Anonymous asked:

how accessible is ultrakill for someone not terribly good at videogames? because it looks like it fucks severely but I generally have a pretty bad time with games that require super quick reflexes... are there difficulty settings or is it like, go all in all the time?

shuttershocky answered:

I’m glad you asked, as this is something I’ve wanted to post about for a while.

While Ultrakill’s default is pretty difficult (it’s heavily inspired by DMC after all, which is incredibly difficult to actually get good at) There’s actually quite a lot of accessibility settings you can tweak to make the game perfectly playable to even new time gamers.

First off there’s the Difficulty Settings: Harmless, Lenient, Standard, and Violence.

Harmless gives you double the health (200 instead of 100) and massively slows down enemy attacks to the point where even a very slow reflex should let you get out of the way. It also disables special moves on some bosses and special enemies.

Lenient’s a bump up in difficulty where you got standard health and enemies will actually try to hit you now, but they’re still slow and some enemies will still take it easy on you.

Standard is standard everything (obviously). Enemies are moving at normal speed, they got all their attacks, and theyll actually do a decent job of killing you.

Violence is sped up. Enemies move much faster, are more aggressive, and even gain new behaviors (like rage modes, modified special attacks, etc) to make it the hardest mode.

Apart from the difficulty settings, Ultrakill has 3 layers of assists: Minor Assists, Major Assists, and Cheats.

Minor Assists can be turned on and used without penalties. These are usually stuff like “ turn on enemy silhouettes” so you can always see enemies better, but very notably, Minor Assists includes Auto-Aim, and a bar from 0% to Fullscreen. This means that you can set an aim assist from minorly helping you lock on to targets if your mouse drifts close, to covering the entire screen, perfectly shooting targets with 100% accuracy regardless of your aim. This can be done without any penalties whatsoever, meaning you can equip a full aim bot all you like.

Major Assists are settings that mess harder with the game balance. You can set how much damage you take (even move it down to 0% to make you invincible!), set the Game Speed (100% is normal, 50% means everything moves at half speed), and other random useful bits like enabling infinite stamina or disabling weapon freshness (basically, the game lowers your style if you constantly stick to just one weapon, this setting can disable that). While you can finish stages this way and get scored, using Major Assists disables getting P (perfect) ranks on stages. This is notable, because P ranking all the stages is how you unlock the secret superbosses. You’ll have to learn how to beat stages with just minor assists if you want to meet these.

Cheats are cheat settings that are less about helping you beat the game and more for the developers to test stuff. This gives you access to things like spawning specific enemies, blinding all enemies so they stand still, making enemies invincible, that sort of stuff, so you really don’t need these if you’re just after playing the game, since Major Assists can literally make you invincible. However, it can be fun to turn on certain cheats like disabling weapon cooldowns or despawning all enemies on the map so you can freely explore it, just note that these sometimes break the game. To activate cheats, enter the Konami code (up up down down left right left right B A). If you play a stage with cheats activated, you get NO SCORE for a stage.

If you find the game’s rapid pace and aggressive gameplay intimidating, you can go through the game on one of the lower difficulties with Major Assists turned on to reduce the damage you gain, and once you’re confident you know a stage inside and out, clear it again with only auto-aim from Minor Assists turned on to get the P rank if you really wish to fight the superbosses.

Ultrakill is all about playing as stylishly as possible, but what that actually means can be entirely defined by you! Slow down the game speed, reduce damage taken, bring along a teeny tiny aim assist or go full aimbot with every weapon, you can tweak it exactly how you want!

And if you ever want to push yourself on certain skills (maybe fighting certain enemies or movement techniques), the game also has a Sandbox mode where you can place whatever stage objects, hazards, and enemies you like to practice on. I like to spend time in the sandbox learning the exact parry timings on different enemy attacks, as well as experimenting with different ways to approach them!