So I played The Ultimatest Battle (TUB) which looked cool to me and caught my interest with its description, ”Blurring the lines between Worms, Team Fortress 2 and Super Smash Brothers, is where you will find The Ultimatest Battle, a 2D real-time arena shooter with a heavy dose of Wackiness!”, so when I read this I got all excited and from looking at the trailer and screenshots I got charmed by the art.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=giAWVuq77oA
So let’s see how the game actually is.
Storyline
In TUB you play as “Nubs” who are little human-like creatures. The Nubs are divided into two factions “the Reds” and “ the Blues”. At the end of the tutorial the narrator tells you: “They have always hated each other, that is just how it is”. So the story is very limiting but as this is a PvP only game this is no big deal.
Gameplay
TUB is a 2D arena/platform shooter where you can choose between 6 classes to battle in a variety of game modes, some of them being kind of cool and unique. Each class is customizable with different weapons and cosmetics, all weapons have different stats and some of them even have special abilities, this is by far my favorite part of the game.
Something I noticed is that the devs continuously repeat that this game is not pay-to-win but looking at the cash shop in the game the weapons available for real money are very strong and do give you a clear edge over your opponents. So I can only believe the person making those statements was completely sarcastic.
But the gameplay was actually the biggest letdown of this game. To me the game just does not feel right, the core concept of the game is really interesting but it was not executed very well. The movement feels unpolished and clunky. You are too slow in my opinion and I constantly got stuck behind small edges and the tiniest objects and jumping just sometimes did not work.
The overall pacing of the game also feels too slow, together with the movement being awkward the cooldowns feel way too long, some basic abilities have cooldowns above 10 seconds, and some attacks that can be charged take 2 seconds to charge which is way too long. At first sight, the classes all look unique but after playing a little you realize they share many similarities the only unique and fun class, in my opinion, was the ninja who can go invisible and has a dash.
But what really bothers me is something a lot of games these days do wrong.
The game focused too much on a lot of content instead of making the core of the game better first. A wide variety of game modes can be fun but some of them are bland and when the game itself does not feel right a lot of boring content is not going to make it better.
Graphics
The overall presentation of The Ultimatest Battle is alright. The art has its charm and the user interface looks pretty good. The art is inconsistent though, some of the maps have a good vibe to them and have detailed backgrounds and props in them while others are bland and feel empty. However, overall I enjoyed the look of the game.
Sound
The sound design of the game is pretty average, nothing fancy but good enough for indie titles like these. Although again it was a little inconsistent with the quality of some sounds being much better than others but nothing to really complain about.
Replayability
So as a multiplayer only, PvP game The Ultimatest Battle potentially does have a lot of replay value, provided that you like the game a lot, and I know there are people who really like TUB.
In the end, I did have a little fun with TUB, but after a couple of hours, it got worse and worse. But as I stated before there are people who really like this game. So check out The Ultimatest Battle on Steam, it is free anyway, and maybe you will like it. The game still has a lot of potential and it does have an interesting concept, but the devs really need to work hard to make this a great game.
