If you’re one of those online disgruntled people who constantly babbles about the difficulty of the game, keep your eyes open – this one’s for you. Metal: Hellsinger, when played well, is a tricky game with a steep learning curve, and it doesn’t hesitate to throw you into a pit and knock you over until you can barely get up. Even the first level can be very embarrassing if you don’t have a sense of time and rhythm. To succeed in hell, you need to keep time.
Of course, this is nothing new: BPM: Bullets Per Minute, Crypt of the Necrodancer, Cadence of Hyrule, and Before the Echo have been popularizing the genre over the past few years — for those of us who like to shake our heads and nod in time, no Indiscriminate murder of tons of chewable games. But few games do it all like Metal: Hellsinger.
Even if you don’t like metal, there is value here. As a game, you can easily activate a sense of fluidity by listening to the explosive beats of 4/4 and execute your subtle moves that empower you and make you truly feel like an unbreakable master of war. Even better, if you keep your multiplier high by doing everything in time to the beat and closing time, you’ll “win” some vocal tracks with well-known industry names.
Dodge, shoot, jump, shoot, dodge, shoot, jump, reload. boom. You kill some kind of whirlwind mage and your multiplier soars to 16x. Suddenly, in addition to the constantly playing beats and the fuzzy guitar layers you get by hitting an 8x multiplier, you hear Serj Tankian of System of a Down join the hustle – singing some staccato crap on top of it all , cheers for your continued use of his specific brand of octave vibrato.
The whole premise of this game is that you are the eponymous hell singer whose voice has been stolen by one of hell’s judges. For some reason, you’re armed with a skeleton with a heavy Texan accent, traversing the circles of hell, restoring your voice and fulfilling an ancient prophecy. As the story about the damned in hell goes, it’s swamp-standard, full of tropes, and papery window decorations for what the game is really about: kill shit in time.
This is no criticism: seven main levels – each with its own dedicated track – you’ve played through with its own quirks: whether it’s enemies in a particular formation, combat puzzles you need to overcome, or the last The level of cookie-cutter bosses. If you’ve played (nu)Doom or a similar hardcore shooter, you know what’s going on here: you’ve got pistols, shotguns, some wild crossbows, and even a skull that you can grab after killing everyone Live time available to enemies. Soft enough to soften a target and you can complete them by executing them, which will restore your life. Like I said, it’s all doomsday.
The innovation is in how the game forces you to keep time; shooting does less damage (nearly zero at higher levels), and taking damage resets all the perks and boons you’ve accumulated while slicing and dicing in hell . It’s your responsibility, then, to learn maneuverability, use your weapons in time, and get the perfect reload by doing anything on the beat. Tap your feet, flip the trigger of your pad, nod your head, and take out an enemy. Flush, repeat, and earn vocals for the tracks you’re playing – when all combined, it’s a very rare FPS catnip, even reminiscent of Doom 2016 at its best.
However, Metal: Hellsinger also has problems. I can be forgiven for being overly dry or lacking meaningful gameplay beyond the seven core levels, but things get frustrating when UX issues start to seep into your actual enjoyment of the game. You can choose to set the visual and auditory sync rate at the start of the game, but I (and others I’ve talked to reviewing this game) had issues with out-of-sync and calibration.
Sometimes, cocking your shotgun completely on time and reloading it to the beat can cause you to lose your chain, simply because the always-present rhythm reticle in the center of the screen is off for some reason. I even play games with a metronome (yes, I’m annoyed by that) and notice that playing white ticks sometimes makes me lose my streak. So you need to try to distract yourself and listen to music instead – hey, at least it’s basically great!
Metal: Hellsinger is a good time, if not for a short time. Hard as a nail and hard-earned, fueled by some of the best names in the heavy music world, The Outsider and Funcom have made a game worth every second of your time — even if it’s just one game long. There are more epic edgy albums out there. Knowledge and fun in the rhythm shooter genre, plagued by some calibration and UI issues, this romp through hell is both satisfying and frustrating – not even hearing the melodious pitch and raspy growl of Trivium’s Matt Heafy can offset this.
