Metal: Hell Singer review

When your voice is stolen by the Devil itself what else is there to do except destroy everything in your path? This is the direction that Unknown has taken when their voice has been stolen from them. When met with Paz the skull they take on the 9 levels of hell and seek to take back what they have lost.

Metal: Hellsinger is a first person rhythm based shooter. With amazing metal artists at its helm the game has a very intense atmosphere it creates. When you pair these amazing artists with the land of fire and demons you get what is probably one of the most badass music games.

There are pieces of the game though that do not pair well with the whole picture. When faced with the many types and styles of enemies there is one that does not get this kind of love. The bosses are all very similar and while you have many normal enemies and even more variants of those it’s hard to look past the same boss each level with slightly different mechanics to it.

The level design helps pull us back though and creates tons of unique areas and challenges. When you are swarmed by demons and angels the place of combat really helps set the mood for battle. From what looks like inspiration taken from Doom the area style locations really help create a fun combat system that pairs well with the ever going beat of rhythm you must follow.

These rooms do not make everything pretty though. Playing on beast mode is for sure a challenge, but there is a more fundamental problem the further into the game you get. The curve of difficulty seems to not be very planned out. As with half way through the game getting a massive increase of special enemies along with small spaces to be able to fight them in. When facing AOE based enemies in a space that is covered by their entire AOE it’s easy to get overwhelmed fast.

To pull away from the small spaces though when you get the full ability to unleash the movement of the game it will take you for a ride. Between the double jump, dashing, and what feels almost like b-hopping you can glide around the arena like a beautiful swan! If swans had devil horns and giant wings wielding huge swords that is. This type of movement is very needed for how fast pace the gameplay is overall and creates an overall very fair gameplay style with the added difficulty of the rhythm mechanic. *Except the dumb slowdown enemies which break you whole groove…*

The slow and steady cut scenes that help split up the dash and go life of gameplay really help tell the story of Unknown. This is probably my favorite part as it really ties the game together and makes the idea of the rhythm mechanics and doom style shooter together. With Narration from Paz on point to help tell the story that isn’t possible from the stolen voice of Unknown.

Overall though I would have to give this game nothing less than a solid 8/10. There are more mechanics that just feel a little clunky such as the powerups you find in some sigils that are not really explained well or the lack of original boss fights and really just facing the same one over and over again. Hopefully we will see a lot more come out of this game as it will be receiving custom song creation and with that hopefully full steam mod support.