Metal Eden Review (PS5) – Take It To The Cleaners

Metal Eden PS5 Review. If DOOM, Titanfall and Ghostrunner had a placebo-obsessed cybernetic baby, then Metal Eden is pretty much exactly that. A descendant of an FPS progenitor in DOOM, and another descendant with an infatuation with Mirror’s Edge in Ghostrunner, Metal Eden is a fast and fluid FPS brought to us by Reikon-the developers of 2017’s visceral action shooter Ruiner, as well as publishers Plaion and Deep Silver. Can Metal Eden sit comfortably alongside its contemporaries and forebears, or is it a metallic mess?

Metal Eden Review (PS5) – Take It To The Cleaners

There’s a tremendous futuristic flavour in Metal Eden which saturates its very existence. A female “Hyper Unit” called ASKA is charged with undertaking a death-defying mission to rescue citizens from a booming metropolitan utopia called Moebius, which has become a deathtrap. ASKA is not only concerned with liberating innocents, but also unearthing secrets and confronting the designers of this corrupted Eden.

Metal Eden’s story feels like nothing but a complex backdrop to the slick movement and gameplay. There are cutscene interludes that are impressively rendered and provide a sense of scale and panache, though the impressive presentation is matched by the ho-hum story that has a hard time providing a reason to care. Yeah, the strung up Hyper Unit man with a blood-scarred face is a disturbing image, but the talk of cores and those Mass Effect-like connection beams don’t strike a chord properly because there’s an absence of understandable world building.

A Pleasingly Doomed Titanfall Ghostrunner

Fortunately, you aren’t playing Metal Eden for the story are you? If you are then you may feel short-changed, but your pockets will feel loaded with change after you sample some Metal Eden gameplay! The speed and slickness of Metal Eden is the most compelling reason to play it. Yes it’s like DOOM, DOOM if it was situated in dingy metallic facilities, but despite the environments not being very inspired-the sense of movement and fluidity is spot on.

The springiness of Metal Eden ensures zipping through environments and laying down hellfire on demented scourges is always frenetic and flows in all the right ways to give you those insatiable badass vibes. Running through environments has an irresistible sense of speed, and running along walls to cross gaps, as well as grappling onto lines provide flickers of inspiration from Ghostrunner and Titanfall-though it is a shame you aren’t able to wall run and shoot.

Lifeforms come in waves and will do their darndest to assault you, but you pack the punches necessary to bosh them back into the abyss. Wave-based battles aren’t too exhilarating, and can become long in the tooth because enemy compositions don’t change much between battle sections, but the intensity and speed can alleviate feelings of sameness.

Whether you want to clean up the cleaners that Moebius engineers throw your way by bashing their bodies to stagger them, spraying them with lead until they’re dead, or ripping cores out of their chests and then hurling them at another enemy until they explode like projectiles, the flexibility with which you can clear away scum and villainy is nothing short of sophisticated.

Building Waves Of Momentum

With all the on-the-fly combat options in Metal Eden, it marks itself out as an impressively confident contender among the pretenders of the genre. Yes, Metal Eden borrows many of its greatest ideas from exemplars of the FPS, but Metal Eden wears them like a tautly augmented bodysuit-and wearing this metaphorical getup just feels right.

Every encounter with the cleaners is a hectic affair, often swarming at you with all the firepower they can muster, and your job is to use all the abilities you have to wipe them all out before another wave enters the fray to try their fare at trying to destroy you.

There is undoubtedly a routine and flow Metal Eden settles itself into, but there’s no letting up, and this free-running FPS juggles up your opposition by bringing in titans who need to be defeated by specific means. Many fodder enemies can be sprayed with your conventional weaponry, but sometimes you’ll need to decimate the armour of trickier foes, and you may need to utilize the power of a core to provide additional oomph to your offence. This usually means ripping cores from enemies, and instead of hurling them to cause the explosion already mentioned, you insert them into yourself and become empowered to punch through enemy sheathing like it was nothing.

Engineered For DOOM

While the gameplay is undeniably impressive, nothing else about Metal Eden is attractive or engrossing enough to keep you going-though luckily the campaign is short enough not punch a hole through your patience. The truth is after the initial excitement of how Metal Eden feels wears off, the game fails to evolve enough beyond this to keep itself as fresh and invigorating as it started out as.

If the dingy environments are a turn-off to you, then the waves upon waves of samey enemy types will wear even thinner on you. When you’re thrown into routine encounters flushing out waves of hostiles that run the same gamete of drones for you to eradicate, then shaking things up and throwing in unexpected twists and turns is imperative to keep players interested. The same issue springs up with Metal Eden’s environments; they’re too dingy and lacking diversity. There is a thematic throughline to connect each level meaningfully, but they ultimately seem like nothing but expressionless arenas for blasting the enemies contained within.

Metal Eden fails to truly entice in new ways, and no matter how fast-paced and more-ishly chaotic the shooting action is, it isn’t backed up with substance elsewhere, so it continues on a predictable thread until you’re bored or you finish the game and be glad you did because you didn’t want it to keep going and playing the same beats.

When there’s no narrative-based allure to keep you indulging in Metal Eden’s brand of FPS action either, then what you’re ultimately left with is a blistering FPS that looks sharp and impressive, but leaves behind auxiliary ingredients that could’ve turned a good FPS into a great FPS.

Altogether, Metal Eden should be given a try, there’s a demo on the PlayStation Store that can help you decide whether you dig its energy. However, despite its frenetic pace and solid gunplay, there’s a sense the true potential of Metal Eden is unfinished. If you want a good and brief FPS, you can do far worse than Metal Eden, but you’ll be left with the lingering impression you’ve seen all it has to offer too quick, and that the game’s potential has only come out of the FPS oven half-baked.

Review copy was generously provided by the publisher.