Finding The Balance
Ultros makes an immediate impression. Look at the images in this article, and you’ll quickly know why. With a psychedelic style that feels quite different from most similar games, you know within seconds of dropping into Ultros that this is something unique. The more you explore its world, the more you realize just how true that is.
After crash-landing your spaceship into a cosmic uterus holding a demonic being, your job is to keep it there. That’s not going to be easy, but as you explore this giant world, you’ll find that you have a few things on your side. The most promising is a time loop mechanic that allows you to play with time and reset things. Periodically during the game’s story, you’ll suddenly find yourself back at the very start of the game. While some things will remain, such as ways you manipulated the environment, other things, like abilities, will be reset. Seeing how these changes can impact the rather organic world you’re moving through can be both fascinating and disgusting in equal measure.
The first time things reset after a fierce boss battle, I was initially unsure if I’d done something wrong or if I had completed the section of the game that was available for me to play. I quickly realized, however, that I could explore things in a whole new way. Players will find a lot of options that this loop opens up. You can change your path on the skill tree, go after upgrades you previously grabbed, and explore parts of the map that were initially blocked but which your actions the first time through impacted. It’s a cool trick and does a great job of combining a sense of progression while introducing roguelike elements into the mix.
While offering a unique look and feel among Metroidvanias is definitely a great starting point, though, I did come away from my time with Ultros unsure if it will eventually offer everything I’m looking for in such a game. Combat feels interesting and is absolutely filled with moves and options. You can customize a great deal on each run, too, which players will appeal to roguelike fans while perhaps not fully connecting with other players. Still, I appreciated the environment and that several times during my playtime with the game Ultros managed to defy my expectations. Something as simple as starting the first area by having you go in the opposite direction of what players are used to seems small, but it puts you on your back foot and keeps you on your toes from the very start.
If I have a major concern, though, it would have to be the actual movement in Ultros. While the combat worked, and I was able to get through the early bosses without significant issues, something about my character’s movement never felt as organic as the game’s world. There are plenty of fast-moving enemies for you to take on, but my actions always felt just slightly slow. It didn’t stop me from enjoying the game entirely, but if the difficulty goes up significantly as I progress through the game, I could see these slightly slow controls turning into a major concern. Perhaps there will be ways to alleviate that as I progress, but I’m rarely a fan of games setting their starting mechanics to not feel right just so they can fix them later. Your character should feel good to control, and I’m not sure Ultros fully nails that yet. While I certainly hope that changes in time for its eventual release, a February release makes me nervous as that’s not something most developers fix overnight.
Despite those concerns, I came away from my time with Ultros eager to play more of it. This is an absolutely beautiful game with some fascinating ideas, and I want to see how they ultimately come together. If the feel of the main character can be tweaked just a bit, I feel like we could be looking at one of the most interesting games in the first few months of 2024.
