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.