ULTRAKILL’s “Full Arsenal” Update Made Me Fall In Love With It All Over Again

With the resurgence of old-school FPSes that call back to the classic era of first-person shooters, we have seen many new fantastic faces over the years. Starting from DUSK, which kicked off this renaissance, to having newer fantastic shooters like HROT, Deadlink, and Forgive Me Father. However, even in the sea of these shooters that are all incredible in their own right, one of them reigns supreme over all: ULTRAKILL. 

The name alone is enough to make it stand out. ULTRAKILL is an insane title for a game but also ironically the most fitting name for what it is. It is crazy, it’s stylish, it’s loud and relentless. It is Ultra. It is a game where you can chain your shotgun blasts with your melee to punch your shotgun shells, so they explode on contact. It’s an evolution for the genre.

One of my favorite things over the past few years has been checking up on Ultrakill with each new update and doing all of the latest content. Usually, I play it for a few hours and once I’ve seen all of the new stuff I put it back down.

However, that hasn’t been the case with Ultrakill’s newest update. The “Full Arsenal” update is deceptively massive. On the outside, it doesn’t seem like a big update, but if you dig deeper into it’s a behemoth of an update that adds a ton of new content, including a new level that I’ll choose not to spoil here. Let’s start with the biggest new addition. 

Brutal Difficulty 

Perhaps the biggest addition to Ultrakill is its newest “Brutal” difficulty. Unlike Violent, Brutal is designed to be played with your entire arsenal carried over on a second playthrough and it shows. Enemies are much faster and more lethal, displaying entirely new attacks and behaviors to take you down.

The biggest change applies to the bosses who can now take a lot more damage before they go down. Couple that with them being extra aggressive and way faster and you quickly have a challenge that is fittingly…brutal.

It was a much-needed update. As someone who had gone ahead and P-ranked everything in the game up to that point on Violent, I didn’t feel much reason to go back to Ultrakill except if I wanted to mess around in the Cybergrind once in a while. A major reason for that is a large chunk of the game just feels painfully easy to go through once you’re at that point. 

With Brutal I am once again chipping my way through all of the levels trying to P-Rank everything. It has been a fantastic time that has made me regain a lot of my muscle memory all the while making me a significantly better player. Ultrakill feels like a new game again, and I once again feel spirited away to when I was still on my first playthrough slowly learning the ropes and getting better at the game. 

As it stands, I’m already beyond excited for what awaits us in the final difficulty of the game: Ultrakill Must Die. A name that’s a cheeky nod to the hardest difficulty in the Devil May Cry games: Dante Must Die. 

The Full Arsenal

With “The Full Arsenal” update, V1 has gotten a bunch of new additions in his backpack. These include a “Sawed-On” Shotgun, which is the normal shotgun with a chainsaw that can be launched into enemies for massive damage, and the “Firestarter” Rocket launcher which can douse enemies in oil and set them on fire. The biggest addition, however, is the alternate shotgun, a close-range jackhammer that scales damage with your speed, a perfect weapon for players who love moving as fast as possible during combat encounters. 

While the Jackhammer isn’t something I particularly love so far, I’m having a blast with the Sawed-on shotgun and the Firestarter. The Firestarter’s ability to set up walls of flame and set anything on fire makes it fantastic for dealing with both crowds of fodder as well as tanky enemies thanks to increased overall damage against enemies that are on fire. 

The Power Of The Slab

My favorite addition in the entire arsenal though is less of an addition and more of a balance change, but it’s so significant to me that it increased my enjoyment of the game tenfold. It’s a buff to one of the game’s weapons, the alternate Marksman revolver, which was previously among the weakest weapons in the game.

Each weapon in Ultrakill has an alternate version that functions drastically differently from the base version. For the revolver, it’s the “Slab Revolver“, a slower, significantly more powerful revolver that does massive single-shot damage. The catch is that each time you fire it, you have to go through a small 1-2 second animation of pulling the hammer back again.

Cue the Alt-Marksman buff. 

THE BUFFED SLAB MARKSMAN
byu/Shortstuff368 inUltrakill

With this buff, you can have the Alt revolver equipped on all 3 variants of the revolver. Shoot and quick swap through the first two revolvers, equip the alt-marksman, toss a coin, and get a perfect shot to cancel the recovery time of all equipped revolvers. 

The Slab Revolver is already one of the most satisfying weapons in Ultrakill and a personal favorite of mine thanks to its powerful feedback and sound. With the newest update it has now become my new obsession to play around with in the Cybergrind. 

With the “Full Arsenal” update, Ultrakill makes a bold comeback with tons of new additions, and it’s impossible to overstate how happy I am.