Overview
Ultrakill features a lot of hidden abilities, features and tech that are either not obvious or are simply not told to the player. This guide is designed to inform you of such tech, or maybe just remind you in case you forgot about them.
Opening
Ultrakill features a lot of hidden abilities, features and tech that are either not obvious or are simply not told to the player. This guide is designed to inform you of such tech, or maybe just remind you in case you forgot about them. This will also incorporate the “Tips of the Day” and reiterate descriptions featured on the Store Machines at the start of levels. This guide is certainly not complete, so if you know of ones that I have missed, feel free to let me know about them in the comments, and they’ll might be added to the guide. I also might add info about the enemies if there’s an interest but this guide is already big enough without all of that. Like I said, if there’s interest, I’ll expand the guide. But for now, here’s all of the abilities that I am currently aware of that you can perform in game.
Basic stuff
Sliding can be used in order to dodge incoming attacks by sliding under or away from them. When it comes to avoiding attacks, while sliding is certainly not as effective as just normal dodging, it can be used regardless of your stamina. More importantly, sliding for extended periods will multiply any style points you gain up to a multiple of 3. This is very useful when trying to get a higher rank on a level, however it can be tricky to use. A slide will continue infinitely until you either let go of the slide button, dash, jump or hit a wall. You cannot change the direction of your slide while sliding, so be careful to not fall off ledges or slide into unseen enemies. Additionally, dashing while on the ground and then sliding immediately after will carry the momentum into the slide, allowing you to slide faster for a short time. Sliding into an upward ramp will also send you flying forward, and is actually needed for a secret on level 1-3.
Jumping is pretty simple. When in the air you can dash multiple times as your stamina constantly regenerates at a rate of 1 bar about every 1.5 seconds, and you can jump off of walls up to 3 times before needing to land and reset the wall jump count. You can also jump immediately after a dash in order to do a long jump in whatever direction you were dashing in. The momentum from this long jump can be put into your slide if you time it right, however it’s not terribly useful due to the amount of room you’d need to use it. Lastly, jumping immediately after performing a ground slam will allow you to do a Slam Bounce, causing you to jump high in the air. This amount of height gain depends on your height when you begin the ground slam. You can gain great height if you use wall jumps and ledges correctly.
Parrying is an important part of your abilities, and one you should practice at getting used to. Parrying is achieved by punching an enemy or projectile right before the hit lands with your Feedbacker arm. Parrying will deflect the attack back in the direction you punch towards, so the returning attack may miss. Most attacks in the game can be parried. The parry will usually kill weaker enemies out right and do large amounts of damage to the tougher foes and bosses. Parrying can only be done with either the Feedbacker or Shotgun, the latter of which only works on melee attacks. Punching also has more uses than just normal melee damage and Parrying. It can also be used to launch some of your own projectiles, such as shotgun shells and coins.
Weapons
Moving on to weapons, all of them have unique quirks that manage to keep them useful for various situations. The starting pistol for example, will always be useful, even during the later stages. These weapon quirks/tech and their usability keep the arena your own, and clever use and understanding of what they do will keep you alive and your style high.
The Revolver
The Revolver is your first gun. It’s a pistol that uses hitscan bullets, meaning that it’s attack is instant upon firing. Additionally, like another hitscan weapon further down the list, it does location based damage, so firing at an enemy’s head will do 2x the normal damage, and limb shots do 1.5x. The location of an enemy’s biggest weak spot is not always in the same place. The Schisms, for example, have their head located on their right shoulder. Additionally, when some enemies are charging their attacks, such as the Strays, shooting their forming attack/projectile with a hitscan weapon will cause an Interruption, causing the projectile to detonate in their face. This will cause similar damage and explosion as a parry.
The Piercer is the first variant for the revolver. Upon holding the alt fire key, letting go or firing normally will release a powerful 3-hit beam, essentially doing 3 times the normal damage. This beam is hitscan and pierces enemies (as the name implies) but is also capable of destroying glass.
The Marksman will allow you to flick out regenerating coins that can be shot midair, ricocheting your shot into the nearest enemy weak points. If a coin is shot and an enemy is charging an attack, it will instead redirect that ricochet into the charging attack, causing an interruption and doing more damage as a result. You can flick out multiple coins, one after another, and upon shooting one the shot will ricochet into the other coins, causing your style to increase even more. If you’ve got enough air time with the coin, you can shoot the coin with the Piercer variant’s charged shot (Thanks to Expired bread for reminding me of this one).
There is also a very useful technique for the coins called Split Shots. On the left you can see a drawing made by Ultrakill’s developer Hakita showing how the Split Shot works.
You can also punch your coins, however it can be a bit tricky. Just flicking a coin will send a coin flying forward, and while it is possible to hit it by dashing forward, turning around and punching, it’s certainly not ideal. Since the direction of the coin when it is flicked depends on the speed and direction you’re moving, my ideal way of performing this technique is to hold the back key for a half second and flick the coin. This will cause the coin to have little to no forward movement, allowing you to easily punch it. Punching a coin will send the coin flying at an enemy weak spot, and causing a Fistful of Dollars style additive. You can also punch or shoot the coin again as it will fly upward in the air after it hits an enemy. If you’re curious about a more in-depth look into the mechanics behind the coins and some additional advanced tech associated with them, check out this excellent video by HerbMessiah.
The Shotgun
The Shotgun is your second weapon. This gun uses projectiles instead of hit-scan attacks, so it’s not as reliable as the Revolver, however it is still very powerful. The most useful feature of the shotgun is the ability to punch your own shots. Punching shots is simple enough, simply do a punch IMMEDIATELY after firing the shotgun (not at the same time but just after) and it will perform a Projectile Boost, adding to your style meter and causing an explosion upon hitting something, be it an enemy or a wall. This tech is incredibly powerful if you can get the rhythm down, as said explosion does a hefty amount of damage akin to a projectile parry or interruption.
This is a very simple variant. By pressing the alt-fire key, you will “eject your core”. This is a fancy way of saying you fire out a grenade. Holding down the alt-fire key will charge the distance that the core will go. This variant is great for dealing with large clusters of weak enemies. Just pressing alt-fire with this variant is dangerous, as the core will kind of just flop right in front of you before exploding, so I highly recommend always holding down the charge. You can technically do a grenade jump with this by firing it at your feet, but it will send you flying in a somewhat random direction as well as doing 35 damage to yourself, so you really shouldn’t do it.
The Pump Charge variant works by repeatedly pressing the alt-fire key to charge your normal shot’s damage. The more charges you do, the less accurate you become. Pumping 3 times will put the shotgun in an overcharge state, which will just explode in your face and take 50 health. Switching off this variant or weapon will reset the charge state, so if you pump too many times, don’t worry. The variant without doing any pumps/the first charge is actually more accurate than the CE variant, but most likely does less damage. The second charge is equivalent to the CE variant, and the third charge is more damaging and less accurate than the previous charge. The fourth charge may seem useless considering it explodes in your face, but if you get up in an enemy’s face and explode, you’ll be able to gain back a decent amount of health from the blood they let out as a result. Additionally, if you fire the overcharge shot right after preforming a dash in a similar rhythm as the Projectile Boost, you can completely avoid the damage (clarified by Gamefriendly). This can be dangerous if you miss time it, but can deal lots of damage quickly if you can pull it off repeatably (thanks to LavenderHorns for this one). The explosive charge is also very useful on The Cyber Grind, as you can save yourself from falling off by using the explosion to launch yourself in the air and land back on the stage. It’s certainly saved a few of my runs.
Nailgun
The Nailgun is a simple yet hard to master weapon. As the name implies, this gun spits out nails at an alarmingly fast rate, which can deal high amounts of damage to enemies and bosses alike. However, the properties of these nails and their rate-of-fire is affected by which variant you use.
When equipped with this variant, you’ll note that the display on the Nailgun consists of an ammo counter and 3 icons below that. These icons are your magnets-nails. There can be up to 3 magnets out at the same time, and these magnets will stick to whatever surface they hit, including enemies. These magnets can be destroyed by either shooting them with hitscan weapons (such as the Revolver), letting their timer run out (which lasts about 12 seconds) or by shooting them with enough nails, as the nails have weight and will rapidly decrease the time the magnets can stay out before breaking. Once one magnet breaks, you’ll be able to fire another one instantly. Nails shot toward the magnet will gravitate toward them, and will orbit the magnet until they hit an enemy, or the magnet is destroyed. Only nails that haven’t hit a surface before gravitating will orbit these magnets, otherwise they will simply disappear. When multiple magnets are out at the same time, nails will orbit whichever they are closest to, or if the magnets themselves are close enough to each other, the nails will gravitate between them.
As for the ammo count, the Attractor has 100 nails it can shoot before it runs out, and it will begin recharging immediately after releasing the fire button. If you were to fire continuously with full ammo, you would run out in about 5 seconds. After that, it would take 28 seconds for the Nailgun to recharge 100 nails, so it takes about 5 seconds to regenerate only 17 nails. The nails will regenerate without the Attractor variant being equipped, so it is highly recommended to change variants or weapons during this time
On this variant, the Nailgun functions quite differently. On the display, you’ll see 1 large hollow bar and 2 smaller green bars. The large bar represents the Nailgun’s overheat gauge, which will become filled up when firing either on this variant or the other, and will begin emptying when not. This variant has an unlimited ammo capacity and starts out with a rate-of-fire equivalent to that of the Attractor’s. However once the overheat gauge is filled, the RoF will be cut in half. When pressing alt fire with the overheat gauge having some capacity, the Nailgun will shoot a burst of red-hot nails at an extremely high rate. This burst will last until the overheat gauge is empty, which happens after at a faster rate than normal during the burst. Since the time the burst lasts is relative to how filled the overheat gauge is, it is highly recommended to only alt fire when the overheat gauge is full.
The two smaller gauges are the heatsink gauges. These represent how many times you can alt fire in a row without needing to wait for a recharge. Speaking of recharging, it takes 10 seconds for a single gauge to recharge. The gauge will only recharge when not firing, and that includes when firing the other variant. Additionally, the Nailgun’s normal fire rate after using both charges will be drastically decreased and pretty much useless until a single heatsink refills, so you’ll want to switch to the other variant or change weapons regardless. Lastly, the nails launched by the Overheat charge will home-in on the magnet shot in the Attractor Variant (added in at the request of Mayor Ignaeon).
Railgun
The Railgun is an extremely powerful but slow to recharge weapon. This weapon functions a bit differently than the other weapons, in that the alt-fire will instead do a zoom-in as opposed to an attack. Instead, the primary fire is changed depending on what variation you have equipped. Regardless of the variant, it’ll take 15 seconds before you’ll be able to fire off another shot, so be sure to switch weapons during the recharge.
This is a basic Railgun shot. Shooting will cause a large beam to fire out of the Railgun that will pierce all enemies in its path and does quite a lot of damage while doing so. This variant also has a fun tech where if you shoot a coin from the Marksman Revolver with this variant, the beam will ricochet. It’s quite hard since you must switch fast enough from one gun to the other, but it’s very cool and damaging when you pull it off. Oddly, the store also says to not use this Variant in water, however as of now there is no repercussion when doing so.
This variant allows for a drill to be fired from the Railgun that does damage overtime. It does about the same damage as the Electric, but it’s primary use is to regain health, as the enemy it hits will be constantly taking damage and bleeding as a result.
This variant fires an explosive beam that will do damage in a decently large area where it hits. The shot from this variant can also be ricocheted via a coin like the Electric variant (confirmed by the dev/Hakita). It’s best used for crowds of enemies. This variant is a reference to the Malicious Face enemy type, who will also perform an attack very similar to this.
Arms
There are 2 arm variants currently available in the game, one that you start with and one you acquire later on.
The Feedbacker is your starting arm. Unlike the other arm, this one is faster and able to perform parries, including projectile boosts and coin punches.
This arm is slower than the Feedbacker, but does more damage and knockback. By holding down the punch button with this arm, you will perform a shockwave, will launch enemies away and kill lesser foes. Unlike the Feedback, you cannot perform any kind of parry, so be sure to switch back when you need to, however the Knucklesblaster’s shockwave can redirect projectiles.
Conclusion
And with that, you now know everything I know about the abilities of V1. As I mentioned before, if there’s anything I missed, please let me know. Do also tell me if you want me to cover the enemies as well. It’ll be quite a bit of work but I’m happy to do it if enough people want it. Anyway, Happy Ultrakilling.