Metal Eden Review - Cybernetic FPS Carnage!

Even in the endlessly varied indie space, you don’t see a lot of first-person shooters like Metal Eden. It’s a bit frustrating, if anything, that as a fan of short, bespoke campaigns that are tightly paced and visually immersive, I see indie developers too often forgo that approach and end up with boring, repetitive Roguelites that try to hide their lack of meaningful content behind sluggish progression and cooperative play (looking at you, Abyssus). And while some stellar standouts do emerge like Trepang2, Mullet Mad Jack, Turbo Overkill, or virtually anything New Blood publishes, not much has otherwise stood out for me.

Metal Eden, however, comes in looking like the direct offspring of Doom guy and Ghostrunner after the two had a really weird night out. It’s not a roguelike and not a retro boomer shooter, but a blisteringly fast, bombastic campaign of tightly paced action that knows exactly how long it’s welcome for. This sophomore effort from the team behind Ruiner is fast and stressful, but at times also cerebral and clever. And even in moments when it’s not firing on every literal and metaphorical cylinder, my heart is still racing, and my trigger finger aches for more.

In Metal Eden, you play as Hyper Unit Aska, sent to the city of Meobius to fight the Internal Defence Corps and rescue the cores of those sent there in hope of finding a new place for human civilization to thrive. Now, if that sentence didn’t make any sense to you, then don’t worry because it doesn’t make a lick of goddamn sense to me either even after playing the game. Metal Eden’s narrative is built with a concrete-like density of cyberpunk lingo that feels about as easy to follow as if you started to watch Game of Thrones beginning in Season 5. I’m not sure if there’s any coherent narrative buried somewhere here, but if so, parsing it out is a matter for somebody with a lot more patience. This is especially true when Metal Eden has the very Ghostrunner-esque problem of having story-heavy dialogue occur in the middle of the action sometimes, so whatever threads there are to follow feel pretty thin and ring hollow. There are some nicely done cutscenes, though, and nothing about the story is offensively boring or in your face. It’s just kind of there. I would’ve liked to see something a little more coherent, but I’m not an idiot – we’re here to shoot things. Let’s talk about shooting things.

Metal Eden’s gunplay is… crunchy. It feels like taking a perfectly formed block of ice and slamming it on the ground so that it explodes into thousands of tiny, shiny pieces, or watching a family-sized bag of Doritos be crushed under a hydraulic press. When hit by your bullets, energy beams, or electromagnetic pulses, enemies convincingly stagger, flinging armor pieces through the air and ultimately erupting into clouds of biomechanical gore. It’s the kind of game that will have you gritting your teeth and holding your breath as you activate slow motion, jump out of a wall run, and land a flurry of shotgun pellets to an enemy’s face in the hope that it’s the last thing they see. It sounds awesome because it is awesome. This is made by a dev team that clearly knows they can’t be inspired by something like Doom if the shooting doesn’t feel the part, and they absolutely nailed that.

In large part, this also comes down to the game’s move set, which feels appropriately varied and well-catered to in the design of each combat encounter. Every arena you enter is full of grapple points to fling yourself between, walls to run on, launch pads to bounce from, and plenty of dangerous space to fall if you’re doing all of this without paying careful attention. Despite the clear Ghostrunner inspiration, though, the game has more minor platforming elements that don’t tend to pose any real challenge.

Sure, there are sequences of jetpack-hovering, wall-running, jumping, and grappling between and through arenas, but these feel less like Ghostrunner’s devious obstacle courses and more a means to an end – functioning like its own version of Assassin’s Creed’s parkour or Uncharted’s climbing in that it’s designed more to give you interesting ways to get around and not so much to test your skills with movement alone.  But this works because Metal Eden’s enemies are very fast, extremely aggressive, and will surely make mincemeat out of you if you’re foolish enough to stand especially still.  Having a lot more options to get around than just running is a huge part of the fun.  To call the pace “kind of” frenetic would be like calling a pepperoni pie from Pizza Hut “kind of” oily – in both cases less a convenient adjective and more the defining characteristic of the thing.  In Metal Eden’s case, the pace of its explosive chaos is very much the point.

Not every design choice here necessarily lands, but most generally do.  Having access to over a half dozen punchy, crunchy weapons at any given time is great, and the limited ammunition in most of them forces you to switch it up frequently or lose ground quickly.  The upgradeable alternative fire modes and weapon upgrades you can buy by collecting Dust, the game’s currency, feel both very Doom-esque and like an impactful way to make the guns more versatile than they initially appear.  The suit upgrades you can get, many focused around bullet time, traversal, or the game’s unique core-grabbing mechanic, feel appropriately helpful in giving you the edge to survive.  And the way you can grab enemy cores as though ripping their mechanical hearts from their chests, only to throw them back like a grenade or absorb them to gain a powerful super punch, is a really fun feature that rewards careful play.  

Where the game can struggle a tad is in difficulty spikes borne of arenas that are occasionally just too small and claustrophobic.  These aren’t very common, so it can be baffling as to why they’re even there, but the sheer volume and aggression of enemies that Metal Eden throws at you means it’s a game that works best when its environments are wide open and give you a plethora of means to get around.

Variety can be a minor problem as the game goes on too, because other than a few select sequences allowing you to roll up into a Metroid-like ball and use a special set of attacks allotted to that form, the game doesn’t make a habit of straying from its established comfort zone.  Given how fun the core gameplay is, I’m not sure I would’ve even noticed this if it weren’t for the fact that the shiny, industrial environments look pretty generic and same-y, a few eye-catching outliers aside.  It’s a good-looking game, no doubt, and flexes Unreal Engine 5 as well as any indie developer generally can, but there’s a homogenous feel to some of its levels that probably could’ve been avoided with more time or budget.

Thankfully, though, I was pleasantly surprised to see it running pretty well on both a high-end rig sporting an RTX 4080 and a somewhat weaker rig running an RTX 4060.  In both cases, a combination of practical setting tweaks and DLSS gave me easily 100 or more frames per second, and it felt very smooth even if an occasional microstutter was present when I was paying hard enough attention.  For an Unreal Engine 5 game, I would say the optimization here is great.  The only caveat is, as you might expect, on the Steam Deck. 

Metal Eden is not currently optimized for the Steam Deck, but I did give it a go anyway just to check.  Running it through Proton with all settings at their absolute lowest and FSR set to balanced mode, the game gives a fairly uneven showing of 30-45 fps, looking very rough in the process.  For a shooter this fast-paced, I simply can’t recommend it at all if your primary goal is to play on the Deck, but hopefully that changes with some more targeted optimization after launch.  To round out the presentation, sound design and voice acting are all quite good, though in writing this review I can’t remember a single note of the game’s soundtrack, so that may tell you it’s both unobtrusive and completely forgettable, for better or worse.

Despite some relatively minor missteps, Metal Eden kind of rocks.  The moment-to-moment gameplay feels phenomenal, and the design of its arenas and enemies does a great job of keeping you on your toes and never feeling like victory is a given without tight reflexes and quick thinking.  And while I wish it had a bit more variety in the seven hours and change it took me to run the credits, it doesn’t outstay its welcome either and manages to deliver a memorably chaotic journey through its cyberpunk world.  On I Dream of Indie Games’ rating scale that ranges from the dreadful indie Krampus all the way up to the must-play golden genie, Metal Eden secures itself the silver genie lamp of approval.

SILVER - GREAT