensibilities, just to name a few. One thing that perhaps doesn't get as much attention as it should, though, is how these games set themselves apart mechanically.

I was a bit of a latecomer to the Doom reboots, but I finally got around to Doom (2016) this summer, and since then I also picked up another New Blood title, Ultrakill. Doom (2016) actually left something of a sour taste in my mouth: here was a game that carried the Doom title, but was a mechanical departure from its predecessors in every way. Classic Doom games, in my mind, were less about the enemies, and to some extent even less about the weapons, than they were about the maps. The challenge of classic Doom levels came from how the level designer set up ambushes, which is why certain levels are more notorious than enemies. (Some easy examples might include the use of Cyberdemons as boxed-in, stationary turrets in WADs like Sigil, or... well, anything that Plutonia does.) The 2016 reboot, by contrast, felt more inspired by the verticality of Quake, and put you into very clear arenas that would be populated by clearly-telegraphed enemy spawns (visually masked as teleporting). The game was less about the level design and more about your weapons and how you used them to counter enemies - but mechanics like Glory Kills and the overall weakness of the player's arsenal let me down, since the former killed your momentum while the latter meant that weapons were incredibly weak unless using an alternate fire mode. It just felt slow and unsatisfying, even if it was mechanically distinct from its predecessors -- id had thrown away much of what made classic Doom good in order to design something different.

A lot of the indie throwback titles, by contrast, seem more interested in taking most of the design sensibilities of their inspirations and iterating on them in more conservative ways. Dusk's movement isn't as technical as Quake's, but it's clearly inspired by Doom and Quake; the level design decidedly has more in common with its aforementioned inspirations than it does with an arena shooter, since walls will open up to reveal enemies and you'll be teleported directly into combat on various occasions. The same principle, I think, holds true for most of the other recent New Blood and 3D Realms FPS titles. They iterate in conservative ways, but are otherwise content to crib fairly heavily from older FPS games. One side-effect of this, I think, has been that boss encounters in most of these throwback titles are fairly underwhelming. Ion Fury's final boss is something that practically belongs in Quake 1 or Doom 2, Dusk's bosses are almost laughably easy compared to the actual combat encounters, and Amid Evil, while generally "fine," still didn't necessarily wow me with the bosses, except occasionally in terms of visual design and spectacle.

That brings me to Ultrakill. I played the demo for Ultrakill a few months back, and I thought at the time that it was pretty good and decidedly a breath of fresh air from what I had played up to then, but the level design seemed simple and the arsenal at the time only included the pistol and shotgun. After spoiling myself and watching a bit of what's included in Act 1 of the game, though, I was persuaded to pick it up, and I've been fairly impressed so far. The Prelude still reminds me a lot of the Doom reboot, but the subsequent "layers" are visually distinct like Amid Evil's chapters, and the arsenal you can acquire thus far has been excellent -- so, at least one of my gripes about Doom (2016) has been alleviated there.

Getting to the point, though: the best way I can describe Ultrakill is "what I wanted Doom 2016 to be." Mind you, I don't mean this as in "what I would want a new Doom game to be," as Ultrakill's level design isn't quite rude enough and doesn't have enough ambushes to meet that standard. But Ultrakill strikes me as a faster and leaner version of what Doom (2016) was trying to be, eschewing Glory Kills for a simpler point-blank healing system and making the player terrifyingly agile even compared to Doom Eternal. Besides that, Ultrakill abandons one of the retro-throwback FPS game tropes that seems otherwise universal: ammo management. The Doom reboots try to make you switch weapons regularly by limiting your access to ammo, but Ultrakill does so by placing special firing modes on cooldowns, occasionally telling you outright to swap to another weapon during a cooldown in the case of the Railcannon.

The other thing that struck me about Ultrakill is the absurd number of techniques present in the game, and the clear inspiration from Devil May Cry. The game still manages to be fairly challenging despite having infinite ammo, and the gameplay loop itself is dramatically faster than either the Doom reboots or other throwback titles. So in a sense, the only thing "retro-throwback" about Ultrakill is the PSX-like visual design -- the rest of the game is a long string of someone saying "you know what would be cool in an FPS game?" and subsequently implementing those things. It's an FPS game with classic staples like grenade jumping, bunny hopping, and an unlimited arsenal, but also with parrying, trick shots, a style meter, and faster and more ruthless versions of Doom (2016)'s mechanics. In a way, Ultrakill still isn't "innovative," inasmuch as many of its features are borrowed from other genres -- but by combining those features into a single FPS game, Ultrakill manages to draw inspiration from many sources, rather than just one or two, and the result is something quite unique.

I haven't found anywhere else to mention this that makes sense, so I'll arbitrarily affix it at the bottom of my post: I mentioned boss design previously, and one of the other things that I noticed about Ultrakill is how it has already managed to make some bosses which, on a blind first encounter, are veritably Souls-like in difficulty. This is one of the few "throwback" games I can think of where boss encounters tend to be more difficult than regular combat, despite the fact that every single attack can either be dodged, parried, or otherwise avoided. In short, the hodge-podge of mechanics that Ultrakill offers lend themselves surprisingly well to boss encounters, whether those encounters are "Quake 1v1s" like Dusk's Jakob (or V2 here), or if they're more Souls-like battles against massive opponents with highly distinct movesets. And the fact that Ultrakill packs into its first third what Dusk used for a final boss is all the more impressive to me, since it leaves me wondering what'll be next.

Is it for everyone? Nah. Is it even a real "retro-throwback FPS game"? Arguably not. But I like it, and I hope the genre-crossing design sensibilities behind it can be appreciated and used more elsewhere.

TL;DR: I am an unpaid shill for Hakita's early access game