Metal: Hellsinger Review
Played on Xbox One (base)
Developed by The Outsiders
Released 15th September 2022
Before being announced in 2020, The Outsiders' debut title was supposed to be 'Darkborn', a stealth game where you played as a monster cub that would grow and evolve to hunt down the Viking-like barbarians that killed your family. The cool art style, cool concept and a great promise of talent given that the company was spearheaded by ex-DICE developers, was expected to make the game land well. However, complications like a change to the development cycle, a new focus on making the game open-world, and parting ways with publisher Take-Two ultimately prevented the game from ever seeing light, yet, it did persuade The Outsiders to pick up a new project, which would release in 2022, after being delayed in 2021.
At first glance, it'd be fair to mistake the game as a 'Doom' clone given how much that IP has capitalised on the Hell-shooter aesthetic mixed with hardcore heavy metal soundtracks. While it does borrow many elements from that franchise, 'Hellsinger's' rhythm-focused gameplay separates it enough from the former (kinda).
Story
The story was somewhat uninteresting. While I found little intrigue in its narrative, the game doesn't begin like that with a prologue that establishes an enjoyable premise of our protagonist, the Unknown, waking in Hell with her memories, voice and "song" stolen. With the help of the narrating skull called Paz, she climbs the depths of Hell to regain what was lost and challenges its ruler, the Red Judge. The story is stagnant in its development as the only difference between the beginning and ending is that the Unknown is now directly challenging the Red Judge. The recovered memories, the expositions behind all the mysteries and more all felt null and void, ultimately failing to captivate me as the minute-long cutscenes between each level are mostly just filler to the gameplay at heart. There is a heavy teaser for a potential sequel towards the end of the game and while I wouldn't mind one, I'm not in desperate need of one either, especially after completing this 4-hour game. Its narrative is just plain - not good, but not bad.
Gameplay
The rhythmic-shooter style of gameplay was greatly underwhelming for me as neither the action nor the soundtrack provided that blood-pumping synergy that I was expecting. The game strings up 9 levels together and other than slight visual differences, they are mostly replicas of each other. In these levels, you'll be subjected to shooting on-beat with the heavy metal music playing in the background and every time you align a shot and note perfectly, the game rewards you with bonus damage for that shot. While you're only allowed to carry 2 weapons at a time, there is enough variety in their firing speeds and visual design to spice up the 4 hours you'll spend B-lining the campaign. In addition to this, each weapon has an ultimate ability that will generate over time as you use them and they're surprisingly not generic; whether it's the Vulcan crossbow being able to create a gravity well or the Hound dual pistols creating a clone of yourself, I was pleasantly surprised that the player's arsenal wasn't creatively lacking, even if some of these abilities weren't all that useful.
The game managed to keep my attention for about half its duration as the strongest element I found to be was the shooter component. However, once I stopped unlocking new weaponry around the halfway point, all that was left for me to engage with was the fairly plain level structure (which complemented the fluid movement), an enemy variety that is the barebone basic in all action video games nowadays, and an unsatisfying rhythm mechanic. Going into the game, I expected the on-beat gameplay to stand out more, with the soundtrack being more distinctive audibly to the point I could play the game blindfolded, or at least have it more interactive with the environment, such as having the bonfires spark up in tune with the beats. Instead, it felt more like the soundtrack was there to accommodate the game's atmosphere rather than as a focus point for developing the encounters. This doesn't ruin the game as a whole because there still is a decent enough shooter embedded into it, but its rhythmic unique-selling-point holds back the potential evolution the gunplay could've had.
Bossfights
The bosses don't make the most of the gameplay which really made some of its flaws all the more apparent. Throughout the 9 stages, 7 of them will have the same boss that concludes the level. These bosses are "Aspects" - manifestations of the Red Judge that safeguard each layer of Hell. There is only a slight difference between each Aspect, however, visually you won't be able to notice it unless you look up the game's wiki. Gameplay-wise they all mostly share the same moveset, albeit one-to-two new attacks that were made specifically in mind for the arena they were occupying. Does this create diversity in their encounters? Not really. At most, it created about 10 seconds of intrigue and shock before relapsing back into monotony. The only kind of positive aspect about these bosses is that they fit into the shooter element well, before being undermined by the lacklustre rhythm mechanic. You'd expect the final boss to be more engaging or epic to go against seeing as you're fighting the Red Judge (aka the Devil), but other than its cool, unique design, its onslaught of projectiles and attacks was near-identical to the previous bosses that you went up against.
Characters
There isn't enough appearance from the characters to warrant a critique or scoring of sorts as they at most share 5-7 lines per still-image cutscene in between each level, more as a form of storytelling or narrative progression rather than character development.
Atmosphere
The atmosphere can be best described as "metal AF". Visually, the designs of the environments, enemies and weapons draw upon that of skeletons, gore and other massively Hellish stereotypes. The colour palette is centralised on the bland balance between reds, browns and greys, which occasionally get swapped out or altered into its natural opposite of blues and whites, as such in the frosted snow levels. However, this change never has a significant prescence making it as bland as the other environments. Audibly, it's heavy metal, what else is there to say? I'm not a metalhead in any sense of the term so I'm not one to say if it's the best or worst from its genre, however, I can say from an outsider's perspective that it's not bad, but it's not great either - just meh. Technically, it didn't have any bugs or issues.
Story - 6/10
Gameplay - 5/10
Bossfights - 4/10
Atmosphere - 6/10
MEDIOCRE
'Metal: Hellsinger' is one of the few instances where, I can acknowledge the good in the game and I know it'll suit other's tastes really well, yet personally, it wasn't my cup of tea.
