Metal Eden Review

Fans of the boomer shooter genre have already been eating well with the release of DOOM: The Dark Ages. Even beyond this year, there have been some great boomer shooters like Warhammer 40K: Boltgun and Selaco. What I am trying to say is that we aren’t exactly starved for choice. Reikon Games has sought to add to that with Metal Eden, a short, decently fun shooter that ultimately lacks the X factor to elevate it beyond just being a shooter.

Assuming the role of Aska, you are effectively a robotic super soldier known as a HYPER UNIT. Your goal is to delve into the depths of Moebius (an orbital city that has since turned hostile), and recover the COREs of the citizens who once resided within (effectively the hearts of people). It’s a pretty simple elevator pitch. You pick up guns and shoot down anyone who gets in your way. The story does try to be a little deeper than the surface-level plot it presents you with at the beginning, but it never feels particularly impactful, and its potential twists are incredibly obvious.

Metal Eden’s gameplay pitch is simple. Pick up a slowly increasing arsenal of weapons, then kill enemies. It never strays from this pitch. The gameplay itself is quite decent, however. The guns feel great to shoot, and the extra mechanic of armour breaking is a nice touch. Enemies often wear armour, preventing you from dealing meaningful damage to them. What beats armour? A good ol’ punch to the face. Using your melee on an enemy puts them in a vulnerable position where their armour takes considerably more damage than it otherwise would. These windows of vulnerability are critical to ensuring that you can effectively break through an enemy’s defences and subsequently put them down.

The game does an impressive job of ensuring its moment-to-moment gameplay is incredibly gratifying. Each gun is punchy, unique, and fun. The only issue I had with the arsenal of weapons is that, aside from the very first weapon, which has infinite ammo, each weapon’s ammo reserves are fairly limited. What ends up happening is that you consistently fall back to the very first weapon you start with once you have used some of the more powerful weapons to break through an enemy’s armour. Don’t get me wrong, the very first weapon is one of my favourites, and it vaguely reminded me of the suppressed SMG in Halo 3: ODST, which is always a good thing to remember, but it being a constant fallback weapon makes the weapon variety feel a tad undermined.

The game’s unique mechanic is CORE extraction. To put it simply, CORE extraction is effectively ripping out the mechanical hearts of your enemies and using them in one of two ways. You can elect to immediately throw at an enemy, putting them in the vulnerable position to deal high damage to their armour. Or, if that is not quite your cup of tea, you can instead absorb the CORE to temporarily amp yourself up. Doing this allows you to perform a super punch, which deals high damage and also leaves enemies in a vulnerable state like a melee normally would.

Weirdly enough, I found myself thoroughly enjoying most of the traversal sections. They’re nothing amazing, but they do a decent enough job of breaking up the gameplay and giving you some fun, albeit not particularly challenging, puzzles to get around. You have the wall running of Titanfall with the movement of DOOM as well as the grappling hook. On top of that, there are areas where you even roll around in a ball like in Metroid Prime, which was a nice surprise for me as I have been sorely waiting on Metroid Prime 4.

The encounter design mostly feels safe. Everything is about what you would expect from a boomer shooter like this. The quality of encounters is wholly reliant on the level design of each encounter, and while no levels ever reach the lows of some shooters, they also never quite reach any true heights either. It understands the basics of how boomer shooters should be but never feels compelled to go beyond the basics.

The boss encounters, however, were something that I did find myself quite fond of. If you were to argue that all the creative encounter design was spent on the boss encounters, I would believe it. These encounters make great use of the game’s traversal mechanics to stand out, and it works. I was a fan of how, especially with the final boss, using the movement and traversal improved these fights tremendously. Without them, the bosses would be rather dull.

The smaller progression systems are a pretty standard affair. In each level, there are many upgrade modules you can acquire for your character. These upgrades range from incredibly minor adjustments to significant overhauls. Alongside the upgrades for your character, there are also upgrades for each weapon in your arsenal. In addition to the gun you start with, each weapon has two upgrade paths, which determine the function of their alternate fires. If you have played any of the modern DOOM games, you would know exactly how this operates. This isn’t to imply that these upgrades aren’t cool or welcome; rather, it’s just an incredibly familiar system to deal with. In fact, some upgrades feel familiar, too. The game’s Plasma Rifle equivalent has a mode where it charges up as you fire and then can release a blast when it is ready. Granted, this blast is more of a freezing wave than the blast in id Software’s games, but it is still nonetheless eerily similar.

The game looks and runs pretty well, though. The sci-fi aesthetic is always welcome, and it is nice to see that Metal Eden understands that solid performance is extremely important when it comes to ensuring the fluidity of gameplay. There were some periods where the game struggled, mainly with high amounts of blood splatter or when you find yourself in damage fields on the floor during combat encounters, but aside from that, I was able to have everything cranked to the max and sat anywhere from 90 to 120 frames per second. I never had any crashes, but I did have the occasional hitch, which is honestly something I would just chalk up to NVIDIA drivers being junk nowadays. In fact, I had a smoother experience on the latest Studio Drivers than the latest Game Ready Drivers.