Doom has a lot to answer for. Be it the nightmares of children who encountered a Pinky sprite far too young in ‘93 or the now inextricable link between metal beats and FPS demon-slaying, we’ll be blaming the godfather of shooty-bangs for a lot. Metal: Hellsinger is the latest attempt to take that mix of music and blasting and actually combine the two in gameplay – the big difference to all the other attempts is it actually works, despite all the complexities in the way.
Hellsinger challenges you to make it through various arenas while shooting, dashing, reloading, and activating special abilities, but you do it to a beat. The music swells as you keep to it, and big, satisfying points pop out of enemies as you headshot, slice, slaughter, shotgun, and otherwise destroy your daemonic opponents. Get to a x16 multiplier and the vocals kick in, your job being to hold it there as long as possible.
In similar games I’ve tried in the past, this has been ludicrously difficult. The combination of trying to navigate a fast-paced game world, stay alive, and stay on beat quickly overwhelms. Hellsinger does a lot to help with that, and most of it comes down to subtleties. Simply, everything on screen is trying to keep you on-beat. Keeping your shots in time to just the crosshair would be a challenge, but every target pulses. Every gun reloads in-time. Missing one beat isn’t punishing, and sound-cues (alongside the music, natch) will put you back on the path. Even moving in-time rewards you, and the game never expects you to do two things on-beat – simply choose one each time.
Hellsinger also makes the correct decision of not being a challenging game outside of its rhythm properties. Damage isn’t too high, enemies aren’t too fast – it’s a high-score game, not a massively difficult FPS with metal on top. It simply wouldn’t work with Doom Eternal’s hyper-lethal enemies, ludicrous pace, or massive number of weapon and movement options. No doubt difficulty options – even a one-hit-death mode – are one of many potential additions that could be made outside of the demo I played, but for a starter experience this is perfect.
There’s just enough auto-aim that you don’t need to be pixel perfect. Health is regenerated through good combat, but there’s plenty just lying around too. Shooting off-beat still does damage and has an effect, if not as explosive of one. When the pace of the music changes, everything happens faster, rather than expecting you to work out how your gun timings interact now.
It helps, massively, that said music rules. Obviously, if you run screaming from heavy drums and guitars, or can’t stand melodic screaming as vocals, this simply isn’t the game for you. But this isn’t just thrown-together game music metal, it’s good metal. There’s famous names on the original soundtrack, and it sounds as legitimate and brilliant as anything Spotify Discover is likely to pop out.
Beyond the music, the aesthetics also work. Two things concerned me coming into Hellsinger: the general rhythm FPS difficulties explained above, and the ‘80s hair metal stylings that I’m both personally not a fan of and feel are very overdone. Whatever your personal feelings on it are, I was vastly more impressed than I expected. Enemies feel unique and interesting, guns are cool, the main character is a clear badass without speaking. I’d rather hear more from her than the odd cowboy skull-gun companion, who is probably the low-point, but it’s so much better than I expected. If the stylings of the trailers put you off, give it a shot anyway.
It’s probably also worth noting, and not just for my ego boost, that I am (at time of writing) the world record high score holder on the press demo level. As well as making me extremely cool and sexually attractive, positioning the game as a high-score chaser is going to increase its longevity a thousand-fold. You get a nice big “New World Record!” message if you manage to grab one, and a spot at the top of a global leaderboard. You can also show just your friends’ leaderboards to compete with them.
I have no doubt my record (6.8 million and change on Stygia) will be smashed within hours of the wider world getting access, but it does mean I can’t tell you if the game works with no sense of rhythm. I thought I’d be pretty terrible at it but I wasn’t, and I can say that I think the tutorial and various in-game prompts do an incredible job of teaching you, but this is something that each person will have to try for themselves. Hence why they’re putting out a free, three-level demo fairly soon, I suppose.
Those high-scores are one point of contention. After getting my world record (did I mention that?), I then tried a couple of times to beat it. I spent more time at a x16 multiplier, I took less damage, but my score ended up lower due to, I think, higher weighting on completing a level quickly. I don’t really want to beat it quickly, I want to do it skillfully, and I think the balancing of all that before launch and people start setting real records is going to be very important. There’s also so much optimization that can be done with every kill that getting a true 100% max run is going to be near-impossible.
Another area Hellsinger triumphs is boss design. If you’ve played Returnal’s bullet-hell bosses, you’ll be immediately at home with Hellsinger’s variant. Attacks hang in the air to give you a chance to analyze the pattern, and once again the whole combination of on-screen prompts means you can concentrate on it without dropping the beat, with some practice. The Stygia boss is simple and not particularly difficult to kill, so there’s clear room for increased complexity there.
On that note, this first level is brilliant but this definitely isn’t a game loop that can sustain a 20 hour campaign. You’d get tired, for one, and the areas for expansion that other FPS games can exploit don’t work when you have to keep it all simple enough to not overload players. This includes level design, enemies, guns, movement tools – the lot. What’s here so far is impressive enough that I think they’ll pull it off, but one misstep and it could go up in smoke.
With just one, ten minute level I’ve already dropped an hour or so on Hellsinger, and I’m desperate for more. Skill runs and high-score competitions will be a feast for the eyes and ears, and it should immediately get a post in the skill-game community, if they like the music. More, please.
Written by Ben Barrett on behalf of GLHF.
[mm-video type=video id=01fny0xyn0f9j5fer2ry playlist_id=none player_id=none image=https://images2.minutemediacdn.com/image/upload/video/thumbnail/mmplus/01fny0xyn0f9j5fer2ry/01fny0xyn0f9j5fer2ry-460ad43025526197fb4b1d0d985304cc.jpg]
[listicle id=1311406]