Ultra Age

At first, I was going to put a recommendation for this B-grade game. It has okay asset-based graphics, an okay story from Nier Automata, and a pretty solid battle system straight from DMC4. But during the final parts, specifically the 3rd maze with Atlas as the final boss, it got extremely frustrating. Atlas is a difficult boss, and the fact that you need to go through the whole labyrinth with tough enemies is tiring and depressing. Also, the achievements stopped working during Atlas's tries, so this goes for the second frustrating fact. Although, unlike Atlas, Deucalion was a much better boss and overall the conclusion of the story with potential continuation was okay, those two facts really turned the tide to the Not Recommend category. There are better slashers, not made of assets, that you can find.

They say imitation is the highest form of flattery, and while the character action game genre in general were an inspiration for Ultra Age, the similarities to Nier Automata border on plagiarism. To be fair though, it is one of my favorite game of all time, so not the worst game to copy homework from. It's an indie creation from the land of worse sushi called kimbab and ♥♥♥♥♥♥ kpop culture, despite being indie the presentation is surprisingly decent. Visuals are a big potential draw, but somehow the game remained very niche at the time of writing this review. The optimization, particle effects and animations are surprisingly top notch, what is pretty apparent however is the unimaginative environment design, I'm not even talking about drawing similarities from environments and camera shifts of automata, more so how dull a lot of the corridors and arenas are (especially in the bloody palace mode HOLY F***), the more you look around the more the cracks start to show, the feeling that it's a rushjob of copy pasted assets and clutter, plastered around a unity map, never quite goes away. The enemy visual design is not too exciting, the robots share very similar visuals, and biological enemies are a few repeated crystal animals, then some variants are just recolors. All in all, it's a very competent looking game at first glance, with low budget starting to show only once you start playing it. However we all know the visuals are not the most important, and gameplay wise it's a decent game, they have neat mechanics of their own, and some borrowed from the genre classics. Different timed combos, several weapon types, light air juggling, invincibility dodge, enhanced combos through leveling, enemy weaknesses to certain weapon types, Nero grapple, "devil trigger", and most uniquely weapon durability, with special attacks when you break them. There is not a style meter to keep you switching the weapons around, but both enemy weakness and durability heavily incentivize it regardless. You'd think that with the weapon amount there is going to be huge overlap in weakness exploiting, when enemy types are only 2 - biological and mechanical, but some weapons have special effects of their own that are handy to keep around, most notably gun sword to apply bleed, and lightning sword to apply shock. I'd say the enemy encounters are somewhat hit or miss, at times it feels like there is not enough time to ever do a combo without getting hit, so you might resort to safe attacks like parry-riposte, or invincibility triggering weapon breaks, at times there is also too many projectiles around, and unlike Automata - your little pod (yes, I'm not joking, you get a pod in this game too) cannot shoot these projectiles down. There are also some weirder mechanics, like a time of day skip, changing the day-night cycle, as well as refreshing enemies and loot pickups (those are of course the weapons and healing charges), or upgrades so dumb they feel borderline useless - like the looting with your grapple, when you still need to be somewhat close to loot anyway, so that's several upgrade points wasted, for a potential 1-2 seconds save sometimes, said upgrade also doesn't work on loot crates that contain "modules", which are just randomize stat upgrades. Story is surprisingly, not a 1 to 1 copy of automata, though it does borrow a bit from it, I didn't pay a lot of attention to it as writing was extremely unengaging, I recall the main character being a clone that wants a power of immortaility, which is probably gathered through unethical means, and you discover some ruins of ancient civilization with rogue AI around, as well as those crystal corruptions spread around the place. Your pod is also a mcguffin of some sort, I'd guess it makes immortality gathering process more efficient and even more unethical and genocidal, there is like 3-4 characters in the whole game, so it's not like there is much to work with. Lastly the audio, combat audio is nice, some action sequence music is decent rock stuff, volume mixing is not AS f***ed as I'd expect from a small indie project, that said, I do wish some attacks would have better audio tells before you get hit, some of them feel unsynced, some get drowned out etc., and with how many enemies they like to throw in the arena, surrounding you from all sides at times, it makes it a rough time, with how much camera turning you need to do, it might unironically be one of the few char action games that are easier to play on KB+M instead of a pad. Overall, it's a decent 6 hour action game, I didn't like it as much as Assault Spy, but I don't regret buying and playing it, you can probably pick it up at decent sales too. And there is a free dlc included now, that's just a bloody palace with some rogue-lite elements, it's a tad unbalanced, and feels like some HP upgrades have been cut from the mode, but it's not "unbeatable" or anything, just takes a tad to practice. Still, don't let the runtime fool you, I had the game running idle, I'd say I've played main game for like 6 hours and bloody palace for probably 10-12, so if you don't vibe with second mode, you get 1/3rd of total potential playtime.

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