Metal: Hellsinger is a rhythm FPS, where your ability to shoot on the beat will enhance your gameplay experience. The more in sync you are with the rhythm, the more intense the music will become and the more destruction you will cause. In essence, the game is a love letter to fast-paced first-person shooters, especially Doom, and a tribute to metal music and the culture surrounding it.
You play as The Unknown, who is part human and part demon, seeking vengeance against the Red Judge. Alongside her is Pax, a talking skull, who helps narrate throughout the game since Unknown lost her voice. The only goal is to burst your way through the fiercest domains of Hell and slaughter hordes of demons that are in your way.
The story itself is purposefully vague, revealing small pieces of information until the end, and doesn’t play a significant factor in enjoying Metal: Hellsinger since in the end, it’s just another vengeance story. As Pax delivers the bulk of the narration and comments on what the pair are doing at the moment. The actual story is delivered between every combat arena and stage. These are substantial information dumps that can last around five minutes each. While interesting, these scenes could have been spread out more evenly across the game.
Gameplay has you mostly moving from one room to another before sealing you in and summoning demons to kill. Metal: Hellsinger offers basic movements like dodging and double jumping. Firing and dodging on beat improves your combo score, which increases your damage and adds new tracks to the song for each combo tier.
While killing demons, you can hear an instrumental version of songs playing but the catch is that there’s no vocal in the song until you hit the 16x Multiplier. Initially, the song starts off sounding sparse with the visual metronome in the crosshairs. As the player shoots on the beat, they’ll get good or perfect hits that can raise the multiplier. As the multiplier increases the sound fills out, increasing the guitar and bass volume with vocals kicking in once the 16x Multiplier is hit. This mechanic encourages the players to shoot to the beat, move around, and explore, as does the satisfaction you get when you get into a nice rhythm as the shots that ring out pair beautifully with the songs themselves.
Another factor that makes Metal: Hellsinger fun and thrilling is its “Demonic Arsenal” which offers a wide range of murderous weapons that range from a talking skull that spits out flames to dual revolvers dubbed “The Hounds”, each with their own ultimate ability that lets players many different ways to slaughter demons. Another cool mechanic is the “fast reload” when reloading “on beat” rewards you with a fast reload. Sometimes when enemies are weak, you can perform a finisher on the beat to rush to them and finish them with a melee kill. This doesn’t improve your combo meter, but the enemy will drop health.
Music plays an important role in setting the tone of The Unknown’s battle through Hell. The soundtrack of Metal: Hellsinger is its biggest star featuring the likes of Serk Tankian from System of a Down, Alissa White-Gluz from Arch Enemy, and more. Every track hits hard and fits the brutal visuals. Thoughtful touches such as the pillars of fire or glowing parts of enemies pulsing to the music further sell the aesthetics and tracks together.
Speaking in term of replayability, Metal: Hellsinger offers optional challenges after finishing a stage to upgrade your passive abilities. At the end of each stage, you are presented a breakdown of your points.
This is helpful with l since it lets you know which aspects of your gameplay to focus/improve more on. Not just that, a leaderboard is shown to compare how you did to other players.
As you progress more into the game, you start to see more cracks in the game. First, the overall level design comes across very barebone. The environments across all eight levels seem blurred together and have similar colour grading with uninteresting level design. Each level amounts to a series of arenas connected by hallways ending in a boss. The level designs have minor variations in verticality, objects, and layouts to make each one feel different, though they’re not varied enough to feel unique.
Speaking of enemies, there are technically some varieties of enemies, there are your basic grunt enemies and some that can fly or spit things. There’s not any enemy that requires certain tactics to kill them; I understand why not to include an enemy like that since the game is all about fast-paced action and doing something like that would ruin pacing a bit. At the same time, I think a few challenges here and there makes the players more engaged. On top of that, the design of bosses can be improved a lot more. By the end of the day, each boss is the same with different looks but does the same thing.
While Metal: Hellsinger does have its flaws, I believe it did a really good job of marrying 2 different genres of games. Overall, it is a pleasant blend of action and rhythm, allowing players to get lost in the mayhem of Hell. While a relatively short campaign might leave players wanting more, what’s already there is an excellent package that fans of rhythm and action will immediately agree is a classic.
Score: 7 of 10
Review on PC