Not if that demo is anything to go by. Shoddy gunplay, no real encounter placement (enemies are just continually teleported in right in front of you), level design so linear and on rails it makes even a Call of Duty campaign look labyrinthine by comparison, poor sound design, really bad readability on the attacks and movement of enemies, obnoxious visual effects that fill the entire screen and obscure enemies right in front of you.
We're about to witness a new wave of first-person shooters which no longer emphasize long-term strategy and resource management, but twitch action and short-term tactics instead. Where instead of worrying only about survival, these new games will also reward you for playing more efficiently and utilizing the full extent of your toolkit, and looking cool while doing it. Where instead of 'cerebral' gameplay the emphasis lies rather on a more arcade-ish high mechanical execution level and twitch skill. Or to put it simply, going from Dark Souls to DMC.
It makes no sense to judge these new games using the boomer shooters of yore as an objective standard for all FPS games to adhere; they're merely different design philosophies with different goals, and is why ULTRAKILL required a different approach to level design and health/ammo. It makes as much sense to say that the focus on exploration and secrets and resources in Apogee platformers is the reason why they're superior over the linear gauntlets that are most NES platformers. Take any random game in any other genre and consider whether adding in elements of limited ammo and health pick-ups would magically improve it if it didn't have them already.
Regarding ULTRAKILL itself, it's a game that asks of some creativity on the player's part, since just going for survival is kinda easy. You're given all these tools to kill enemies in cool ways: you can toss coins in the air and shoot them to make them ricochet at enemies, you can do a ground slam to launch enemies in the air, you're given a score bonus for using weapons you just switched out in order to encourage weapon variety, you can even parry your own shotgun grenade for increased effect. And there's more to come.
You'd be surprised how well made the sound design is; one of the vendor screen tips even tells you to listen to sounds in order to keep track of what's happening around you. All ranged attacks have a distinct wind-up sound, and some bosses have an unique wind-up sound for each one of their attacks. Concerning readability, all of the retro post-processing effects and excessive amounts of gore can be disabled, on top of an option that lets you display all enemies as a silhouette of a single color.
Also, is this mostly bitching about the graphics I read? For shame, Codex.