It's such a good time for quick gimmicky action games that absolutely slap... But have awful writing. This is very similar in that respect to Neon White, the other big indie fast paced gimmick shooter of the year. The Doom inspiration is so obvious it isn't worth mentioning, but for the most part this surpasses the label of 'doom clone'.

Over the last couple of years there's been a few games that have tried the 'FPS rhythm shooter' formula over the last few years, and I've played a lot of them, but they've always felt like they're missing something. This game finally hits the mark with a simple and easy to use inventory system, music that's easy to keep track of the best for, a variety of weapons that interact with the beat timings in different ways and enemies that are responsive and interesting.

The only problem I have is with level design, I spent maybe 75% of my time with the game at 16X multiplier, and then 10% was me losing my grip on the timing momentarily, but the remaining 15% was just losing combos because enemies can't find me, are too far away or I've accidentally run from them, I don't think this is a problem with enemy design more than the levels being not ideally designed to keep killing them as quickly as is required by the combo system, and it leads to some frustrating moments.

However, I was expecting next to nothing from this, and it's become one of my favourites this year, easily top 10, I just wish it was longer as I easily beat it in under 4 hours; at least it has challenge modes to come back to.

The gameplay's good if not repetitive without much of a hook beyond the first couple of levels; The music is great and fits very well with the game's themes; The story sucks because it's just there to give you a reason to shoot shit to a beat, and lastly the game isn't very visually appealing in a lot of areas though it does have its moments in later levels. That's Hellsinger in a nutshell, it's probably a 6/10 (3 stars) for me mainly because I set my expectations too high due to the Steam Next Fest demo being so memorable, it just didn't provide anything new beyond its base premise.

Isso aqui é sinônimo de diversão pra mim: gameplay freneticamente viciante, uma trilha sonora ABSURDA e inspiração em Rhythm games. Posso falar tranquilamente que é o jogo que mais esperava esse ano, quando soube do Game Pass então, eu surtei.
Falando de maneira geral, é bem simples resumir em um FPS de ritmo, mas esse segmento de música no combate é um estilo que nunca presenciei nesse estilo de jogo (apesar de já existir como BPM: BULLETS PER MINUTE). Infelizmente é bastante curto, algo por 3 horas ou menos você consegue chegar ao final, mas tem um fator replay bem interessante com até mesmo algumas fases desafio. Além da curta duração, há outro pequeno problema de level design no qual você se encontra em segmentos vazios onde você não consegue manter seu multiplicador de pontos por simplesmente não ter nenhum inimigo.
E claro, como fã de System of a Down enfrentar um boss final em um game de FPS Rítmico ao som de Serj Tankian foi algo simplesmente FODA, to doido até agora.

There’s an oft-repeated (and just as oft-derided) quote by Doom designer John Carmack, who said “Story in a game is like story in a porn movie. It's expected to be there, but it's not important.”

Obviously that quote made more sense in the context of early gaming, and in recent hears even Carmack himself has softened his stance on gaming’s narrative potential.

But nowhere is that quote more true than with this game.

Of all Doom’s children, Metal: Hellsinger might wear its inspiration the most on its sleeves. It rips gameplay concepts straight from Doom 2016/Doom Eternal and recontextualizes them as part of a rhythm game.

It’s a shooter set to a heavy metal drumbeat, with a short runtime and arcade-style high-score leaderboards. It owes almost as much to games like Guitar Hero, Dance Dance Revolution, Crypt of the NecroDancer, and Taiko No Tatsujin as it does to Doom.

It’s a bit repetitive (as rythm games often are), the shield enemies are terrible, and the game admittedly gets a bit exhausting after a while, but it’s an admirable experiment that more than deserves a look (even if you’re like me and this isn’t your favorite type of music). It’s clever in literally weaponizing a human quirk: the desire to do things to the rhythm of a soundtrack. I was already doing this, but now there’s a game about it!

But man this has some of the cringiest dialogue and the most skippable cutscenes since Forza Horizon 5. The voice acting isn’t bad, and I don’t want to sound too mean-spirited, but…

Doom and Rock Band. What do they have in common? Electric guitars and minimal story.

PEAK GAMING. This soundtrack SLAPPED, the gameplay wa stats and fun, though you should never use any weapons beyond the shotgun and pistols, and the story is what it needs to be. It’s fine and sets up for DLC/A Sequel well. I think. Though quite frankly it’s pretty fucking stupid. That ending blew lmao. But it didn’t take away from the rest of the game being fun. It’s really damn short tho only like 6 hours. Anyways, Yhelm and Nihil are the best songs by far, though the rest are great too. Bunch of big names here. Hope they can do it again in that sequel they teased.

The rhythm-based gimmick is sort of neat for, like, an hour or two and then it gets old. There's not much else here to praise beyond that though. The combat is... acceptable I guess. Weapons are all mediocre. The shotgun is the only thing I found decent enjoyment out of in the arsenal and, even then, it's nothing to write home about. It's just very "Walmart-brand DOOM 2016."

The music itself is cool, but it doesn't really take as much advantage of rhythm in it as I expected. Pretty sure every song is the same bpm so you're never having to always consider how much faster or slower you need to be attacking and moving in order to accommodate for that. A bit of shame. Even if the track changes, nothing about how you're playing really does which I think is a pretty big reason why it gets old very quickly.

Also, a weird ass throw-in plot? I mean, it's whatever. I just skipped all the cutscenes but it really just felt completely unneeded to try to have all this dialogue and cutscenes in a game where literally no one cares. Once again, though, it's all completely skippable so I really ain't gonna criticize it being here as harshly as some others are being.

I think I played half of the game and then dipped. I've seen enough. I'm satisfied.

Ação frenética com heavy metal acompanhando suas ações, e sensação do peso e tiros das armas que beira a perfeição. Metal Hellsinger é, para o bem ou para o mal, EXATAMENTE o que ele aparenta ser. Para mim, isso foi fantástico. Como alguém que ama as "gritarias" do famoso "rock pauleira", esse jogo foi um prato cheio e uma experiência extremamente satisfatória.

Você pode argumentar comigo que um ponto negativo do jogo é que ele não faz nada de diferente durante toda a sua (curta) duração e que a premissa inicial é a mesma durante todo o decorrer do jogo, sem muita variação além das armas e símbolos que vão sendo desbloqueados. Eu concordo, mas vou contra argumentar: é realmente necessário?

Diferente de Bullets Per Minute, jogo que é claramente a inspiração maior, aqui você encontra uma execução técnica extremamente melhor, tanto no sentido gráfico (aquele filtro vermelho do BPM é péssimo), de level design e da própria jogabilidade em si, já que Metal Hellsinger tem a vantagem de contar com veteranos de jogos FPS trabalhando em seu desenvolvimento. E o melhor de tudo, NÃO É UM ROGUE-LIKE (ou rogue-lite, escolha o que você preferir e não venha me encher o saco)!!!!

Meu ponto final é: a premissa base é totalmente capaz de, por si só, manter o jogador engajado e entretido durante todo o jogo, graças à sua brilhante execução técnica alinhada com boas músicas e o gênero certo: Doom-like (famigerado boomer shooter, termo da moda), e não rogue-like. Diversão garantida, se você se animou assim que viu o jogo. Se não, nem chegue perto, porque ele é exatamente o que você imagina dele pelos trailers!

Have you ever looked at an album’s cover art and wished that, somehow, you could play it? Do you gain much satisfaction from a well-timed button press and/or chasing high scores? Did you grow up watching Scuzz? Metal: Hellsinger was made for you if your answer to any one of those questions is yes, but even if these don’t apply, you should play it anyway. Fast-paced, old school FPSs have had among the strongest resurgences any kind of game’s ever had, but even the most boisterous of those feel tame after you’ve experienced one that’s been beautifully blended with a rhythm game.

It’s unreal how much the seemingly simple addition of having to stay in rhythm adds to this sort of formula. Chaining perfectly timed dashes, shots, reloads and slaughters one after the other as Matt Heafy or Serj Tankian or whoever else begins to progressively batter your eardrums isn’t just bound to make you involuntarily grin, it’s also an example of how Hellsinger trumps one of its influences. Slaughters are analogous to Doom’s glory kills, which I’d argue were already outdone by WH40K: Space Marine’s executions five years prior, but Hellsinger takes a step further and makes this kind of mechanic more cohesive than ever. You have to properly time slaughters the same way you do virtually every other action in the game or else your score streak goes kaput, and you can’t rely too heavily on the brief invincibility they give you since they don’t prevent your fury (i.e. your score multiplier) from going down. We have risk, we have reward, and they’re implemented in such a way that they add to Hellsinger’s enthralling flow rather than disrupting it, thanks to small but constant tests of timing and prioritisation.

The rhythm informs much of Hellsinger’s visual design, too. I especially love how light sources (including certain enemies) flash along to the beat, eventually turning into streams of fire you’d see at a concert once your fury gets high enough. It’s not just window dressing, either. In such an active, hectic game where so many things are going on at once, it’s immensely helpful to have indicators of how well you’re doing implemented diegetically into the environment, serving a similar function to Patapon’s (also clever) light bar. The environments themselves complement the Unknown’s movement abilities well, offering you plenty of ways to zip all over the show and gradually increasing in complexity over the course of the game’s short runtime to form a well-balanced difficulty curve in tandem with new, increasingly manoeuvrable enemies being thrown at you in each level. It might’ve been good to have varied the bosses’ appearances more, but their attack patterns and arenas are each distinct enough functionally speaking that they remain entertaining throughout.

As far Hellsinger’s story goes, much of the criticism it seems to be receiving on here strikes me as being overly concerned with the what rather than the how. Is there a better way is there to tell a tale in a game like this than via song lyrics which only kick in once you’re playing well enough, alternate between the perspectives of the three main characters and finally culminate in a remix of the main menu theme? This is the kind of thing that’s exclusively possible within this medium, accomplishing which I’d say pretty vastly outweighs whether or not the (entirely skippable) cutscenes are to your taste. The narrative’s primarily here to make you feel unstoppable with some brief moments of levity sprinkled in through Paz, as if you were playing an interactive version of Judas Priest’s Painkiller or Brothers of Metal’s Chain Breaker, and it’s a total success in that respect.

If you’ve been listening to metal for most of your life like I have, I should also hope you’re aware of just how many concept albums out there are comprised of the most broken of broken English. Few would doubt the quality of Avantasia’s discography, for instance, but I imagine equally few could tell you off the top of their head what half of their songs are about. I bring this up both because people seem to lack a frame of reference for how comprehensible Hellsinger’s writing is compared to much of what it’s a love letter to, and also to illustrate the point that content is secondary to how that content is delivered. Put another way: it’s not what you say, but how you say it, and Hellsinger says it with an appropriate helping of tongue-in-cheek which lends it the same charisma as other great odes to the genre like Metalocalypse.

No doubt, the fruit of saying “the soundtrack is good” hangs so low it’s on the ground, but I’m saying it anyway. You could release it standalone and it’d pass for a high quality album, though listening to it (and the excellence that is Stygia in particular) in a vacuum just isn’t the same without shotgun blasts and demonic wing flaps pulsating in the background.

Hence why you should play Metal: Hellsinger. It’s around five hours of pure unadulterated joy, and more than that if you’re into games like Hotline Miami where you can easily pass an afternoon chasing higher scores. The fact that the Unknown has what is probably the coolest design for any protagonist in the past decade or so is just a bonus. Do it for her.

esse jogo só não é um sólido 5 por que ele é ridiculamente curto e o fato q só tem 4 armas e que podem ser fácilmente abusadas meio que quebra o jogo bem fácil.
mas PUTA QUE PARIU ESSE BAGULHO VAI MAIS DURO Q O KNOTFEST INTEIRO EH TIPO UM KNOTFEST COM MUSICA BOA QUE TU FICA MATANDO DEMONIO PA PA PA PA
o unico problema é que agora eu vou provavelmente fazer tudo seguindo o ritmo da musica que eu to ouvindo por que eu passei 3 horas direto no PC sentado jogando esse jogo sem pausa pra nada por que eu me odeio bastante MAS faz parte

puta que pariu que bagulho foda do caralho meus parabéns tanto pros desenvolvedores TANTO PROS MÚSICOS QUE FIZERAM PARTE PRINCIPALMENTE VOCÊ SERJ TANKIAN

Rapaiz, que jogo tenso de se jogar. Mas ao mesmo tempo, é divertido hein.

Metal: Hellsinger é basicamente um boomer shoter com metronomo ligado com uma trilha sonora animal (digitando esse texto ao som da musica Dissolution, que tem o Bjorn Strid do Soilwork e Night Flight Orchestra no vocal).

Por ser um jogo pequeno, ele tem poucas fases, poucas armas, os chefes sao todos iguais basicamente (exceto o ultimo, queria mais lutas desse tipo) e por isso acaba deixando o game um pouco repetitivo, mas ele é bem curto, entao vc nao vai enjoar.

Entre as fases, tem alguns desafios, como matar um certo numero de demonios com as armas trocando a cada morte, quanto menos vida vc tem mais dano vc causa e etc. Completando eles, vc ganha algumas habilidades pra usar no jogo, como reducao de dano e tal.

A principio, a mecanica de atirar no ritmo da musica parece complicado, mas rapidao vc se acostuma. Quanto mais vc acertar e fazer pontos, o seu multiplicador vai aumentando e vai entrando mais instrumentos na musica (no ultimo entra o vocal e vc vai querer manter esse combo pra ouvir os vocais).

Jogo divertido pra caramba se vc curte fps antigo e metal. Aproveita que ta no game pass e vai bater cabeça porra :v

Este jogo é uma experiência de puro Metal, não é a toa que tá no nome, um dos melhores shooters de ritmo que já joguei, não é como se tivesse muitos no mercado, pra falar a verdade só lembro de mais um outro (BPM), um título obrigatório pra quem curte o estilo de música.

A Gameplay é maravilhosa, principalmente se você estiver jogando no Mouse e Teclado, no controle é um pouco chato conseguir coordenar o ritmo com a mira do game, mas é muito competente no que faz.
É um jogo extremamente rápido, então pode gerar algum desconforto em pessoas que não estão acostumadas com FPS, mas ainda assim, é necessário dar uma chance.

A trilha sonora é o mais puro Metal elevado ao seu melhor nível, esse jogo é extremamente dinâmico e chega a muitas vezes ser desafiador já que se você não estiver atento. principalmente nas músicas. você pode acabar perdendo completamente o ritmo e só se atrapalhar.

A história é medíocre pra ser bem sincero, no começo ela é um pouco misteriosa e até intrigante, mas é tudo muito expositivo e não chega a ser muito interessante pra eu realmente querer saber mais sobre, é mais um contexto pra o que você tá fazendo ali.

Os gráficos são decentes, não são nada ultra absurdos e não entendo como não foi lançado pra antiga geração, provavelmente por questões de performance, mas acho que ainda dava pra dar um jeitinho.

Esse game foi uma grata surpresa, não esperava muito, mas é muito gostoso e satisfatório de jogar. Os defeitos no game se baseiam praticamente na quantidade conteúdo, são pouquíssimas missões, cada uma delas, exceto a primeira e a última, tem três desafios para serem completados e assim você ganha umas vantagens que te auxiliam e muito pra facilitar o game. Não encontrei nenhum bug e tudo saiu nos conformes, nada de queda de FPS ou texturas que não carregam.

Sério, não é lá um jogo que eu colocaria na lista dos meus favoritos de paixão, mas aqui é tudo bem feito e feito com muito carinho e recomendo pra qualquer um.