The maddest shooters of 2024 and 2020 join forces, as Ultrakill crosses over into Mullet Madjack
You can keep your CODs and your BLOPSes and your live-service shooters that could poof out of existence at any moment. Give me a lurid cyberpunk world, comical killing animations, and a protagonist with the retro sensibilities of Duke Nukem (minus the outmoded attitudes towards women), and you've got my attention. Mullet Madjack ticks all those boxes, amplifying its intensity via a roguelite structure and the jaw-clenching hook of having to kill an enemy every 10 seconds, lest you drop dead.
It's good vicious fun, and it's just gotten even better, thanks to an update that includes a crossover with fellow super-speedy shooter Ultrakill. The crossover comes as part of Madjack's new Boss Rush Mode, which sees you trying to obliterate its procession of mechs, cyber-samurai, and other 'billionaire robots' that run the show in this dopamine-driven world. The Boss Rush mode is linked to a global leaderboard, so you'll get to compare your robo-bliterating feats with other players around the world.
Once you shoot, slash, and hatchet your way through the game's existing bosses in Boss Rush Mode, you'll get to a final confrontation with Utrakill's big bad V2, the cycloptic red 'Supreme Machine', armed with a shotgun and an arm that can reel you in Scorpion-style.
Mullet Madjack is a blast, though with the disclaimer that it is a roguelite, which seems to be a bit of a marmite genre these days. That means that you'll get to load your Madjack up with plenty of cool randomised powerups, but when you die (and you'll die a lot), you restart back from the first of the game's 10 levels. If that tickles your dopamine receptors, then good news, because the game is 25% off on Steam and GOG (just under $15/£13) at the moment, meaning now's as good a time as any to grab it.