Diluvian Ultra is a Doom-style shooter (the genre that people have decided to call “Boomer Shooters,” because we must not acknowledge the existence of Gen X) in which you are Attila, a prince of a species called Diluvians. It’s not really clear how the other Diluvians look or act, because there’s only one other left, and while Attila is a skull-faced demon man, the other survivor, Cathryn, is a hot lady witch. Attila is called Lord of Swarms and his primary ranged weapon is a pistol bug pet he names Bella, so his weaponry might be at least partially unique to him, which means his appearance might be, too. Attila awakens on his tombship after it is invaded by space marines and he must go on a rampage through ten-ish levels death metal album covers to defeat them, with most of the game taking place on the tombship, a giant living ship torn from the surface of Mars and flung across the stars eons ago, mostly a living thing but with chunks of Martian bedrock, especially in the outer shell.
The plot has sort of a role reversal thing going on, with Attila looking a bit like an enemy from Doom might, fighting foes some of whom look kind of like Doom Guy, and starting out in the depths of an alien Hellscape and steadily fighting his way through several different environments of the tombship before finally striking at the space marines’ cruiser in the finale, in reverse of how a shooter might normally start you out in some kind of sci-fi science/military facility and take you into some alien Hellscape for the finale. Other than that theme, the plot is present, but not really anything to write home about, especially since the game has released only one chapter out of three. It’s only a year and a half out from its original release, which isn’t quite “abandon hope” levels of dead, but for a game that’s already got its engine and most of its enemies worked out, and only needs new levels and a handful of new enemies and weapons to keep things fresh, a year and a half is getting to be a worryingly long development time.
The plot as it is mostly just introduces Attila and the invaders, and that Cathryn has betrayed Attila to the invaders, but is running some larger scheme. Exactly what that scheme is does not get explained in the first chapter.
Gameplay-wise, I’m not in a great position to comment because I’ve never played a single game of this genre all the way through, played Doom as a child at a friend’s house because it was the 90s and Doom was big and I can’t recall how far I got into it but it can’t have been far, and also played a mod for one of these games made by Yahtzee and didn’t even finish that. So I’m not completely without experience, but I can fit all of my experience into a single run-on sentence.
And that means that while I think the armor/health divide is a cool new feature, it’s possible that it isn’t. Some weapons deal armor damage while others deal health damage, and I think health damage affects armor and health equally, with the balancing factor being that weapons that only affect armor tend to deal much more damage. The squire bug pistol deals health damage, but the impaler (basically a semi-automatic rifle) does about four times as much, while only affecting armor. The impaler was my weapon of choice, so I’d have to switch to the pistol to finish off the last shot or two of an enemy’s health after destroying their armor.
Attila has separate health and armor as well, and enemies will also deal health and armor damage, indicated by red or yellow projectiles, respectively. Just like the player’s, enemy red projectiles can damage health, while yellow projectiles cannot. However, red damage takes out all exposed red health with a single hit. This means if your armor is reduced to zero, a single red projectile will kill you instantly. Your armor level can’t go above your health level, either. Your health is a bar and I have no idea what numbers are attached to it in the code, but by way of example, say you have 10 HP and AP, you get knocked down to 7 AP, then take a shot of health damage, now you’re at 7 HP and 7 AP – that means you’re at maximum armor, so any armor pickups are now useless. Armor pickups are much more common than health pickups, and certain enemy types drop armor pickups when damaged or killed, so you can zoom around hoovering up armor pickups to rebuild your defenses as long as you don’t get hit by a red attack.
In practice, I found this didn’t affect how I played as much as the way my damage types affected enemy defenses. It’s not like there was ever a situation where I’d be dodging out of a yellow projectile and into a red one or vice-versa, so I’d just try to avoid attacks in general, and lose some combination of armor and health whenever one hit me, and which was which was mostly out of my control. Eventually I unlocked upgrades that let me convert bio-ammo, what my impaler used, into armor, which made it more relevant. Just like you can duck behind cover to reload before rejoining the fray, you can also duck behind cover to re-armor, but it costs ammo for my preferred weapon (and bio-ammo is also used for the chain gun, and the reason I didn’t like it as much as the impaler is precisely because it’s an ammo hog). There’s some timing and risk-reward to that.
I might’ve gotten more out of the game’s health/armor distinction if I’d played at a higher difficulty. Normal didn’t push me very hard – the game has a system where dying consumes upgrade points and resets you to the last checkpoint, with enemies still damaged, and the only time I ever had to restart a level altogether is when I hadn’t gotten to the first checkpoint yet when I died, something that happened occasionally in the final levels, which aren’t shy about throwing some of the most intense firefights at you early on, and which can put the checkpoints in somewhat out of the way places. I never found it difficult to locate a checkpoint at all, but they were sometimes sufficiently out of the way that I had to slug it out through multiple firefights before finding them. Once I had a checkpoint, I was never in much danger. The game’s upgrades aren’t that powerful, so I found it never stung much to keep a large amount of upgrade points in reserve in case of a tricky firefight, and I only needed such a cautious reserve once, against the first appearance of a “Varangian guard,” a twelve-foot tall mech boss that shows up twice. The guard itself is not that threatening, but there are swarms of regular enemies in the same arena, it’s difficult to keep track of them all, and some of them hit like a truck.
I like this system – the limited continues being tied to weapon upgrades means that I don’t feel like dying is totally consequence-free, especially since I will eventually run out, the weapon upgrades are good enough to be noticeable but not so good that you’ll end up in a death spiral if you miss them, and while the game was easy enough on Normal difficulty that I felt like I was never pushing the mechanics too hard, there are higher difficulty levels for people who want that and you could always challenge yourself to beat each level with no deaths if that’s what you want. As is usually the case with this kind of thing, making a hard game means you’re betting everything on your mechanics being worth taking the time to master, and that’s a bet that many games lose on.
I also tried to play Scorn, but while it does an amazing job of being an explorable HR Giger illustration, I’ve run into a bunch of bugs in it where my ability to interact with the environment properly breaks, I couldn’t fix the latest one after about fifteen minutes of effort, and I decided that was all the trouble I was willing to go to. Pretty similar fate as Grime: Loved the aesthetic, was having a reasonably good time with the gameplay, and then there was a game-breaking bug in the controls.
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