‘Metal: Hellsinger’ is Good, But It’s Missing Something

First-person shooters rarely grab my attention, but from the moment Metal: Hellsinger was announced, I was hooked. I downloaded the demo straight away, replaying it four or five times prior to the game’s full release in mid-September. Out of seemingly nowhere, Metal: Hellsinger became one of my most anticipated games of 2022. But after two play sessions, I’ve exhausted all Hellsinger has to offer, and I can’t help but feel disappointed, like the game is missing something.

I grew up listening to metal, from Trivium to Avenged Sevenfold, and my penchant for hardcore music has never fully left me. I distinctly remember my Tenacious D phase and the parodically satanic imagery associated with “Beelzebub: The Final Showdown,” amongst other devil-horned iconography in their works. The first few bands I played in were all variations of metal, as I spent my free time teaching myself my favorite riffs via online tablatures, honing my ability to play the guitar. Later in life, bands like Periphery would replace bands like Bullet For My Valentine as regular albums in my rotation. This is all to say that Metal: Hellsinger feels like the perfect callback to the formative music of my teenage and young adult years.

The visual aesthetic of metal appeals to me quite a bit less than the thumping music, however, and Metal: Hellsinger unfortunately leans in that predictably hellish direction. From the horned protagonist to the boiling lava pits and snowy peaks of abandoned stretches of hell, Metal: Hellsinger feels decidedly immature with its visual choices. I’m reminded of the countless times my friends asked me to try Doom, or the compelling critical reception to BPM: Bullets Per Minute – a strikingly similar game, and how I never gave either a proper chance because I am turned off by the characteristically boring design choices like demon hordes and flaming rocks. But the demo for Metal: Hellsinger was so instantly compelling that I eagerly set those personal tastes aside. 

The Day One Hype for Metal: Hellsinger

I bought Metal: Hellsinger on day one, ready to dive into a game that built upon the fantastic foundations laid by the catchy demo. Before heading home from work that day, I had “Stygia” from the soundtrack on loop, nodding along and singing with Alissa White’s soaring vocal melodies. Upon installation, I worked my way through the first three hells of Hellsinger, making my way back to the song that drew me in so rapidly. Paradoxically, that’s also where I stopped. I had found the level that I knew so well from the demo, satisfied myself by squashing my high score from previous attempts, and put the controller down for the day. (Perhaps this decision was motivated by a sudden desire to binge Cyberpunk: Edgerunners, but that’s an article for another time.)

With the obvious exception of the song I already knew and loved, I was crestfallen at my first play session with the full experience of Metal: Hellsinger. None of the other songs grabbed me, and the levels were shockingly linear, if not repetitive, in their design ethos. Perhaps that linearity is necessary due to the relationship between the game’s music and its mechanics, but there was no joy in seeing new environments – it was all self-similar in a way that didn’t strike me as merely cohesive, but uninspired. Hellsinger left a mixed first impression at best, but I wasn’t deterred from finishing it.

Challenge Arenas & Optional Rewards

In my next play session with Metal: Hellsinger, I decided to tackle the game’s side challenges, called Torments. As you complete each hell, you unlock the ability to pursue three challenge arenas tied around the anchor of that hell’s song. It’s my fault for picking the easiest difficulty in the game, but I found these challenges to be, well, not very challenging. I first-tried my way through the first six without a modicum of friction. To some extent, I enjoyed quickly cleaning up these arenas; completing them unlocks useful boons that you can use in your customized loadout before heading into the next hell. At the same time, however, they quickly grew stale as Hellsinger crams them all into a meager handful of arenas that add no visual variety to the environments when you revisit them. I enjoyed spending more time with my favored songs, as well as beefing up my loadout, but towards the second half of the game, I was inclined to entirely skip these challenges. 

The challenge arenas in Metal: Hellsinger involve keeping a timer afloat by rapidly killing enemies. For instance, you might start with ten seconds on the clock, tasked with “slaughtering” enemies to add seconds to your clock. Slaughtering involves severely damaging, but not killing enemies, before clicking the analog stick to zoom in quickly for a melee kill. In order to complete the challenge, you’ll have to wipe out a few dozen enemies of various toughness without letting the timer hit zero or losing your health. As an arcade experience, these challenges have the potential to be fun. They even reinforce necessary skills for the main game’s experience. But as far as their relationship to the overall game and its story, these challenges feel like an afterthought. 

To be fair to Hellsinger’s challenges, there is quite a bit of demonic lore dumped on the player prior to initiating each challenge. Some god, angel, demon, or devil – take your pick – was pissed off once, and here we are trapped in this arena, one might expect to learn. Strangely, though, these lore dumps offer more writing than nearly any scene in the main game itself. I found these moments of exposition grating, and they contributed nothing to the aspects that I enjoyed in the game to begin with – namely, the rhythm shooting and metal riffs. 

Underbaked Elements: Story & Mechanics

Troy Baker delivers nearly all the lines in the game, with some exceptions for a Judge character voiced by Jennifer Hale. I can’t help but think that Baker’s character, Pax, is the weakest performance of his career. Maybe it’s the monotone delivery, the satirically thick southern twang, or the writing itself, but I had to actively resist the urge to skip even these main story cutscenes by about halfway through the story. Metal: Hellsinger’s story halts the compelling relationship between music and gameplay in exchange for satanic fanfiction.

Unfortunately, even though my favorite aspects of Metal: Hellsinger were to be found in that music-gameplay relationship, I was astonished at how little the full game developed on that rock solid foundation by the time I reached the final boss. Hellsinger features half a dozen or so weapons, which range from shotgun to dual pistols to throwable boomerang blades, and so forth. You can select two weapons of your choice before starting the next hell. I dabbled at first with different gun combinations, but immediately found a combination that I preferred and was never remotely tempted to experiment further.

Each weapon has an overcharge ability where you unleash some sort of special attack once you fill up a meter from dealing damage. These special abilities, like the shotgun’s long burst or the boomerang’s cyclical tornado shield, are invaluable and worth using both strategically and often. But with the exception of one boss – the final boss – I never once had to ponder my moveset or attack pattern. Considering the nature of the boons you unlock to modify your loadout, I would have liked to see more customizability or engage with enemies that resisted certain weapons and specials. Such a design decision would be engaging even on the lowest difficulty.

The Rhythms of Monotony

Additionally, I was disappointed to see the game’s rhythm shooting mechanics never alter from the fundamental base introduced in the demo. In order to earn points and rack up combos in Metal: Hellsinger, you have to time your shots to a series of arrow icons that align with your reticle. Lining up a shot with those reticles will result in a “perfect” designation, earning you the most points, which can be further enhanced by keeping your streak alive. This streak maxes out at a 16 times multiplier, which brings out the vocals in the music – a satisfying reward for being precise and skilled with combat. But once you understand how this mechanic works, it never changes. Many of the songs are around similar tempos, and all of these note timings are delivered via simple quarter notes, so the mental effort of precisely timing your shots disappears almost instantly.

This stultification towards the shooting mechanics could have easily been avoided if they had become more varied and interesting. For example, if there was a single 6/8 song in the game, or even something fun like 5/4 and 7/8, that shift in time signature might feel like a tricky change. Or if shooting ever aligned with the kick drum’s syncopated patterns, it might be fun to squeeze in some eighth and sixteenth notes. Even dotted eighth notes, which many of the songs contain, would be just enough to keep me on my toes and make me pay attention to what I am doing. Instead, I found my finger tapping the right trigger button without ever skipping a beat unless I neglected to reload at the correct interval. And even then, I could just dash around until returning to mindless finger squeezing. 

The Highs and Lows of Boss Encounters

Each hell in Metal: Hellsinger culminates with a boss encounter, which alters the music, confines you to an arena, and pits you against a flying enemy that disappears and moves around the space. These boss fights quickly grow stale, literally copy-pasting the bosses until nearly the end of the game when it introduces a few copies that cannot be damaged. Suddenly you have to shoot until you register damage, unload into that tangible boss, before they all dissolve back into air, shuffling again. When this encounter finally happened, I found myself perking back up about my opinion on Hellsinger. I wish there was simply more boss variety in the way that I wish the shooting mechanics and level design varied more.

The final boss encounter is a well designed and truly fun test of all your skills. For the first time in the entire game, I realized that my strategy of shotgun and boomerang would not serve me during a specific long-range phase of the fight, and I died twice in a row figuring out what tactic would carry me through the penultimate phase. Uncharacteristically, I enjoyed the temporary disorientation as I puzzled together a path through this fight, and it serves as the most distinct and memorable moment in the game. The song that rips over the top of this encounter, “No Tomorrow,” carried by Serj Tankian’s idiosyncratic vocals, unexpectedly transported me to a third place between my childhood nostalgia and my contemporary love for indie games. All at once, everything clicked again, and I was back on the high that the demo left me with. I even replayed this boss encounter with two underutilized guns just to relive the delightful adrenaline that the song inspired in me. 

Does Metal: Hellsinger Have A Future?

I understand that not every encounter can be designed with as much thought, care, and poise as this final boss in Metal: Hellsinger. It also seems that the development team for Hellsinger is rather small and worked under tight constraints to produce this mid-priced game. I don’t want to disrespect the effort and craft that went into Hellsinger’s creation, I just firmly believe that the game we received is not as great as it ought to have been. Considering the juggernauts of talent involved with the music, as well as the high profile voice actors present in the cutscenes, it puzzles me that I felt nothing by the time the credits rolled.

After tearing this game apart a bit, I’d also like to suggest that the foundation laid here with Metal: Hellsinger has plenty of potential. Perhaps the team intends to introduce DLC levels and songs at some point, to which I can certainly imagine myself picking them up. If the game performs well, they might consider a sequel, which, if my considerations outlined above were taken into account, I think would yield something truly special. 

As it exists now, however, I think Metal: Hellsinger is good, but it’s missing something – a playable album in the manner that Sayonara Wild Hearts is, but without the variety to make it genuinely replayable. If a fellow metalhead asked if they should pick up Hellsinger, I would caution them with as many caveats as I’ve laid out above. But if they are looking for some headbanging tributes to the music they grew up loving, very few games can claim this degree of authenticity with respect to the genre that inspired it.

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