After the wildly psychedelic metroidvania Ultros debuted on PC and PlayStation last year, February 2025 sees it debut on Xbox as well. We couldn’t just, not review it, right?
Acid bomb
I remember having seen this game before, perhaps at one of the many gaming events that have substituted E3 in recent years, but I never really looked into what it is. All I know is, the game’s visual style is just gorgeous, and it absolutely stands out from the masses. It’s a mixture of psychedelic imagery, akin to an acid trip while listening prog rock from the 70’s, and all sorts of cosmic horror. The stylized sci-fi constructions, the bright, predominantly warm colours, the organic shapes of what are, for the most part, inorganic objects. It’s very much inspired by the surrealist style of Hotline Miami, but it goes further.
I’m no art critic, I’m just a modest videogame reviewer, so I don’t really have the proper reference points to describe the art behind Ultros. Yet, if I had to make comparisons, you can find hints of surrealism that you’d encounter in a Banksy or Dalì piece, with colour choices reminiscent of Yayoi Kusama’s creations. Don’t just trust my limited knowledge of art however, and check out screenshots and videos of the game yourself – it’s easily one of the most mesmerizing visual designs I’ve seen in a videogame, all generation. And despite the busy visuals, the black-tinted foreground hides a lot of the unnecessary areas and helps the player focus on what they should actually look at. It’s just a well-designed art design all around.
Paranoid Metroid
The game initially seems to follow the most traditional of metroidvania tropes, at least in terms of level design. Interconnected rooms and corridors sprawl in any direction from a 2D sidescroller room, with a convenient map that shows every area we already encountered and what is our current goal. The player immediately finds destructible walls that can not yet be brought down, platforms that are too high up to reach just yet. You know the drill: the game relies on some level of backtracking, re-exploring previously seen locations, but next time with brand new skills that allow the protagonist to access areas that previously were just outside of their reach.
For the most part, the dungeon design is rather safe indeed. Basic platforming segments, a few moving pillars, the usual metroidvania classic of forcing the player to take the long route, only to get back via a very visible and very obvious shortcut that gets unlocked for later, making future trips to said location a breeze. It’s formulaic perhaps to a fault, as I’ve encountered very little that I’ve not done in a hundred other metroidvania games before. The same can be said for the combat, which has a few fun quirks, such as the ability of dodge an attack at the last second to then allow us to hit a weakpoint from behind an enemy. This mechanic will be used a ton in boss battles, for example. But all around, the combat model is rather safe, and in fact, most fights are pretty easy too, with only a couple bosses taking me more than a few attempts.
Is it a roguelike or not?
Death is not a huge issue – back to a checkpoint we go. However, at various points in the game, a new time loop begins, resetting players’ progress, their abilities and so forth. You see, the game almost tricks the player into thinking it’s a roguelike, or roguelite if you prefer, but it’s really not. There’s no randomly generated areas, RNG-defined skills or anything of the sort. It’s all part of the game’s cosmic lore, though it has its ups and downs.
Indeed, I’ve found this part of Ultros to be a bit hit and miss. At first, it seemed like a way to inflate the game’s length, forcing the player to go through sequences they already have finished and mastered before. Later on, however, it becomes evident this is all done to serve a narrative and game design purpose alike. Even the game’s world evolves in reaction to new time loops, as the trees (more on those later) we plant keep growing and reshaping our surroundings. Before long, the player will also be able to salvage some unlocked abilities, decreasing that one annoyance as well. It’s easy to feel gobsmacked after progress resets the first couple times – I know I felt so. I did push through, however, and Ultros made it worth the effort.
Planting the seed
In terms of gameplay, Ultros mostly plays it safe. Yet, progress later in the game becomes more and more intriguing, with various levels of player agency involved. As the player moves through the game world, a seemingly living spaceship (hence the mixture of organic and inorganic aspects), they can eventually start planting seeds, which will generate interconnected plants and trees. These not only offer barriers and platforms, but also brand new powers, which will then be usable in movement and combat alike. Figuring out how to best use and combine these powers becomes the core, instead of the mindbendingly difficult platforming and combat that characterizes a lot of late game segments in other metroidvania titles. Some of these powers can be a little clunky and uncomfortable to use at first, but it doesn’t take too long to get used to them.
Related to the plants and seeds, the game has interesting mechanic tied to food, which usually boils down to plants and mystical fruit. These can be used to heal, a move that takes a couple seconds and that can be risky to do during combat, or more importantly to upgrade your skills and unlock new ones. A skill tree very specifically shows how much and which kind of nutrients are needed to unlock certain abilities, so the player is tasked with optimizing what they consume. These unlocks are one of the things the player loses when dying, but it doesn’t take long to get back to a satisfying power level after a death.
Style over substance?
The journey in Ultros is also not a solitary one, as the player will meet various mostly humanoid yet alien characters they can interact with. There’s even a handful of humorous exchanges and situations, breaking the pace of an otherwise somewhat bleak atmosphere. These are some of the highlights of the story, which took me around 10 hours to beat. The game features a graphics and a performance mode – an unusual sight for a 2D game. Whichever mode I chose, however, I did encounter some noticeable tearing when moving across some of the bigger rooms, while the framerate itself was pretty stable.
Exploring these psychedelic locations, interacting with its unique world, trying the weird powers of the plants and optimizing the builds via nutrients is where Ultros really shines – unfortunately, much of the exploration and combat is a bit basic, with the early hours of the game in particular being a little bit of a slog. My main gripe is exactly that: by adhering to common metroidvania tropes and not making a particularly engaging combat or dungeon design, the game’s most unique aspects don’t quite shine as much as they could. My advice is: come for the gorgeous psychedelic artstyle and stay for the second half of the game, even if it means muscling through the relatively stale early hours. It may not be the most satisfying metroidvania around, but it certainly is a unique experience that I recommend to fans of the genre.
Ultros
Played on
Xbox Series X
PROS
- Incredible psychedelic artstyle
- Intriguing rebirth mechanic
- Planting seeds is an interesting twist
CONS
- Very formulaic metroidvania features
- Takes a couple hours to truly get going
- A few technical hiccups
