I love roguelikes; nothing else in gaming matches the feeling of wanting just one more run. That’s why I’ve been interested in Morbid Metal since it was first announced, showing off a highly polished looking fast-paced action game.
After spending just over three hours with Morbid Metal’s early access release version, the foundation here is quite promising, even if it does feel much further from release than the polished visuals might suggest. Even so, the base gameplay that is there speaks to the action sicko in me.
Hot Swap Combos
Morbid Metal takes heavy inspiration from stylish action games like Devil May Cry, asking you to chain together massive combos by flying between enemies in a fight. You have limited abilities, with two cooldown abilities and a special that requires a meter to build, but that’s where the character swapping mechanic comes in.
Early into my first run after the tutorial, I was introduced to a second character. You start off as Flux, who wields a sword and is better at dealing high damage to a single-target, but quickly gets Ekku. Ekku wields a large polearm and can handle large groups of enemies with crowd control abilities. Of course, you don’t pick a single character to play as.
Instead, both characters are given hot swaps on the D-Pad, so you can switch between them in the heat of battle. Now, instead of waiting for abilities to come off cooldown, I could swap between characters to keep the combo rolling throughout the entire fight. Swapping between characters feels mostly seamless, although there were a few instances of it not working properly, but it is an early access release.
The character swapping really started to work for me when I was building my characters for each run. Some abilities are character specific, while some work for all of your characters. For example, one universal pick-up makes all abilities cause enemies to Leak, taking damage over time. Since Leak can stack with each ability hit, I picked up a buff for Flux that added more hits to one of their abilities, increasing the amount of stacks I could inflict.
On the Ekku side, I picked up an ability that gives Ekku super armor when using abilities, making it so you can’t be interrupted by enemy attacks. I could tank through the crowd with Ekku, inflicting a couple of stacks of Leak on a large number of enemies, while Flux could inflict the max amount of Leak stacks on one of the bigger enemies.
Where I’m less confident in Morbid Metal, although this seems like a main focus for early access updates, is the lack of variety in abilities. The pool of available options felt incredibly light, with many runs resulting in similar builds, and unlocking more is fairly slow moving, with a single run only netting enough currency for a single ability unlock.
There is also a third character named Vekta, although I didn’t make it far enough in for them to join my roster, but adding in another character to swap between makes me excited to reach that point.
Morbid Metal looks great and runs quite smoothly in its current build. With a solid foundation in gameplay and strong mechanics in the character swapping, I’m confident that Morbid Metal is going to be quite special by the time it reaches its 1.0 release, but it’s pretty good right now if you can’t wait to jump in.
