In Metal Eden, the upcoming sci-fi shooter from Ruiner developer Reikon Games, progress is all a matter of breaking apart the old in order to make way for the new. Sometimes that means indiscriminately mowing down whole swaths of enemies; other times it means upgrading and enhancing your abilities to inflict ever more spectacular feats of lethality. In either case, “progress” is only ever a work in progress. Practice makes perfect.
Players assume the role of Aska, a fleet-footed battle android known as a Hyper Unit, tasked by their mysterious creator to save a human colony city called Moebius from a mysterious “erosion” that’s taken control of the city’s automated defenses and imperiled the lives of every human trapped within. There’s a lot more to the game’s premise than that, but the gist from the start is straightforward: Regain control over the city, rescue the colonists, and eliminate anything that stands in your way to do it.
Image: Reikon Games/Deep Silver
At a glance it’s not difficult to pinpoint the root of Metal Eden’s influences. A sci-fi boomer shooter with an emphasis on arena-based combat and zippy environment traversal, Reikon’s sophomore effort combines the brutality of 2016’s Doom with the verticality of Ghostrunner, Mirror’s Edge, and Titanfall 2 to create a match made in Metal Eden.
The demo for the game, which was released last week, includes the first two levels: a tutorial that sees the player retrieving their equipment and running a mission through hostile territory, and a level through one of Moebius’ industrial sectors in order to access an orbital elevator. Between fending off waves of hostile enemy units and traversing the strata of an enormous megastructure, nearly every moment of the demo’s duration is punctuated with either a set-piece or varied gameplay encounters that demonstrate Metal Eden is a solid, compelling experience.
Image: Reikon Games/Deep Silver
The coolest feature in the game’s arsenal, and the chief distinguishing feature of its gameplay, is Metal Eden’s core-ripping mechanic. Throughout the demo, Aska is faced with an onslaught of cyborg enemies, each with their own respective strengths and weaknesses that must be exploited in order to defeat them. As a so-called Hyper Unit, the player has the ability to telepathically rip out an enemy’s core — which houses their digitized consciousness — at will once they’ve dealt enough damage to charge the ability.
Core-ripping is essentially Metal Eden’s equivalent to Doom’s Glory Kill system, albeit with an added dimension of strategic variety aside from sheer gratuitous spectacle. Once the player has ripped out an enemy’s core, they can either throw it at other nearby enemies to inflict explosive damage, or harness the core into the player’s own for a temporary boost to their melee strength. The latter tactic especially comes in handy when the player is faced with larger, plate-armored enemies that they’ll need to chip away at in order to adequately afflict damage.
All in all, it took me an hour to play through the demo for Metal Eden to completion, not counting all the times I stopped to gawk at the game’s environment design and take screenshots. There were a lot of standout moments throughout my initial playtime, though the one that left the biggest impression on me was the demo’s final combat encounter, which tasked me with unlocking a nearby door by standing in the radius of a holographic sphere while fending off waves of enemies, not unlike a raid puzzle in Destiny 2. It’s moments like these, where the game throws something unexpected yet immediately intuitive at the player, that had me returning for yet another run after completing the demo.
If there’s one impression I felt after playing the demo, it was amusement at the fact that Metal Eden would happen to land in the same year as Marathon, Bungie’s upcoming sci-fi extraction shooter. While the former may not share the latter’s stark art style or PvPvE gameplay, there is a lot in common between the two in terms of their respective premises. Both feature 3D-printed cyborg characters exploring abandoned human colonies overrun by automated adversaries, and both appear to have more up their sleeves than what first meets the eye. That is to say, if you’re intrigued by the idea of Marathon, but aren’t sold on its multiplayer core experience, Metal Eden might shape up to be a worthy substitute.
With all that said, however, I did encounter a handful of technical difficulties in my hands-on experience with the game. Certain dialogue lines and sound effects were conspicuously absent during cutscenes, and I noticed some lorem ipsum placeholder text during an early mission briefing. While I played the demo on Windows PC, I’ve read other players’ experiences with screen tearing and texture popping while playing on PlayStation 5. Mind you, there’s still time to iron these issues out in the lead-up to Metal Eden’s release next month, or even through a day one patch, but it nonetheless sours what was otherwise a thrilling first outing. We’ll see if Reikon Games can polish out these issues and deliver on the game’s potential when it comes out on May 6.
Metal Eden will be released May 6 on PlayStation 5, Windows PC, and Xbox Series X.
