Metal Eden Review (PS5) – Hard Drive

When we were starved of a new Metroid game for decades I imagine a lot of developers thought like me. Well, why don’t we make our own? Metal Eden is a science fiction first-person shooter featuring a female lead in an armoured suit, sporting a gun, and she can morph into a ball mode. I mean, it’s all there.

Metal Eden is what the western audience wants from Metroid, but never gets, as it’s a Nintendo PG property. There’s blood, there’s a grown-up storyline with grown-up themes. There are no dumb cartoonish monsters, there’s little in the way of annoying environmental puzzles, and it’s straight shot missions, in no way a Metroidvania. Streamlined, combined with Ghost Runner’s FPS platforming, and bosh. Eat your core out, Nintendo.

A little annoying for Ruiner’s dev team Reikon, that we’d have Metroid Dread and Metroid Prime 4 news before they shot their shot, but it’s here now. Is it the Metroid you’ve kind of always dreamed of, or does losing those parts take away from the whole?

Death Isn’t What It Used To Be

Aska is hyper. Sorry, no, Aska is a Hyper, a human mind in a ‘core’, a chip that records the whole of a personality, memory, skills, and experience. She can be uploaded into a new body with ease as long as her core is intact. Ever seen Altered Carbon? – It’s pretty close to the resleeving idea from that. Aska also has a synthetic body, built to be Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger, and more ball than a human.

Working for a shady faceless revolutionary, Aska is sent out to recover the Apex cores of a number of ‘Engineers’ on runs, which makes the whole scenario sound like a roguelite. But of course, if you are in a cheap synthetic body and your core is recovered, you can just keep getting new bodies, and each forward mission becomes the next run. It’s taken a roguelite idea into its narrative.

To begin with at least, Aska is led by the nose, by the constant dark rhetoric of Nexus, a revolutionary who is behind your Hyper sleeve, and urging you on to complete your missions. I could have done without his crazed Wachowski architect vibes. He has the feel of a villain right off the bat. Thankfully, around half the game features another voice in your ear, who I won’t spoil name-wise, but is vastly superior and funny and unhinged, but in just the right way.

And the story of Metal Eden, while there and serviceable, feels like window dressing for the gameplay. Aska for all her Hyper skills and cool look, is as replaceable as any sleeve, rarely has any lines of dialogue, and feels completely non-descript. Even more non-descript than KILLKILLKILL Helmet guy from Ruiner.

Don’t Call Her Samus

So maybe the forgettable plot is a vehicle to sell setting and gameplay? So what? Combat in Metal Eden is a frenetic, hyperkinetic race for survival and positioning. It’s got a lot of the feel of Doom Eternal if you crossed it with a recent hyperfast hero shooter in a science fiction setting – that brutal damage, repositioning and constantly changing up the gun or ability you are using, whilst bouncing around every wall and platform there is.

You have an infinite ammo, but rechargeable magazine machine gun to start with, and you’ll find seven other finite ammo weapons, from your basic pistol and shotguns on to Sniper rifles, grenade launchers and kind of awesome energy lancers that rip up shields. These can be substituted at the click of a button as you’d expect from something so fast.

Cores are central to combat and function as a one-shot kill special, ripping it out of your opponent with a kind of Darth-Vader-on-his-worst-day force grip, and then as a kind of grenade you can throw. Probably for another one-shot kill. The only trouble is as soon as you use it, you’ve got a cooldown to wait out until you can use it again. You can also absorb it and use it as a hyper punch, which can break armour. Personall,y I found this a cumbersome way to break armour while I was zipping about like a jackrabbit, and was pleased when I found the shotgun took armour down in moments, and then the energy weapons were even better at it.

Metal Eden is like a dance. A dance of sick-making neon fireworks. It’s going to appeal to FPS players if they like the Doom Eternal or Rage style but not to the Call of Duty or Battlefield types. And it may well appeal to those used to recent hyperfast MMO shooters. If you get queasy on VR or rollercoasters, this one may be hard to play. I had to up my usual movement amount fivefold, and that can make it a bit of a ride.

Restore Hyper Function

Movement is everything. Each area is either a linear corridor of traversal obstacles or an arena of enclosed traversal options to keep you constantly moving during a fight. There’s usually not many areas to hide, enemies can phase out one place and phase in another, right behind you. These areas just want one thing – for you to move. You’ve got wall runs, double jump and jet pack enhanced double jumps; you’ve got grapples and dodges, and fall height is no obstacle. There’s even a few random portals towards the end.

Everything is also on a cooldown timer, from grapples to core grabs, to your gun, to health, shield and ammo power-ups, to fuel, to punches. You can’t keep using the same thing or the same area – its impossible. You’ll run out, or you’ll get stuck, you are constantly having to take new routes, or work out multi-path routes through an arena.

It’s a cruel but cool design loop, and it makes Metal Eden a lot of fun to play. It’s also got a little of that Ruiner difficulty, as enemies will punish you for crashing into them unprepared or sneak up on you camping, or just pausing for a moment. Thankfully unlike Ruiner, there are multiple difficulty options here, from really easy, up to several stages of skill-testing insanity. I took the ‘normal’ route for this review, and I’m glad I did.

Pedal To The Metal

Metal Eden’s speed makes Sonic look like he’s taking a nap. And that’s all while throwing beautiful crispy graphics at you the whole time. I never noticed a frame rate drop, and I zipped about as much as possible. The science fiction cityscape, the obstacles, every background is beautifully designed and while possibly no more memorable than insert sci-fi city here, it’s still stunning.

It’s no wonder the same team made Ruiner – there’s the same stunning text, menu, and overall graphic design here. Even if you didn’t know it, you’d guess. There’s a design skill on show that really defines Metal Eden’s look and feel, and it’s a font lover’s dream.

We should probably also cover the ball mode. In missions two and six (of nine), you can use ball mode to travel across hazardous terrain. It’s restricted to these levels and I couldn’t seem to engage it in any others. It’s not used to access secret areas like it was in Metroid, but here as a variant on the gameplay loop – suddenly things are third person, you have a shield-ripping lazer, and homing missiles, and the gameplay usually switches to something akin to stealth. These few ball mode areas are usually untraversable even with your biggest jumps and longest wallruns. There are laser towers that eat up your Android mode shields, and so you’ve got to go ball style. I felt these areas completely underutilized, and their inclusion just means Metal Eden gets every unfavourable Metroid comparison going, rather than me just having thought of Ghostrunner and various other fast FPS games.

Garden of Eden

Metal Eden’s soundtrack is quite the ambient soundscape for its vibrant future city and underbelly, with lots of glitchy dynamic pieces that kick in when battle is joined. It’s full on channelling Ghost in the Shell with tracks that have that glorious Okinawan chanting in them. I hope there’s a soundtrack release to coincide with the game so that I can add it to regular rotation.

However, the voice work grated on me terribly. The monologuing of Nexus in your ear was far too frequent and constant for my liking – I was very pleased when the second character came along, the whole feel of the game changes from oppressive and annoying to kind of fun.  

Full Metal Jacket

Metal Eden is a great feeling blend of genres and hyperkinetic gameplay. It will appeal to those who find Metroid too slow, cumbersome or Nintendo for them. It will appeal to those who like fast FPS’s, or the brutal blasting of the recent Doom games. It’ll appeal to those who enjoyed the FPS platforming of Ghostrunner or Neon White. It’s also blended with a kind of single-player MMO shooter, a hero shooter you play on your own.

Everything is so fast, so kinetic, it’s honestly disorienting. When in combat, there is nowhere to stop and hide. And I found this relentlessness refreshing. It demanded far more of me than an average first-person shooter does, especially after two decades of playing them. I had to push further to find places to stop, routes to gather the resources I needed, strategies that worked on enemies that could attack in unexpected ways – I had to find ways to break the system.

Is it the Metroid game we’ve always wanted? Well, no. It’s a linear corridor shooter, a completely different kind of game, that shouldn’t be compared to a backtracking action adventure with far more personality. I feel the ball mode and character of Aska creates this frame of reference that is really unhelpful and a false comparison. It’s a kind of misdirection. I fell into it immediately watching the trailers, but once you play the game, you know ball-mode is an underutilized and almost unnecessary system, and the only real compsrison you should be thinking of is Ghostrunner.

Metal Eden is available today on PlayStation 5 (review platform), Xbox Series S|X, and PC via Steam.

Developer: Reikon
Publisher: Plaion, Deep Silver

Disclaimer: In order to complete this review, we were provided with a promotional copy of the game. For our full review policy, please go here.

If you enjoyed this article or any more of our content, please consider our Patreon.

Make sure to follow Finger Guns on our social channels. Twitter, Facebook, Twitch, Spotify or Apple Podcasts – to keep up to date on our news, reviews and features.