Metal: Hellsinger
Review
2025-02-22
As someone who broke their foot in a Between the Buried and Me mosh pit I am all for proper metal in video games whenever it makes the rare appearance. So I was quite excited to dive into one of them new-fangled "rhythm shooters" focused entirely on metal.
Metal: Hellsinger plays a bit like a rougher Doom Eternal with a rhythm-based shoot-on-the-beat mechanic added. It has a nice flow: do your loops of the levels, platforming, evading enemies, shooting on the beat, around and around till you kill everyone. But it's not a great flow. For instance there's a shield enemy that you basically can't touch with any weapon. Even running around them they just turn around to block your shots. This results in you basically just stopping to repeatedly shoot them until your bullets inexplicably hit them and completely breaks the momentum of the game. I found most of the roster of enemies to be similarly one-note and the levels to not really be cleanly laid out leading many of them to feel frustrating and clunky rather than Doom Eternal's fun spaces to explore and creatively "solve". Maybe it's unfair to compare it to Doom Eternal but fundamentally they're both games about mowing through hordes of demons with guns to a metal soundtrack and the rhythm mechanic doesn't separate them that much in my mind.
Arguably the music is the star of the show but then again if you know metalheads at all you know it's a genre that is rife with infighting and subjectivity. I'm personally more of a chuggy, breakdown-heavy, garbage deathcore or heady progressive metal/djent guy. What that means is I found the score to be...solid. Most of the tracks have vocals from the Dark Tranquility and Trivium guys and they're a bit too far on the "normie" spectrum for me personally. Annoyingly they added some Lorna Shore and Fit For An Autopsy vocal'd in the DLC that def hits better but I didn't play that.
Ok while I just complained a lot but it is good. I'm a child of the 90s; anything with Serj Tankian appearing in it is gonna get a thumbs up from yours truly. To sum it up, my enjoyment in mosh pit terms was the fun deathcore mosh pit where a fat shirtless guy windmills you in the back of the head one too many times versus the sublime experience of the perfect Meshuggah circle pit.
0 Likes
2024-12-14
Relistening to the soundtrack because I remember almost nothing of it. I apparently said it was "fantastic", which by video game standards for "metal" it is really good. Maybe I'm biased because I wish it went harder and there were some songs that fell flat. Serj Tankian was a surprise sick appearance. I'm a little sad they have the singers from Lorna Shore and Fit for an Autopsy only in the DLC. Those are actually metal as fuck.
Start review “as a true metalhead who broke their foot in a mosh pit before”
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Rhythm shooters are a somewhat new idea and one that has a lot of promise. I think Metal: Hellsinger is one of the first ones I've played that I really enjoyed. It's got a fantastic metal score with some legit vocalists lending their talents.
It plays a bit like Doom Eternal though not as tight. The guns feel good and with the rhythm is has a nice flow. But not a great flow. Enemies are kind of one note and don't really play off of each other like Doom Eternal. While encounters in DE would be incredibly challenging forcing you to become really excellent at aiming as well as navigating the levels making use of all the forms of movement they give you with jumps and grapple hooks and so forth, here the levels feel more frustrating than challenging. For instance there's a shield enemy that you basically can't touch with any weapon? Even running around them they just turn around to block your shots. This results in you basically just stopping to repeatedly shoot them until your bullets inexplicably hit them and completely breaks the momentum of the game.
The final boss of each level is another kind of lame thing. While they're varied and have different attack patterns and level layouts the song is the same for each one except for the last one. Incredibly odd for a game so focused on music. And the model is basically the same for each one. Couldn't we have gotten some different looking bosses? Maybe it was a budget thing and for a $20 game I can't really complain but it was odd.
But overall I had a lot of fun. I think it needs a lot of polish to truly be a GREAT game but I did have fun.