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DOOM: BPM

Metal: Hellsinger was a pleasant surprise. I'm already so burnt-out by 'Early Access Retro indie FPS, Quake-inspired games, set in a (insert typical aesthetic here), with 1 weapon gimmick, dumb AI, boring maps... that'll be $19.99 please' type games.
Sorry, I just have like ~40 boomer-shooters in my library, and I can't distinguish them anymore.
So with Metal: Hellsinger, it was a truly neat surprise. It was a nice change of form, and finally something which felt like striked out & carved something really unique & cool.


A Pure Metal Rhythm Shooter

Straight-up, I suck at rhythms in video-games. I'm typically piss at most rhythm games, and timing each note right. Which made it a hefty indecisive choice as to whether I even wanted to play this game. Yet it looked really nice, and there seemed to be some very interesting mechanics & systems outside of the rhythm game-play as well.
The neat mechanic to skip reloads through a well-timed beat was really cool, and is something that couldn't really work in any other game. Albeit I think that it'd've been truly cool if you could skip reloads through dashing too, and not just pressing the reload button. When I first noticed that dashing could be in-beat with the rhythm, I actually thought it was done for exactly that. It could cause some insanely smart strategies for high-skill players I can imagine.
Each demon is cool, and they're all unique. There are no demon where they feel like fillers, or bloats, or anything. They all seem to fit into the game-play loop of the game, and feel very fine-tuned to the pacing of it all. They're also not brainless either, even if they're not super smart too. They have a nice middle-ground somewhere between ULTRAKILL & DOOM Eternal's demons; but it earns that through lessening the demon aggressiveness & smartness by scaling up the difficulty of attention too. The mere rhythm aspect of the game make it indirectly a lot harder than controlling something like the Doom Slayer, for example. One cannot fully focus on the demons themselves all the time, as they need a lot of focus towards themselves too; so the lesser demons actually makes sense here, unlike in ULTRAKILL. That's super cool!
My only problem with the demon variety are the bosses, because they're really repetitive. Throughout the first 7 levels, it's the same exact boss used at the ending of them all. I just cannot defend that. And it's even worse when in 'Nihil' they decide to just throw two of those bosses in at the end at the same time... why? It's such a huge pace-breaker, due to how the difficulty suddenly rises by double. I shouted, and screamed in pure unfiltered anger so many times because of them. And it's even worse that when you fully die, you cannot just return to the boss itself... you need to replay the whole-ass level. BUT WHY?!?! I'm getting actual Dark Souls flashbacks here.
And it's EVEN worse when you finally beat them, the game never reaches that same difficulty level again. Not even with the final boss. That's SHOCKING. And I must say, that the final boss is really cool, and I think it may just be my favourite boss-fight in any FPS game to date. It was just so cool!
I really enjoyed this game, mostly. It has a lot of truly wonderful moments, and a plethora of fun hours at hand.
The campaign was quite fun, and really sweet. It uses some smart & unique map-designs which works surprisingly well, and something I haven't seem much of anywhere else. There's this section in the last mission, which really reminded me of the Resident Evil 4 staircase elevator section; and that was just amazing.
The main-campaign also creates a ton of cool set-pieces & twists; both visually & through game-play. I adored how the level 'Acheron' looks, it just might be my favourite. It has a hefty DOOM Eternal vibe.
I must admit that I got beat around a lot in this game, because my rhythm. However after a few levels I felt like I finally got the hang of it, like I finally got the rhythm of it all. And it begun to notice how each level has an entirely unique beat compared to the previous, which I felt was a smart move to change up the game-play as to prevent it being repetitive or stale; I can very much appreciate that.
But... there is one levels specifically with beats that just f#ck me up always, where its rhythm are totally in such a way where they for some reason do not compute in my brain. That one being 'Nihil'; which is a real bummer. I'm not sure if it's the music itself which has an unclear beat, of it's just the timing itself. But I could never really conjure that specific rhythm, and that honestly tilted me a lot, especially in its respective boss & Torment levels.
Most levels have 3 respective Torment levels, which are singular arenas with unique game-play twists. And honestly I enjoyed most of them, I really loved the 'Weapon Trickery' one specifically. That's a very smart game-play twist, as it caused moments otherwise unobtainable within the main-campaign itself, through its more limited focus to force you into learning each weapon through forcing you to use them. That's really cool, I hope more games do that. Yet the 'Slaughter Mastery' & 'Ultimate Mastery' piss me off.... a lot! Because in each Torment there's a time-limit, and you can gain more time by kills. Cool, neat. But when each wave of demons only spawn in by killing most/all other demons in the arena, it more often than not will cause you having to traverse to the opposite of the map just to get 1 specific kill, which can/will make you lose a ton of time or downright kill you. The amount of times my hand almost went through my monitor due to that is crazy. I really HATED those parts of Torments. Make waves of demons continuous, and instead of punishing players who cannot keep up by making them run out of time, kill them by flooding the room with demons.


Beatings & Beats

The soundtrack of Metal: Hellsinger is really cool.
I've spent a lot of time listening to the soundtrack, both in-game & on YouTube (I beg you to add it on Spotify, dev)
And while there definitely are large curves in quality between them. The fan favourite no doubt being 'Stygia', 'Blood and Law', and 'No Tomorrow'; that's obvious. They're the best of the soundtrack, which is neat... But my problem is that they're the best because the rest are just 'cool' or 'good'. They're quite straightforward & typical. I wish the soundtrack was a lot more experimental, with more songs like 'Stygia' with a lot of clear vocals; much akin to musicians like Alcest's works. I also would've adored more experimental & boppy sounds like Turmion Kätilöt's line-up. Because the game is called "Metal: Hellsinger", not "Black Metal: Hellsinger"
Some smaller bands like Biomechanical would be very welcome.
And for a female protagonist, and for her to canonly be the vocals, as I understand it as... I'm quite shocked by how few of the vocals are actually sung by female leads. The male presence is of course fully welcome, yet females should've really been prioritized a lot more, in my humble opinion.
Still, even for all my hefty gripes, I still love most of it. I'm only being very critical & harsh because I love it & want it to be even better.
I also adore how each level is represented by art of which is supposed to look like vinyl covers full of marks & scratches. That blew my mind when I first noticed that, that was a really neat nod to the music itself, especially as each song is named after their respective level.


Conclusion

Metal: Hellsinger is a game I really enjoyed for the most part, and while there no doubt are moments I disliked a lot. The best parts not only overwhelm the negative ones, but leave a lengthier lasting impression as well. This game no doubt will land on my top 10 games of 2022! And I can't wait to replay it whenever I find the will to play it once more!