Metal Eden feels like a fantastic rollercoaster, only bogged down by the long line. In this case, that long line is an abundance of story cutscenes and dialogue that only ever exceeded in annoying me. But when you do finally get back into action, that fast-paced platforming and shooting shine alongside the best, although having even one additional game mode beyond the campaign could make Metal Eden a must play.
Metal Eden
Developer: Reikon Games
Price: $40
Platforms: PS5, Xbox Series X|S (reviewed), PC
The publisher provided an Xbox code for this review
Metal Eden is a Short but Explosive Ride Through Moebius
You play as Hyper Unit Aska, designed for high octane combat and able to utilize a variety of cores, which contain the human elements of the synthetic people who populate Moebius, a special futuristic city meant to be the next beacon of human civilization. However, that dream has fallen apart, with a powerful erosion bomb making the city unlivable, while the citizens in their cores are kept hidden.
While you will get plenty of plot during your five to six hours with Metal Eden’s narrative, the voice performances and the formatting of these conversations make it grating. You have Nexus, a power engineer, just rambling in your ear at almost all times, chewing scenery like he wants to be George Clooney, reaching points where I considered muting all character dialogue.
Luckily, that’s not what Metal Eden is really about; what it’s really about is Doom style fast-paced action. You are armed with an ever growing arsenal of weapons, each with a fairly limited amount of ammo. Along with the ability to rip cores out of enemies, which can either be thrown to explode enemies and make them drop ammo, or consumed to power up your melee to break an enemy’s shield, if they have one.
As you gather upgrades during the course of the campaign, you will quickly gain a series of options, allowing a more free-flow combat cycle. For example, you can use an energy weapon to rip through enemy shields before swapping to a kinetic weapon to finish them off. You could also rip their core out, instantly finishing them, and throwing the explosive to take out more enemies. These all feel satisfying, thanks to a nice combination of explosive feedback and an explosion of resources.
In between combat sequences, you will have to go through platforming sections. These never quite reach a height where it feels challenging, but the movement is speedy enough that even just flying through these areas is still satisfying. There are some extended sequences of riding on long ziplines, and while some of these ask you to jump between tracks, it is certainly a low point. You slow down the game just to hear more from Nexus, while not really engaging with anything in a way that takes some of the wind out of my sails. The vast majority of levels consist of combat and platforming, so even these moments are spread out enough to not take away too much from the excellent combat arenas you find.
Metal Eden does a great job of consistently throwing bigger and badder enemies at you while granting even more powerful weapons. The variety really sings too, swapping from a Nikola Tesla laser gun to an SMG, followed by a grenade launcher, letting me constantly make small choices about how I tackle combat sequences, while still utilizing all of my tools to keep my resources up.
There are a few sequences where you get to utilize ball form, where you turn into a giant metal ball and roll around, shooting lasers and targeted missiles. These sections aren’t bad by any means, but combat as the ball is much more rigid and slow compared to the first-person combat, and with the platforming sections breaking up the flow of the game, these parts ultimately felt unnecessary, but again, not overly frustrating or long.
The Final Word
Metal Eden is a fantastic, high-octane FPS that, even in its short campaign run time, occasionally strays too far from its core combat loop. A lack of any additional game modes, not even a new game plus option, does make this package feel a bit lacking, as I wanted to do more when credits rolled, but didn’t have any options besides running through it again. The narrative takes up far too much time, and the dialogue during missions is overly dramatic in a way that is quite grating, but the core combat is more than enough to make me happy with my time playing.
MonsterVine Rating: 3.5 out of 5 – Fair
