After months of teasers from lead developer Arsi "Hakita" Patala, early access boomer shooter Ultrakill has gotten a complete visual overhaul of nearly every level, with the lone exception being the newest batch, 2023's four-level layer of Violence.
Patala first previewed the visual revamp last May with a walkthrough of the gussied-up new look for level 1-1 Heart of the Sunrise. "While our programmers are busy with major rewrites that will take a long time, me and [3D artist Victoria Holland] are doing a visual pass on the old levels to get them up to par with the later ones," Patala wrote in the description of the first showcase. "There will likely be some functional changes here and there, but the general geometry, layouts, and encounters will remain the same in almost all cases since they work fine as is."
In some of the areas, particularly Limbo, the changes might be more difficult to clock, but it's in an "as you remember it" kind of way—New Blood quips that "this will be Ultrakill grafix in 1999," so maybe think of the original art as more '97 to '98. A comparison video from New Blood helps illustrate the extent of the changes in some of the more subtly retouched areas.
I think my favorite is the overhauled skybox introduced to layer 2, Lust. The lore is that the humans of hell actually banded together to turn Lust into a quite lovely metropolis under the rule of wise and colossal King Minos. I think the city's been going downhill since the DIY hardcore scene petered out and it started getting Sweetgreens, but it definitely died when the angels of heaven intervened to punish mankind and enslave King Minos.
Old Lust was just a flat texture of a city viewed from, like, 30,000 feet underneath the layer's floating levels, while New Lust has a fully rendered 3D city, and the Punished "Venom" King Minos wandering around in the distance also has a lot more oomph and presence. The ick factor of Gluttony, which is set inside Minos' corpse, has been seriously dialed up with the new assets, and I appreciate how on one of my very favorite levels, 4-3 Ship of Fools, the team opted to increase the density of the yacht's 3D modeled details like tasteful statuary and other decadent decorations.
It's all reminiscent of Dusk's own "HD update" from last year, both in terms of scope and faithfulness to the original art style. The big difference, of course, is that Ultrakill is still in early access, leading to repeated ribbing by fans that we're getting Ultrakill Remastered before Ultrakill. But good things take time, and I've loved Ultrakill in early access—like Gloomwood and Fallen Aces, though, I'm holding off to not burn myself out on it too much before the full release.
Ultrakill's update also has one final surprise: Two remixed "encore" levels, a taste of what will otherwise be a post-launch feature. One looks like 2-1 but at night and the floor is lava, while the other seems to be a Prelude level but with an icy twist. According to New Blood, "They don't look anything like the levels they're based on, they don't play anything like the levels they're based on, and they're about 10x harder than the levels they're based on." The update's well-timed with a 33% off sale on Ultrakill as part of New Blood's 11th anniversary sale on Steam.
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