I’ve become really obsessed with games that let you do stylish moves and combos. Usually, these games will have a style meter displayed in the corner that lets you know how you’re doing, and this can end up being tallied into a high score system. Some games will let you compare if you’ve beaten your previous scores, and even let you compare on leaderboards with your friends or against online players.
So real quick, a style meter is generally a mechanic that shows either Points and/or Letter-Grade scores while you are fighting enemies. Dealing damage tends to increase your style meter, performing combos or specific moves will increase it further, and taking damage will usually lower your style meter.
Specifically I wanna talk about Ultrakill
Ultrakill directly takes inspirations from the Devil May Cry series, touting itself as “devil may quake”, and takes the core ideas of a Boomer Shooter and adds an intense level of interconnectivity. Boomer Shooters to me tend to have a giant arsenal of guns, each providing fairly unique options, that all can be equipped simultaneously, but they generally don’t interact with each other. Ultrakill spins this by letting you combo each gun into each other against enemies.
For example, early on you get a Revolver that tosses coins. Shooting a coin will cause that attack to bounce towards enemies, dealing bonus damage, and if you get the right timing it can even double revolver shots (Split Coining i think). You can combo multiple coins that with the game’s Railcannon to cause a single rail to bounce through the same enemy multiple times, while boosting its damage, often one-shotting most mini-boss enemies.
Mechanics like these are each marked in the game’s Style Meter. Performing a special combo such as one of these will add bonus points to your Style Meter and also add a little pop up on the combo you performed, such as +ULTRARICOSHOT for combining the Coin Revolver with a Railcannon shot (or any other gun). You can view an extensive list of each Style Bonus on this page here that goes into more detail and lists each mechanic on a chart.
Now a style-meter is not an exact measure of “skill” or “optimal gameplay”. To me, its an indicator from the developers on if you are engaging with the game in the way they want you to. Ultrakill gives you style bonuses for swapping weapons and combining their special moves, which discourages sticking to a single gun or playstyle. Their style meter has a Score Multiplier, ranging from 0% to 150%. Equipping a new weapon gives you a Fresh bonus of 150%, while spamming the same weapon reduces this down to Used (100%), Stale (50%) and Dull (0%). The only way to recover freshness is to keep dealing damage with other weapons. You also gain multipliers for moving fast mid-air and using movement abilities (up to 300%).
Lastly, the higher your Style Ranking, the more healing you get. In Ultrakill, you can basically heal from damage you deal to nearby enemies. Taking damage reduces your max HP temporarily reducing the effectiveness of your healing (via hard damage), but if you are playing Stylishly, the penalties of hard damage can be lowered or completely removed at max rank.
This means that you get Positive Reinforcement (high score), that encourages you to combo (tends to make you more successful), that will also make you harder to kill (by increasing your healing).
Speedrunners and number crunchers will find the most optimal way to play a game, often times disengaging with certain systems to abuse others. This will sometimes lead to them performing stylish combos, in that case Ultrakill has added more Style Bonuses and tweaked mechanics to reflect the communities findings. Other times they will find that certain moves, items, or characters arent optimal, and will avoid using them. Developers can’t entirely stop this from happening unless they treat their game like a spreadsheet, but they can push mechanics to everyone else, and i think the Style Meter can be a great way of doing that.
does anyone have any other good examples of style meters and how they display tricks or enable gameplay? Ive only really played DMC5, but i did buy 1-4 and was planning on marathoning those soon.