And that’s not even touching on the bosses, which are predictably beefy as hell and have patterns that allow for almost no margin of error.Īs for the story… I don’t fuckin’ know, man. Coupled with the fact that it only takes three hits to send you back to the last checkpoint, it’s going to take you a load of bullshit deaths to get anywhere in this game. Then there are flying enemies which love nothing more than to approach from angles you can’t aim at. Walking enemies will constantly zoom towards you from either side with hardly any warning, and almost always take at least two hits to dispatch. Some games could make this work, I suppose, but Ultionus instead decides to be “hard as nails” in the nails-on-chalkboard agonizing way. Your character is slow, she can’t move while shooting, there are huge delays between her shots (which only get worse the longer you try to shoot at once), and she can only aim straight ahead and slightly up and ahead. The issue here is that because it exists as an homage to some ancient game I’ve never heard of, it controls worse than the Castlevania Adventure on the old GameBoy. You shuffle your top-heavy lass through rather open levels, dodging threats with her floaty jump and blasting enemies with her ray gun. Ultionus is primarily a side-scrolling platformer, though there are a few space shoot-em-up levels.
We’ll get to the story later, because the gameplay needs to take center stage here. Ultionus definitely suffers from this sort of short-sighted design, and then goes and layers a bunch of other terrible ideas on top of it, like some kind of foul garbage lasagna. Honestly very few of them age well, and those that don’t are usually held back by designs or mechanics that should have remained in a bygone era. It sounds like it should be the opposite, except that classic games are often a product of their time. Making an homage to a classic game is often harder than coming up with something new, and I don’t think many people realize that.
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