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.

i want to like this so much more than i actually do. maybe i missed out because i only just played this game and never got the chance to play it online. my experience with injustice says that's likely not the case, but it's worth consideration if nothing else.

i think one of the most damning things about this game is that its singleplayer content just outright fucking sucks. story mode is awful for a myriad of reasons, the primary one being that this game really fails as a reboot for the series. so often i found myself wonder "who is this character?" or "how do these characters know each other?" or "what is the established power of this character and how is that relative to other characters?" and other basic questions that any plot should immediately resolve in its exposition. the narrative is ostensibly about raiden and his attempt to save earthrealm, sure okay. who is raiden? what is he like? why does everyone seem to know who he is? what is his established rapport with liu kang and why is it one of the focal points of the game? or even basic really nitpick-y questions like "what is outrealm exactly? how do people get there? how do people know about it? how did someone like johnny cage enter into a tournament where people fight to the death by accident?" go unanswered.

i feel as though part of me is being an overly critical internet asshole who thinks he can write a better script than everyone in the world, but these are very basic worldbuilding things that are never established. i don't know who these characters are prior to the events that happen. the plot begins basically in media res so i don't have any time to familiarize myself with all the pre-established character relationships. some of them are explained to the audience, but a large portion aren't, and the story is weaker for that. i can't invest myself in raiden's struggle if i don't know what his limitations are as a deity or what his personality is even like beyond "stern and lawful".

and on a beat-for-beat basis, the plot just makes some bafflingly bad decisions. why do we spend the first third of the story hyping up this tournament as the end-all be-all for the plot conflict only to immediately go "lol okay let's do another tournament but this time for realsies"? what the fuck is the point? why is shao kahn killed by liu kang and then immediately afterwards quan chi goes "okay guys i secretly saved his life he's okay" without any sort of tension or false resolution? again, what the fuck is the point?

in terms of gameplay, story mode really suffers too because of the lack of narrative weight a lot of fights have. oh whoops smoke misunderstood what was going on and wants to fight you now despite several characters in the cutscene telling him he was wrong. fight time. oh man isn't it crazy how sonya and raiden have a case of miscommunication and fight each other because of it? how enthralling. so much of the story mode is filler fights, and don't even get me started on the "you have to do a two on one" fight that pops up every 3 cutscenes. it's so formulaic and tiresome and BORING.

challenge tower is its own bag of worms because... it's 300 missions. that's an intimidating amount of content by itself. now factor in that most of these missions are repetitive concepts or just completely vanilla fights with the spicy twist of "use x move y amount of times" or something to that effect. the noteworthy challenges are the ones that are just outright tedious as all shit to do, like kill shao kahn 3 times in a row with one health bar. it's semi-difficult, but most of the challenges can be broken in half by finding a way to exploit the bad AI by using a specific move or strategy, so all difficulty just becomes tedium. challenge tower could stand to be about 25% as long and it'd be a much more enjoyable experience. as it is? trash, redundant, filler, monotonous trash.

after spending the past few paragraphs ripping this game to shreds, you might be surprised to find that this score isn't just outright negative. and, on some level, it's because NRS know how to make a competent fighting game. i would say i enjoyed this game as a fighting game engine quite a bit. i have my complaints with the roster, mainly that they're a lot of them are same-y (it's easier to count which characters don't have projectiles + a lot of the special moves function in very similar ways for multiple movesets), but i did enjoy exploring the cast and learning the various playstyles. and while the characters can be a bit flat and underdeveloped, i still like a fairly decently portion of them. it's not anything astounding, and you really have to get past the "every woman is designed for the male gaze" aspect, but it's the most enjoyable part of the game for me.

if you look at this purely as a fighting game with no singleplayer content beyond an arcade mode, this game is actually fine. it's a real shame that so much of that content has such a negative impact on the game as a whole for me. there's a lot of potential here that just does not get met. i've heard MKX is a great iteration on what was established here. all i can hope is that it lives up to the hype.