Though there’s some inherent suspicion to be had when you see an Early Access game that isn’t pushing out its 1.0 build no matter what, some of these unfinished projects go beyond any such qualms. Take the amazing ULTRAKILL, for one, which receive🔯d an out-of-the-blue graphics revamp just now.
I feel like there’s something to be said about the sheer scope and quality of ULTRAKILL‘s content updates, specifically. For one, they usually come out completely unexpected. On top of that, they’re also usually jam-packed with content, making it all too easy to jump back in and start gunning down demons and angels alike. As part of the all-new (and appropriately titled) ULTRA_REVAMP update, however, you may well want to start replaying the game from the very start.
ULTRAKILL’s ULTRA_REVAMP update is an unexpected boost to performance, visual quality, and content
Though I imagine you’d be hard-pressed to find many ULTRAKILL fans who felt like the game needed a visual revamp, it’s happened, and it rules. This didn’t just occur on a whim from the developers, either, as there’s a valid technical reason for the frankly humongous number of upgrades ULTRAKILL has just received: “much of ULTRAKILL’s codebase was very messy, especially the enemy behaviors. So much so that not only would it make it harder for us (and modders) to work on the game in the future, but even for us to do some of the new things we wanted to do in Layer 8,” explains from the dev.
Basically, it’s going to take some time still for Layer 8 to be fully wrapped up, so the developers decided it was time to bring the remainder of the game up-to-spec with the fancy upcoming content: “Hakita and Victoria decided to use [the time programmers took to rework enemy behaviors] to REVAMP a lot of the visuals from the previous layers to bring them up to par artistically to where the game has reached by Layer 7.”
The video featured above is a tad too fast for it all to make sense, granted, so I’ve got a second official showcase for you to gaze upon:
The good news doesn’t stop with the fact that ULTRAKILL now looks much, much fancier than ever before. The game now also runs about twice as fast in most situations, as per the developers’ claims, which should be particularly handy if you’ve got a high refresh rate monitor eager to render upwards of 400 FPS of ULTRAKILL brutality. Neat!
If you’ve already played ULTRAKILL‘s existing content to death, the new ULTRA_REVAMP update’s got you covered on the new-level side of things, too. The update includes two fancy new (and super difficult) Encore levels. Here’s the exact explanation from the developers as to how Encores work: “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.”
Promising stuff, no? We now even have a rough outline of what’s coming next for ULTRAKILL. The next major content update is going to be Layer 8: Fraud, and the update after that is the aptly titled “Grand Finale”, which is presumably the 1.0 release. More Encore levels will be coming out post-1.0, too. All in all, then, excellent news across the board. Time to dive back into ULTRAKILL once again, I suppose.
Published: Feb 25, 2025 06:02 am