My goodness, Ultra Vortek must rate as one of the worst beat ’em ups of all time!

Originally released for the Atari Jaguar in 1995, Ultra Vortek is something of a Mortal Kombat ‘tribute’, meaning: it’s an over-the-top, ultra-violent fighting game with digitised characters. Except in this the characters look terrible. In Mortal Kombat they were mostly good.

I don’t know what developer Beyond Games were thinking when they made this. The backdrops in some of the levels look like they were painted by a 16 year old art student and then scanned into the game. The pink cave level looks particularly hideous.

Gameplay too is tremendously sucky. It doesn’t matter how many moves each character has, if it doesn’t feel like the fighters are connecting when they hit each other, then the game is a failure. Combine sucky gameplay with cruddy graphics and appalling typography and you get Ultra Vortek.

With games this bad, it’s no wonder the Jaguar went belly-up as quickly as it did.

More: Ultra Vortek on Wikipedia