Has this ever happened to you, when you are playing a game filled with frenetic intense action, like Doom, or Devil May Cry, there is a moment, when the music is at its most feverish, and you enter a sort of Zen State, where your actions and the music synergise. The supershot gun blasts the head off an imp in time with a kick drum, and for a brief while everything just feels right. You find yourself tapping your foot along or nodding your head as you play. Sometimes the music just hits just right and I find myself pressing X in turn-based games in time with the soundtrack. It’s a weird habit I know. So what happens when a group of people decide to make a game where that feeling, that fusion of gameplay and music is the point? Well, you end up with a game like Metal Hellsinger, a game where you battle through the hordes of hell, chasing those moments where it all comes together, but is it good, and was the platinum worth the effort? Let’s find out.
Metal Hellsinger opens with a simple premise. You are a prisoner of hell, referred to as The Unknown, and your voice has been ripped away from you. To get it back, you must rip and tear your way through the hordes of the abyss. Its story is simple and metal in a very cliche-expected way, and is little more than a backdrop for the gameplay, but there is a charm and earnestness about it. This is in part due to the Paz, a talking skull that can shoot fireballs, who narrates the journey with charming southern drawl. Paz explains early on that there is a rhythm to hells, and if we can keep to that rhythm, nothing will stand in your way as you fight to claim your voice back.
Metal Hellsinger wears its Doom inspiration on its sleeve, combining fast movement with intense shooting against hordes of demonic foes. As you progress through the different levels, your arsenal expands as you collect demonic weapons to help you blast your foes apart. These enemies come fast and plentiful and on normal difficulty are challenging enough to kill you if you aren’t careful. If this were all there was to the game, it would be a good but not great FPS game. What sets this game apart though, is the rhythmic component to the gameplay.
As you play, chevrons that move across the screen as you play in a 4/4 beat. If you take an action just as these hit the middle of the screen around your crosshairs, you will be rewarded for staying on beat. If you are shooting, which 9 out of 10 times you will be, your damage gets a boost, if you are reloading, and you press the reload button again on the appropriately marked beat you will do a quick reload so you can get back into the action faster.
Each gun has a slightly different timing on the beat that you need to learn, Paz is the easiest to master, he never needs reloading and when you shoot him on the beat, he will get a damage boost, and the shooting animation for him looks like he is headbanging, which is so great to watch. The shotgun, Persephone is shot on every other beat, but when you hit the beat right, it damages multiple enemies at once. When you deal enough damage to enemies they will sometimes go into a sort of downed state, and you can do a slaughter attack that needs to be on beat to succeed, but rewards you will a cool little kill animation and a small health drop.
Each weapon also has an ultimate that charges as you kill more enemies, especially from the Slaughter attacks I mentioned. Persephone does a super shot that rips through multiple enemies doing massive damage, The Hounds create a clone of The Unknown that does a string of perfect beat shots for a short time. The Hellcrows surround you in a damaging vortex of blades.
As you continue to hit the beats in time, you also have a Fury Meter that builds up the top of the screen, and if you kill something when it’s full, your score multiplier goes up, which is great but your damage will go up too. But there is more, and perhaps more rewarding, as your score multiplier goes up, you get to hear more of the song that accompanies each level similar to the way the music in Devil May Cry 5 is linked to your stylish rating.
At a 0 multiplier, all you hear are drums, then at 2x the bass kicks in, then rhythm guitar, lead guitar, and at the apex when you hit 16x the vocals join in the song, and for me, this was a greater reward than any score boost the game could offer me.
The soundtrack is the real heart of Metal Hellsinger and it is truly special if you are a fan of Metal music. There are some outstanding songs in this game, with some incredible talent attached to them. Some personal standout songs are This Devastation which has vocals from Matt Heafy from Trivium, No Tomorrow which features the incredible Serj Tankian of System of a Down fame, and my favourite song was Stygia with vocals from Alissa White-Gluz from Archenemy. None of the songs are bad by any stretch though, and each level was a blast to playthrough if only to hear the new songs.
If you enjoy the music the game has to offer you, it really drives you to keep that 16x score multiplier up, and if you get hit, or miss a beat and the vocals drop back out, it can be quite jarring but it does encourage you to do better, or at least it did for me, to keep that music going. As you finish each Hell you will unlock a few things, like the next level, the ability to change the song that is playing in a level you have already beaten, and side missions known as Torments.
These Torments are small challenges that push your mastery of the game’s systems and mechanics, and reward you with sigils which offer small power-ups or boosts. These Torments all give you a time limit to achieve a goal, like Kill 50 enemies on beat in 20 seconds. Each time you achieve on kill on beat though, you get some extra time. So it incentivises you to make as few mistakes as possible as every kill counts, and if you are successful, it gives you an equipable perk that will do things like protect your hit streak from a missed note one time. These vary greatly in difficulty, with one of the hardest ones for me being kills with Ultimates. This took me the most attempts out of any of the challenges, as you need to plan which enemies are fodder to build your ultimate bar, and how to group the enemies for the big multikill time boost.
These Torments were a good way to extend the length of the game too, as it is actually quite short taking me around 8 hours in total. There are 8 main levels, that each take around 10-15 minutes to play through, which felt like the perfect length of time for each song, any longer and it might have started to get repetitive or worn out its welcome. One of the downsides with the game being so short though, is that the enemy variety just isn’t there. There are 7 basic enemy types, and 4 Elite types, which are honestly just variants of the basic enemies with a slightly different design. Whats even worse is that one of these Elites is locked behind the hardest difficulty, which isn’t accessible until you finish the game once. All of the enemies look cool and have interesting designs and it’s a shame there were not more new types.
This is even worse for the bosses, who apart from the final boss are almost identical except for their different hats. They all have different mechanics they introduce to make the boss fights just as explosive and frantic as the rest of the game, but it would have been more interesting if each boss had been unique. It is a cool design, I can’t deny that but fighting it 7 times as the climax of each hell was more than a little disappointing.
The locales for each of the Hells you playthrough all look great and varied enough that each one has its own unique identity, from the snow-covered Voke to the industrial Acheron and each one introduces a new enemy type that you will start seeing more and more often as you progress. Performance was smooth for my whole experience on PS5, except for one level where I had a graphical glitch where the floor textures just decided not to show up for work.
I would have loved for the game to be a little bit longer, and have a few more levels which I’m sure the DLC that has been released since has helped with, but the base game feels like it just stopped a step short of being amazing. For a first attempt at this type of game, it’s an amazing effort from the developers, and the fact that is only £25 is good value for money, so I can’t complain too much, especially as I played this after it was added to PlayStation Plus’ Extra Catalogue. But I hope the developers get to make a sequel that has a few more weapons, a few more levels and enemies, and perhaps a bit more variety in beats to keep to. I feel like there could have been potential for different guns to deviate from the standard beat, but maybe that would have made it too difficult to balance gameplay around, trying to keep the player from being overwhelmed by complexity.
The trophy list for Metal Hellsinger was a well-balanced one, with no missable trophies at all, which is always nice. The bulk of them are earned by just playing the game, and as there is no restriction on what difficulty setting you play on, the platinum is achievable even if you might struggle with keeping to the beat, or rhythm games are not usually your thing.
There are some miscellaneous trophies to be aware of, like dying 20 times and getting the final blow on a boss with your sword, but as you can replay levels and none of them are particularly long, they aren’t something you need to worry about if you just want to play through the game first and enjoy yourself which is what I did. I did find some of the torments quite challenging and you do need to get the maximum score on most of them to unlock later ones, but they are achievable with some practice and thought.
There is one pretty difficult trophy though, and that is to finish a level without hitting an offbeat.
Luckily this isn’t as hard as it sounds, you just need to be careful when you shoot or dash. You can get hit and lose your Hit streak or Fury meter as they don’t actually matter so it doesn’t need to be a perfect run. You just need to be very careful to always shoot on beat, and replaying the first level on easy with a slow weapon like the shotgun is a good way to do this.
There is also a trophy for completing a level only using Paz, which is also pretty easy to do on easy difficulty, and the trophy is called Pazificist which is such a great name. Overall I would say the game is a 4/10 Difficulty.
Games like Doom are obviously a huge inspiration for Metal Hellsinger, and while it never reaches the same speed of moment-to-moment weapon switching and high-octane rampaging as Doom Eternal, it achieves what it set out to do. Its fusion of adrenaline-pumping gameplay and fist-pumping metal is a brilliant experience and one that I hope gets replicated more often in more games and with more musical genres. It’s such a fun game to just kick back with and spend a few hours with, listening to some kick-ass music and headbanging in time with Paz. If you are a fan of metal music or fast-paced FPS games, then this game is worth giving a go for sure.
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