There’s one round little chubster robot with an exposed core, so I yank it out of his chest and he drops immediately. I could throw it like a grenade, but instead I absorb it to earn a brief superpunch power-up that I use to launch myself at one of the heavier-armored robots, bashing the metal plates right off him. While I’m up close and he’s staggered I switch to shotgun to finish him off, then jetpack away. There’s a bunch more robot enemies in this arena, and I saw some ammo up on the wallrun I could reach while I wait for the core-yanking ability to come back online.
This is a fairly typical five seconds of Metal Eden, a superspeed neon FPS where you’re a parkour android with a big bag of tools for movement and for destruction. There’s a grappling hook and double-jump, a freezy grenade, and a morph ball mode right out of Super Metroid that lets you roll around flinging homing missiles and lightning.
Staggering enemies with a punch before finishing them off guarantees they’ll drop health, while throwing a core at them ensures they’ll drop ammo. If you were detecting a hint of the Bethesda Dooms about Metal Eden you’re spot on. There’s also a fair chunk of Ruiner, developer Reikon’s previous adrenaline-pumper. But where that had a birdseye view and cyberpunk flair, Metal Eden is a sci-fi movement shooter about rescuing digitized colonists who’ve been imprisoned for extremely nebulous reasons by a coalition of drones and robots who are even less human than the Bubblegum Crisis cosplayer who is Metal Eden’s android protagonist.
What it really reminds me of is Necromunda: Hired Gun, an under-rated movement-shooter that drowned you in abilities like wallrunning and grapple-hooking and slow-mo, which made for frenetic action when you remembered to use them all but could also be a bit overwhelming if you didn’t play for a few days and then tried to remember what the controls were.
The story is likewise overwhelming, with a bitter computer named Nexus as the main narrator and a lot of stylish but wilfully confusing flashbacks. It’s a little like Ruiner that way, only where Ruiner made sense in the end, when I hit the credits six or seven hours into Metal Eden I was even more confused than when I started.
Which wouldn’t be as much of a problem if there weren’t so much story, constantly being monologued at you mid-level when you’d rather be shooting dudes. Metal Eden paces out its mostly linear levels with zipline rides past futuristic tower blocks while Nexus drones on, and occasionally some actual drones appear to shoot at you in case you’re getting bored. While I was playing Metal Eden the first time I couldn’t help but think how dull those segments would be on the replay, and the same with the lingering introductions of each new gun and blank-faced robotic enemy.
And while they are annoying on my second time through these levels, I’m surprised to find an even bigger annoyance. There’s no New Game+ mode for finally cutting loose with all the unlockable abilities, weapons, and upgrades. Instead, when you select a level from the post-game menu you load in with whatever minimal loadout you had the first time, back to square one. In a genre I’d expect to be all about the replay—the speedrun, the showboat second playthrough where you get to demonstrate all the skills you developed the first time—Metal Eden instead feels like a game that wants you to put it down and move on the second you roll credits. Which makes the $40 price a bit harder to swallow.
If they patch in a New Game+ mode though, Metal Eden will be an easier recommendation for adrenaline junkies who get off on wallrunning around arenas shooting plasma at giant spiderbots.