Metal Eden

It pains me to give Metal Eden a negative review. Some excellent aspects mired in poor or uninspired design really is a let down to the whole experience. Graphicly; The game looks great. A lot of time and care was put into the textures, modelling and lightning both in game and in cutscenes that make this game truly feel like a "Triple A" game. Unfortunately it it let down by its overly bland sci-fi environment. Mostly comprising of metal rooms, metal hallways and metal platforms. All set in blue-grey colour pallet. The game ran well at around 100-120 frames per second in 1080p. The bugs were limited, having a few hiccups here and there. Only once I had to restart from checkpoint due to a soft-lock but that was a minor setback. The game also has a little bit of jank. Mostly coming from physics pushing around the player, slightly messy platforming and strange interactions with the environment. Now we get to the shining jewel found in the ruff; the movement and gun play. The movement is incredibly fluid; running jumping, wall running and grappling around the place, all backed up by the jetpack fuel system. All your extra movement options outside of jumping uses fuel which recharges very quickly while on the ground. Meaning up can spend it on multiple extra jumps to get extra height, hover to cover large distances or dodge to get out (or into) sticky situations. Mixing these all together makes for incredibly dynamic movement that is just a blast to use. The gunplay feels solid, everything is reliable, impactful and effective. Shooting does what you would think it would do with very little surprises, making clearing out enemies a joy to do. I will get back to this in the section on the weapons themselves. Also you have the core system. On a cooldown you can tear out the core of an unarmoured enemy of which you can use it as a grenade that drops you ammo or consume it to gain more movement and make your next melee attack more powerful. All of this is supported by light RPG system which you can use to upgrade yourself and your weapons. The level design is as a whole is just simply functional. Very little interesting areas or play-spaces. No exploration. No interaction with the game mechanics outside of basic grappling and jetpack usage. It all falls very flat and takes you out of the world that it promises you. Almost all of the game is the same layout. From combat arena > linear corridor > platforming then back to arena and repeat until the end of the level, with the 3 boss fights spread in-between. The Arenas that you will be spending most of the play time in can have a little bit of variety, but by the end of it they are just reorganised in different patterns. That and with the similar environmental design throughout, start to blend together. Out side of arenas there is very little combat and when there is, it is completely skippable. Which is what I ended up doing as there is no reward for doing so and just acts as a time filler between arenas. While they may have some enemies in the way they to are optional. The platforming is also very simple. Just using your movement in a linear fashion to get to the next arena. The arenas themselves are all large boxes with 2 or more levels and basic grapple points and platforms. With the lower levels becoming damaging on the final waves. The developers had a great opportunity to mix these aspects together in a way that could have been fun, with glimpses of it showing in the penultimate level of the game. It's just a disappointment that such an integral part of the game was just seemingly get glossed over. The enemies, just like the level design, is also just functional. Design wise they all just dudes in different sized sci-fi suits of armour, with a few drones for flying units. Though mechanically they do show a bit more variety. Having small fodder enemies that is used to extract cores from, to various ranged, melee and select specialty enemies that, with good use of your movement, make for the opportunity for interesting encounters. An opportunity I find was mostly wasted by the developers. A lot of the encounter just felt thrown together without much thought to how the player would tackle it. With one group defeated the next one enters, all punctuated by a robotic voice announcing “Enemies Inbound”, “Second wave”, “Third wave” and “Final wave”. The waves also have no structure to them either. With some seeming to be out of order with an earlier wave being significantly harder then the later ones. While some are just “here's a bunch of the same enemy, have fun” waves. This is very apparent with the larger arenas where you could go the whole fight with out even knowing there are more floors or pick ups because encounter didn't encourage their use. There is the possibility of some really interesting combat encounters and with a re-review of them they could really shine. But the seemingly slapped together nature of the enemy choices is compounded buy the simplistic nature of the arenas make the combat feel uninteresting. The weapons have a bit of bite to them, their base forms feel weighty, functional and impactful. While their upgrades are pretty simple they can feel like a bit of a letdown that, with a bit of tweaking, could be really fun. There is a bit of a balancing issue with their upgrade choices as you can only pick one alternate fire mode at a time and some definitely outshine others. While some can be avoided altogether as their alt fire can seem like a waste of ammo and time. Though this is mitigated by their regular fire still being effective. My biggest gripe with the weapons is that armoured enemies take less damage from most weapons until broken except from the two energy weapons, which share the same pool of ammo. With almost all the enemies later in the game being armoured means you are always out of energy weapon ammo and are always on the lookout for ammo pick-ups, therefor in constant surplus of other weapon that it becomes is easy to spam their alt fire without worrying about running out. The animation is clean and effective at conveying their power. While their design is generic blocky versions of current day weapons with primary colouring and the upgrades are just either changing the colour or adding an attachment to the side of the base weapon. If you have been playing close attention, you my find that Metal Eden seems to be taking some inspiration from DOOM Eternal, and it surly does. From the weapons to the RPG mechanics to the arena style combat. Bar the movement, it all seems to be a less polished version of it while missing what made the design decisions from ID Software's game so compelling. The campaign is around 8-9 hours long. Which is a fair go but what it is can be described as a drag. As stated before the levels start to blend together, no new enemies, the story and world can be confusing and the RPG mechanics start to overstay their welcome as you already have you ones you want a bit before the end. Though I didn't think it was too long as the gameplay was enough to get me over the line. The Gauntlet mode on the other hand is probably the most tacked on thing in the game. All it is is doing the campaign arenas, in order, one after the other, through the whole game, with the only difference being you start with all your weapons and you get money and skill points to get upgrades as you go along. It is just a super condensed version of the game. No transitions, no story, no fluff. I finished it in under an hour fist try with no deaths. While it's inclusion doesn't diminish the game as a whole it does show what the game actually is in essence and is purely just to pad playtime. It just saddens me to what this game could be. Still worth a play through with a good sale like I did. If you just want to see what I liked about the game you can go play the demo for free, I can fully recommend that you do.

Game continuously blocks progress by failing to unlock doors after clearing an area of enemies.