Ultra Mission Review

Gamers of a certain age, or just those who have an interest in the heritage of our wonderful hobby, will likely remember the Bally arcade title Berzerk. Whilst often cited as the game which paved the way for the twin-stick shooter, it’s also fondly remembered as one of the first games to use procedurally-generated levels and digitised speech. This might not seem like anything massive nowadays, but in 1980 it was a massive deal.

I’ll tell you who certainly does remember Berzerk, and that’s Gumbo Machine, developer of Ultra Mission. This is the indie developer’s second major release, and its first on Steam. The title is essentially a carbon copy of the 42-year-old game, right down to the low-fidelity sampled speech of enemies and walls that kill you if you touch them. The graphics have been updated of course, bringing them right in line with modern standards if you squint a bit and turn the brightness right down. If you look at them properly, they look more like they’ve been ripped from one of the floppies of the Windows Entertainment Pack,circa 1992. Nobody ever said you can’t mix nostalgia. At least, if they did, Gumbo Machine did not get the memo about it.

I've seen more diversity at a Trump rally...

Gameplay-wise, this is pretty much identical to its inspiration. You are in a maze and you have to get from one end to the other whilst avoiding being shot by robots or touching the walls that are apparently electrified because reasons. To speed you along, a homing robot will chase you if you spend too long in a level, although whereas this was an indestructible enemy in Berzerk, in Ultra Mission it can be killed but explodes into bullets when you do so, meaning you have to dodge out of the way. This adds surprisingly little to the game, and in fact once you’ve mastered the art of killing this enemy type, you can take your time and leisurely walk around killing the other robots. The urgency that “Evil Otto” caused in Berzerk was one of the things that made it an exciting game, so the slight change makes Ultra Mission less appealing than the game it clones.

In addition to making the game easier than its arcade counterpart by changing the behaviour of its most infamous enemy, Gumbo Machine has also added in a new patrolling enemy type that, like the Evil Otto clone, also explodes into a hail of bullets. This one however, does so entirely at random. Because enemies in the game can kill each other with friendly fire, this means that from about level 12 or so, there’s no need to actually engage any of the robots. You can instead simply hang about at the entrance to the level for a few seconds and let one of the exploding robots set off a chain reaction that invariably wipes out most of the playfield. To say that this removes a little of the small amount of challenge that was in the game is an understatement. Ultra Mission is about as challenging as brushing your teeth and sadly it’s slightly less enjoyable than drinking orange juice after doing so. 

Note how some of the robots are so bored they've started staring at the walls.

The lack of a challenge isn’t the only issue, there are numerous bugs in the game that make it frustrating. The most common one is that sometimes you shoot an enemy and whilst it makes the “has been shot” animation, it just sits there with an air of smug invincibility and invariably shoots you right back. When this happens, you do die: the bug only ever works in the enemy’s favour. On the upside, sometimes enemies just magically disappear which I suppose helps redress the balance. 

The “sampled speech” that plays whenever you kill a robot or one kills you gets incredibly grating very quickly. Whilst it may have been charming to hear a semi-intelligible gurgle coming out of the speakers in 1980, in 2022 it just makes the game sound cheap. If I want to listen to low quality nonsense being repeated ad-nauseum then I’m pretty sure that I can find a party political broadcast online somewhere. The music is OK I guess, but not particularly memorable — I couldn’t whistle it if you asked me right now for example. No need to kill these enemies, the one in the bottom right is about to do it for me.

I genuinely wanted to like this game, and it gives me very little pleasure to speak badly about it, but there’s just very little to love. It’s a rip-off of a very old game and it doesn’t do what is a very simple concept as well as the game that it’s ripping off. Between the total lack of challenge, lazy graphics, and irritating bugs, I simply cannot recommend Ultra Mission and that makes me sad. Just set up an emulator and play the original Berzerk instead.