Packing in a fully-fledged story mode with a colourful cast of musically-empowered heroes and villains, The Metronomicon sees you take control a party of eight newly graduated masters of the "rhythmic combat arts" to wage musical warfare against a multitude of dance-mongering fiends. By switching between four concurrent hero-controlled tracks on-the-fly, you'll select and activate a wide array of abilities and spells, buffs and nukes, with your performance and timing all-important in ensuring the effectiveness of your moves. In the RPG spirit, you'll need to improve your characters' stats, hunt down powerful equipment, and combine a multitude of newly-learned abilities - switching between tanking, healing, buffing, and damage-dealing classes as required in real time.
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Status effects are quite fun, too. Your notes start disappearing if you are "blind", or spin around if you are "dizzy"... It's really well done.
The OST was not quite my thing, but it wasn't terrible either.
But it has some seriously great ideas of how to pair RPG elements with rhythm game elements. The way you can switch out the character's moves and decide on the sequence, so you can strategically decide to hit more consecutive notes or less depending on which move you want to perform, is pretty clever. Switching through the 4 characters and their respective rhythm sheets on a whim during the fights works better than I expected it to and if you get into a flow, it's very satisfying. It can be exhausting, but it's mostly in a good way.
Some songs were a bit frustrating for me but thankfully it lets you adjust the difficulty level for each individual song and you don't actually have to beat every single one to progress in the story. I had to play 3 of the songs in easy mode throughout the campaign because a few of the beat maps had some really hard spots here and there that I kept dying at.
The music is very hit and miss for me when it comes to their sound. There were some songs that I genuinely liked, and I was pretty excited when I saw that a song by Jimmy Urine from Mindless Self Indulgence was one of the boss fights, but some of the songs were just obnoxious to me. That didn't really hinder the enjoyment much, because even the songs I didn't like had some fun beat mappings for the most part.
The game also has some very nice visual design at points. Although the story cutscenes look a bit flat, the animated in-game environments and creatures were really nice to look at. Only problem is that you never really get to look at those because you're so focused on hitting the beats. lol
I wouldn't call this game amazing, but I would be very down to playing a sequel with some possible improvements and new features. The core concept is pretty great and the execution is solid.