Metal: Hellsinger review – hard-rocking shooter hybrid proves hell ain't a bad place to be

The best first person shooters have a natural groove to their gunplay; in Metal: Hellsinger, the groove is the gunplay.

This curious hybrid of a game’s genesis lies in the moment of serendipitous synchronicity when indie developer David Goldfarb gleefully realised the heavy metal song he was listening to while playing Doom had fallen into rhythmic time with his gunshots.

Whether you agree that sensation can sustain an entire game will depend on your tolerance for both relentless bass drum blast beats and equally repetitive score-attack gameplay loops.

In truth, there’s not too much else to get to grips with here – certainly not Metal: Hellsinger’s plectrum-thin story, which casts you as a demon unimaginatively named The Unknown, who is rampaging through the underworld one graphically-generic circle of hell at a time in a bid to reclaim her stolen voice.

All of the innovation instead comes from the game’s clever central mechanic. Each of the game’s eight levels is soundtracked by an original composition by Swedish multi-instrumentalists Two Feathers, the tempo of which is visually represented by pulsating lines converging on your crosshair in a manner that recalls the classic Guitar Hero games.

Shots that land on the beat, as well as finishing moves, dashes, and well-timed reloads, feed into your Fury multiplier, which not only ramps up your score bonuses and damage output, but also increases the intensity of the song. Each successive level introduces more instruments into the sound mix, with the highest triggering vocals from an impressive roster of leather-lunged guests including System Of A Down’s Serj Tankian, Trivium’s Matt Heafy, and Randy Blythe from Lamb Of God.

It’s a neat trick designed to trigger a trance-like flow state in which sound and shooting are perfectly in-sync. This can take some time to click, though, because for all its rhythm action stylings, Metal: Hellsinger is still a shooter at heart, and ignoring years of muscle memory itching to shoot bad guys as soon as they spawn in is at least half the battle.

The other half is overcoming the more egregious difficulty spikes. Level design largely comprises surviving waves of different assailants in a series of self-contained combat arenas before besting a multi-stage battle with a bullet sponge boss. Inevitably the developers’ idea of increasing challenge largely equates to ramping up the volume of enemies and harmful projectiles flying towards you.

When you do slip into Metal: Hellsinger’s, er, groove, it can be an intoxicatingly transcendental experience, an immersive, interactive musical extravaganza in which shotgun and kick drum blasts come together with soaring melodies in a viscerally chaotic, carnage-fuelled cacophony.

On the flipside, falling out of time can be fatal and the shooter fan’s instinct to spray and pray their way out of trouble only makes things worse. You’re awarded a couple of continues per level, and some of the bottlenecks in later levels can really kill the mood.

There’s a small arsenal of weapons to juggle and a string of supplementary challenges which bestow boons and perks to help maintain your multipliers but ultimately Metal: Hellsinger is a simple game which gets a surprising amount of mileage from a single good idea executed exceptionally well.

And yet that monomaniacal approach is both a blessing and a curse. Devotees will doubtless spend enjoyable hours perfecting their runs but those not so enamoured with Metal: Hellsinger’s central conceit might find the whole thing a little… one note.

Metal: Hellsinger is released on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series S (reviewed) and X, and PC on September 15.