Eat My Ass, Retro Circlejerking Fuckwads

Yall got your heads so far up your asses, I don’t think you’d know a real game if it punched you in your gosh damned mouth.

I enjoy retro games. They’re good. NES, SNES, arcade shit even. Donkey Kong, Space Invaders, whatever the fuck. Pac-Man. I’m cool with that. I’ll stick a quarter in the slot, give it a whirl.

But if you’re seriously gonna pay 10 whole mother fucking dollars on some arcade-ass shit nowadays, that’s 40 whole quarters, yall need to rethink what you’re paying for.

Ultratron is an alright game, available on just about every major platform. PS4, Xbone, PC, Wii U, you name it. Pretty good shoot-em-up, nice arcade-style game. Very colorful, the action is intense. It’s definitely a bullet-hell at points. You get to shoot your way through a bunch of levels, which are all actually the same level because you’re stuck in the same arena for the entirety of the game. But you’ll get to fight a couple bosses, and it’s really great.

Ever play Robotron? It’s kinda like that. Literally. That’s probably why they called it Ultratron, so people would say “hey, I remember that arcade game, here’s ten dollars”. And then they would make 10 dollars.

Ultratron does some great things to pull the genre forward, and yet blatantly ignores how far the genre has come since then. It’s kinda like Blockbuster.

You stick around in the arena, fighting waves of enemies. Killing them gets you money for upgrades, extra health or stronger guns, things like that. You can buy turrets to set around, and even extra robots to fight alongside you that can also be upgraded. That’s pretty much the game’s claim to fame, it’s like an arcade game but not because you can do that in it.

Aside from that, it’s your usual arcade shit. Bosses are alright, there’s some little mini-game segment things. It’s ultra flashy, always a million things happening on screen at the same time. If you have epilepsy you’ll probably die if you play this or something. And you can collect fruit. Like Pac-Man.

And that’s pretty much it.

Ultratron doesn’t do anything fantastic. Ultratron doesn’t do anything great, or anything to blow you away. In fact, it goes out of its way to not impress you at every turn. It’s fun as an arcade-style bullet-hell, but it does absolutely nothing to break the mold.

The mold is what Ultratron is playing up on. The whole point of Ultratron is that it’s Robotron but with a couple modern things like upgradeable weapons and more flashy special effects. And that’s fine, you know, they had a vision and they went out of their way to make it happen. It’s a modern Robotron.

But Robotron can go fuck itself, for 10 whole dollars. The fuck you mean? I’ve played more impressive games at Chuck E. Cheese. And everything there costs only one token. That’s 25 cents. I wouldn’t blow more than a dollar on this game. Yeah, there’s a lot of flashy lights and shit. But it’s literally a fucking arcade game.

Would you blow 40 fucking Chuck E. Cheese tokens to play a fucking 80’s ass arcade game? Because I wouldn’t. I’m not denying that it’s a decent experience, but it’s a decent, cheap experience. I spent maybe an hour on this shit and was done with it. Maybe less than an hour.

There’s a strong lack of content here. Anyone praising this as “fantastic” and “how you do twin-stick shooters” is full of shit. This is the bare minimum of what equates a “modern twin stick shooter”. It’s a modern arcade game. Big fucking deal. The biggest draw to the game is that you need to unfocus your eyes to play it because there’s always a clusterfuck of lights and shit going on. And that’s not even a good thing for some people.

If I had the choice between playing this game at Chuck E. Cheese and playing that stupid game where you gotta stop the light in the middle of the thing to get a million tickets? I’d play the stupid ticket game. And Chuck E. Cheese ain’t even got decent prizes anymore.

Chuck E. can take his thousand ticket lava lamp, plug it in, and sit on it. Cheap-ass Ratatouille mother fucker.