ULTRAKILL

ULTRAKILL is a fast-paced action-shooter game favored by many players. Players are placed in a brutal post-apocalyptic world where humanity has been wiped out and various blood-sucking machines roam the land. Players must use skillful movement and weapon switching to destroy the relentless attacks of robots, undead, and even demons, constantly regenerating their health from the blood of these creatures to maintain their combat endurance. The game features levels of varying difficulty for players to challenge, accumulating higher scores through continuous attacks, competing against players worldwide on the leaderboard, and unlocking more weapons and mechs.

Gameplay of ULTRAKILL:

Ultrakill is a fast-paced first-person shooter with an emphasis on movement and stylish techniques. The player must make their way through an interpretation of Dante's layers of Hell, with three acts each made up of three layers being divided into multiple levels. As of February 2026, only Act I and Act II have been fully released, with only the first two layers of Act III being available.

The player battles enemies using an arsenal of weapons, having a primary and alternate attack, and various robotic arms. These have unique interactions with each other, evoking the combination attacks of games like Devil May Cry. Many of the advanced techniques in the game are a result of combining various elements of the player's arsenal. To encourage aggressive gameplay, the player can heal by absorbing the blood of enemies through close-range combat or parrying enemy attacks. The player's performance is judged by a "style meter", similar to games such as Devil May Cry. The style meter rewards the player for performing advanced and flashy moves, as well as encouraging aerial maneuvering and quickly swapping between weapons.

At the end of each level, the player's style ranking is combined with time taken and number of kills to determine a letter grade for that run. Achieving an S rank in all three categories without dying throughout that run will earn the player a P (Perfect) rank, the highest possible rank for a level.

In addition to the main campaign, Ultrakill provides various secret levels parodying other video game genres. The game has an endless survival mode called "The Cyber Grind" where players can compete against other players' high scores, and a sandbox mode in which the player can spawn enemies and various objects. Achieving a P rank in all levels of an act allows the player to access the act's "prime sanctum", each containing a secret boss fight.

Features of ULTRAKILL:

High mobility and situational control: First, you combine rapid movement actions to stay active and avoid attacks from undead, demons, and other machines. These tools help reposition quickly and keep pressure on targets while reducing incoming damage.

Powerful arsenal with variations: Next, ULTRAKILL provides multiple weapons, each offering several variations. Points gained through combat can be spent between missions to unlock or switch these options. This lets you adjust your weapon setup for specific encounters and try different tactics without slowing the action.

Blood as health recovery: Then, blood functions as a direct health resource. Staying close to enemies and timing finishing hits restores health, which supports aggressive play during heavy waves. The mechanic rewards confident decision making while keeping downtime low.

Score, ranks, and optional challenges: Finally, combos and efficient kills raise your score, leading to higher ranks at the end of each level. Optional challenges add focused goals that test execution beyond the main path. Exploration also matters, with secret areas placed throughout campaign environments inspired by Dante's Inferno. When ready, download ULTRAKILL and test routes to improve ranks.

Useful Tips of ULTRAKILL:

Never Stop Moving: Ultrakill also happens to be inspired by first-person shooters of the 90s like Quake, so fast and constant movement is a must if you want to survive. Along with keeping your score up, constantly staying in motion will allow you to dodge enemies attacks, and you can easily die from a couple hits on harder difficulties. Enemies have a variety of attacks too: from mad dashing at you, to large explosives, and even hit scan - so there's a lot to dodge.

Seek Out Blood: The tag line of Ultrakill is "Mankind is dead. Blood is fuel. Hell is full." That second one is of particular importance and relates to this game's healing system. Similar to how glory kills gained you health in DOOM 2016, in this game, just interacting with blood will reward you health. Therefore, when you're low on health, even though you may feel like running, it's best to get in close and explode an enemy into a shower of blood, so you can rejuvenate.  

Abuse Slide Spamming: Sliding will help you dodge attacks, access certain areas, and earn you a style multiplier while in use, but it also can be abused to perform the slide spam. Due to gaining a speed boost at the beginning of a Slide, rapidly tapping the Slide button will increase your speed hugely, and will allow you to zoom through the tighter sections. Even the more adaptive enemies will struggle to hurt you during this, so make good use of it.

Use The Slam Jump To Gain Height: There are many secret mechanics for players to discover because of the depth of Ultrakill's movement. One of the easiest to perform and most helpful is the slam jump. While in mid-air, holding the slide button will slam you downward, taking one energy bar and dealing damage. If you jump immediately after slamming though, you can gain lots of vertical height and speed, which can be chained together too.

Player Comments of ULTRAKILL:

It’s kind of hard to find actual written reviews here so I’m taking matters into my own hands.

Ultrakill is inspired by plenty of good games, and successfully both builds on the past and brings new things to the table in a great way. Like the store description says, Quake, Doom, and DMC are a good place to start if you’re familiar with those games. But I don’t like to linger on comparisons because they can sometimes just end up being reductive.

Freedom of movement is integral to Ultrakill’s combat. You start off with a reasonably fast walkspeed, but you’re given plenty of ways to maintain constant, high-speed motion. Sliding, slide jumping, slide dashing, wall jumping, slam bouncing, there’s a lot of options. It has such a degree of verticality that I don’t often see in other shooters, you get to approach and evade enemies from essentially every angle, and the level design accommodates this well.

The arsenal is appropriately sized, and there’s no useless weapon. Everything fulfills it’s own niche, and is introduced at a good pace. Variants can be unlocked in whatever order the player wants, though not too quickly as to be overwhelming. Everyone talks about the weapon interactions so much because it’s something really special and exciting. It feels good to pull off a railcoin, or discover projectile-boosting for the first time. Not a lot of other games can say they offer this level of depth with five guns. The enemies are varied, and there’s not a lot of “wrong” ways to kill them. Not to mention, Ultrakill is a rare FPS with good bosses. They’re more than just glorified bullet sponges, and their movesets pose a genuine threat that keeps the player on the run.

The level design is top-tier too, and it’s a shame I see it left out of a lot of people’s reviews. I love all the extremely red, fire and brimstone type hells as much as the next guy, but sometimes it all starts to blend together and get tiresome. Ultrakill’s levels are refreshing, unique, and memorable. They’re clearly in line with what’s described in Inferno, but it never limits itself on what hell “should” look like. I can, at a glance, identify every layer. I can even do the same for majority of the levels individually, it’s not just 2 or 4 straight levels of the exact same back to back. Prelude’s levels can kind of visually blend together though, because they were the earliest ones made, and there are 5 of them. Looks-wise, I know some people just aren’t about this style of graphics, and that’s fine. But I’ve always rejected the idea that extremely high-fidelity graphics have anything to do with good art direction.

Related is the music, which I’m safely putting in my unsorted top 10 game OSTs ever until the end of time. There are no misses. I said that every layer is visually distinct - and I also think that’s also true audially. Limbo’s music is completely distinct from Heresy’s, which is distinct from Wrath’s, which is distinct from Prelude’s, and so on. Yet no song ever feels like it belongs to a different game - everything is uniquely Ultrakill. On it’s own the music is amazing, but combined with the adrenaline and joy of playing, it’s elevated to a godlike feeling. 6-1, Jesus. Hakita is clearly a skilled composer, and so are his guest artists.

If you want lore, you can choose to pay attention to your surroundings and read text entries from terminals and sparsely placed books. There are a few voiced characters, and what they say gives more meaning and context to the world. But you don’t need to comb through every piece of information to understand the larger story. The very beginning of the game has the 3 most important sentences you need to know. The most this game does is a short text-based cutscene at the end of each act, to serve as an intermission and give the player a break. So far, there’s good characterization, interesting worldbuilding, and compelling themes that approach real-world parallels with maturity and nuance. The voice actors have also done such amazing performances, and they clearly enjoyed their time on the game.

And this is kind of an aside, but when people make claims or jokes about how gay a piece of media or art is, I always assume it’s exaggeration. I went into Act II assuming it would be only slightly gay. I was a fool. This is actually pretty gay. So, if you are gay, you should buy this game.

Final Verdict:

This action ULTRAKILL wants you to be able to come up with an overall way of viewing the problem in order to find a way to destroy the demons. It seems that the iron frame has been knocked down by the demons and they have appeared in the human world. Players need to come up with methods to destroy them quickly as well as coordinate with teammates perfectly. The game allows you to add new weapons and upgrade them to become more perfect for battles.