Crypt of the Necromancer meets Doom. Clever and, in theory, sounds like a recipe for chaotic fun. And while there are some high highs, the lows drag the entire experience down significantly.
Let's start right off with the positives. First off, the soundtrack! Let's face it - if the soundtrack to this music-shooter sucked, the game would be DOA. Fortunately, it doesn't. The soundtrack is pretty decent and even has a couple standouts that have led to me looking up some of these artists other work on Spotify (the Alissa White-Gluz track being my personal favorite). But there are a couple too many songs that I forget entirely after finishing the level.
That cover the music component of this music-shooter, so how's the shooter? Eh, it's pretty alright. For a game that feels like it draws some aesthetic inspiration from Doom (I could be entirely wrong there), I wish it had taken some of the weapon variety as well. The weapons are pretty generic and I just flat out disliked 1 or 2 (demon boomerang things? Not for me), which is significant when there's only 4 real weapon options. All that said, when the game hits a groove and you hit a flow-state of killing demons all around you to the rhythm of the song, it feels amazing. If I felt that way through the entire game, easy 5 star game right there.
So where does Metal Hellsinger fall short? I weirdly didn't care for the level structure. Spawn, walk to an arena of enemies, kill a ton of enemies, walk to the next arena of enemies, repeat. Makes every level feel the same without a lot of variety. And these levels are long! Levels lasted anywhere from 15 minutes (pretty okay) to 30 minutes (not ideal) with no points where you can save you progress in the level. The fact that you're hearing the same 5 minute song repeat over and over doesn't help either. And then every level ends with the same boss battle with a bit of variation for each level. It was a fun fight the first encounter but by rematch 3 or 4 I was pretty done.
In addition to the structure issues, I had a fair amount of bugs/glitches. Mostly relating to the multiplier - either it would totally freeze and wouldn't increase or decrease as I killed enemies or it would continue to drop as I killed enemies. Maybe I misunderstood a mechanic but from what I can tell neither of these things are meant to happen.
Finally, the issue that led to me deciding to leave the game unfinished - The boss will sometimes dematerialize, leave you to kill standard enemies, and then rematerialize in a different location. In my playthrough of the 6th level, the boss dematerialized, I killed all the enemies, the boss came back to the arena... and then didn't rematerialize. It just floated there remaining as the glimmering energy thing. It even said the dialogue that it says when it comes back to fight. So 20 minutes into this level, I was stuck at an unbeatable boss that I couldn't interact with. So I think I'm done, not super interested in having to replay something I just played.
Oh man, and those shield demons suck. Like they can go to hell... again. (So sorry, thanks for reading)
Let's start right off with the positives. First off, the soundtrack! Let's face it - if the soundtrack to this music-shooter sucked, the game would be DOA. Fortunately, it doesn't. The soundtrack is pretty decent and even has a couple standouts that have led to me looking up some of these artists other work on Spotify (the Alissa White-Gluz track being my personal favorite). But there are a couple too many songs that I forget entirely after finishing the level.
That cover the music component of this music-shooter, so how's the shooter? Eh, it's pretty alright. For a game that feels like it draws some aesthetic inspiration from Doom (I could be entirely wrong there), I wish it had taken some of the weapon variety as well. The weapons are pretty generic and I just flat out disliked 1 or 2 (demon boomerang things? Not for me), which is significant when there's only 4 real weapon options. All that said, when the game hits a groove and you hit a flow-state of killing demons all around you to the rhythm of the song, it feels amazing. If I felt that way through the entire game, easy 5 star game right there.
So where does Metal Hellsinger fall short? I weirdly didn't care for the level structure. Spawn, walk to an arena of enemies, kill a ton of enemies, walk to the next arena of enemies, repeat. Makes every level feel the same without a lot of variety. And these levels are long! Levels lasted anywhere from 15 minutes (pretty okay) to 30 minutes (not ideal) with no points where you can save you progress in the level. The fact that you're hearing the same 5 minute song repeat over and over doesn't help either. And then every level ends with the same boss battle with a bit of variation for each level. It was a fun fight the first encounter but by rematch 3 or 4 I was pretty done.
In addition to the structure issues, I had a fair amount of bugs/glitches. Mostly relating to the multiplier - either it would totally freeze and wouldn't increase or decrease as I killed enemies or it would continue to drop as I killed enemies. Maybe I misunderstood a mechanic but from what I can tell neither of these things are meant to happen.
Finally, the issue that led to me deciding to leave the game unfinished - The boss will sometimes dematerialize, leave you to kill standard enemies, and then rematerialize in a different location. In my playthrough of the 6th level, the boss dematerialized, I killed all the enemies, the boss came back to the arena... and then didn't rematerialize. It just floated there remaining as the glimmering energy thing. It even said the dialogue that it says when it comes back to fight. So 20 minutes into this level, I was stuck at an unbeatable boss that I couldn't interact with. So I think I'm done, not super interested in having to replay something I just played.
Oh man, and those shield demons suck. Like they can go to hell... again. (So sorry, thanks for reading)