Metal Eden
Review
A lot of style, a little less substance.
by Jordan Helsley
reviewed on PC
Fighting With Style
With inspiration from modern fast-paced shooters, Metal Eden tries to focus on tight gunplay and fast movement around combat arenas, which are the main focus of the gameplay. The music kicks in, the expositional dialogue stops, and the little voice in your head even announces new waves for you, as you gear up to test out your new or newly upgraded weapons and abilities. The problem is that for much of the game's eight missions, the spaces are boring. Later missions focus more on using abilities like wall running and grappling, but most of the combat arenas end up being relatively flat spaces with things like ammo and health pickups floating above the fight, forcing you to slowly jetpack your way up for them, rather than using the suite of movement abilities to direct the action yourself. And this is highlighted because the later levels improve their design.
It's painfully obvious that the game is meant to be played on the hardest difficulties. Normal barely offers a challenge in most situations, and the hidden collectibles in the game are 1 ups. While the two hardest difficulties bring suitable chaos and challenge, they also expose the combat system's other weaknesses. The running, sliding, and wall running is nice, but your character doesn't have nearly the speed needed to make you feel like the ultimate machine you're made out to be while dealing with these challenges. Movement isn't slow by any means, but it ends up getting sidelined by other combat mechanics. Success depends more on maximizing melee targets, weapon rotations, and upgraded abilities (like increased ammo drops on certain kills) than on actually moving around the map. Because enemies have only armored or unarmored resistances, and you've got multiple tools to deal with either, it doesn't push the player nearly as far as it should. If the act of switching weapons was a tad bit faster that might be more enjoyable, but it would still feel counter to what the game wants to be.
Curious Decisions
One of your primary abilities to deal with armored enemy protections is a move called the Core Rip. Aska splits open her left hand between the two middle fingers and pulls the core out of an unarmored enemy, which can then be lobbed at other enemies like a grenade or consumed for a temporary buff to your melee which damages those armored enemies. It's a cool feature, and a pretty gnarly visual, but it comes standard with a 30-second cooldown, which feels far too long for a shooter that's trying to up the pace. An upgrade can cut this cooldown in half, and most fights include an instant-recharge pickup, but even these pickups draw attention to another issue.
Pickups in combat arenas always appear in the same locations. The health is along this wall, the recharge is under the middle bridge, the armor is on the ramp over there, stuff like that. If you're trying to utilize the movement techniques to avoid the gunshots and leaping melee enemies you're going to end up in less of a flow state and more of a tedious merry-go-round pathing through each of these locations. Juggling weapons, resistances, and chaos can't overcome the static nature of pickup placement and the gameplay they require.
The static pickup placement seems driven by visual clutter concerns rather than level design philosophy. With so many enemies creating visual chaos, players need predictable pickup locations to avoid being overwhelmed. While the vibrant cyberpunk style looks good in a vacuum, when enemies attack en masse, they blur together into visual noise rather than distinct targets, which makes identifying anything to pick up that much harder. Because of this, the most efficient strategy seems to be discovering the loop in the first wave of combat so you can deal with the rest.
Taking It All In
Outside of a few cutscenes, which have an even better, almost discordant art style, most story exposition occurs between combat arenas while riding magnetic rails (which require the player to jump between lines while listening to dialogue) through the vast and varied city or wandering through corridors by a number of voices in your head. They talk a lot, and are voice acted well, but they don't say much at all. It's a step short of being complete nonsense, and surely isn't the reason to play the game. To make matters worse, it builds up relatively slow, especially when combined with the gameplay, and suddenly speeds towards the unsatisfying end just as you're given your full toolkit and shown what the level design can truly pull off.
The final couple of levels are where the gameplay finally comes together. You get to fully utilize the guns you've upgraded to their full potential, the secondary fires you've chosen with those upgrades, and the passive and active skills of your character. Fighting in the seventh mission feels vastly different from the first, and that's a great thing, but the experience is so heavily weighted towards the buildup that it feels like a missed opportunity. It took me roughly five hours to work through the first six levels, and an hour for the last two. A few of those interior levels also feature gameplay inexplicably centered around transforming into a ball and rolling around levels, further slowing down the gameplay, with the only conceit being patches of lava that would hurt your human form, rather than utilizing the movement abilities for platforming action as some of the later levels do. By the time I was enjoying the options at my disposal the game was over, and it came with an unsatisfying final boss.
A Missed Opportunity
The combination of the visual design and the story setup make Metal Eden an enticing experience before even booting it up. And while it tries to blend that sci-fi world with fast-paced combat centered around parkour and hot-swapping weapons, the pieces don't fit together tight enough to be enjoyable for a long enough percentage of its short runtime. When the credits roll it feels unfinished, and at times throughout it feels misguided. When you've got significant upgrades, inside of the later levels, it approaches a satisfying shooter experience, it's just a shame that it isn't at least a few levels longer, which would make the package feel more complete. A few issues can be softened with some polish, by tweaking values and cooldowns or fixing the way you sometimes jarringly mantle a ledge to the side that you can't see when you jump, but the largest ones would require an adjustment to the design philosophy overall.
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5.0
fun score
Pros
Visually beautiful and layered world, that comes with player choice in upgrade paths and difficulty levels. Later levels successfully demonstrate the game's potential when movement abilities, upgraded weapons, and level design finally work together.
Cons
Static pickup placement, visual clutter, and excessive cooldowns undermine the fast-paced movement mechanics the game is built around.
