You have to love the expansion of the rhythm game genre these days as developers as The Outsiders work with publishers like Funcom to get action-FPS games to flow in a rhythm. Their upcoming game is Metal: Hellsinger and after getting a chance to try out this game for myself, I am pretty excited about what the full game will hold! For now, let’s get into how my initial experience was and you can even enjoy my first attempt at the game in the first look video above.

Gameplay

Set up as a level-to-level system, this game is oozing Doom-style action, but with a rhythm game twist. You’ll be gathering guns and weapons as you make your way through the level, where some are better for different situations and different enemies and you’ll be able to cycle through them but to do the most amount of damage you will need to attack on beat with the music.

This means you don’t need to metaphorically defeat your enemies with pazazz… it’s mandatory! Plus, if you find power-ups or do well enough for a long period of time, the music will upgrade to include vocals which signify that you are in a more lethal mode. As long as you stay in rhythm with the song, you will do even more damage than before - but don’t worry, your off-rhythm shots will be a little stronger than normal as well, but it may not last as long.

Not to mention that your reloads and dodges are also set to be more beneficial with proper timing. You can speed up reload times by hitting the indicator icon as it reaches the center. However, enemies do not seem to care at all about you, your music, or your damn rhythm… they are demons dammit and so they don’t follow any rules!

Other than these neat aspects, there are a lot of things that you can expect in the game that you would in a Doom game. Fast-paced action, waves of horrific enemies, plenty of weapon choices, and a story that gives just enough of a reason to go into hell’s territory and start ripping these evil creatures to shreds!

Expectations

This preview was only a single level long and it had a scoreboard at the end, so I would imagine that this game plans to have a scoreboard for each level and an overall ‘game completion’ scoreboard for players to compete on. I just hope this doesn’t end up affecting the ability to play in any way for those trying to access the game while offline or playing on a Steam Deck away from a wifi source.

They had quite the mix of weapons for just the first level of the game. I am very intrigued to see how diverse the weapon catalog ends up getting, not to mention the vast amount of creatures that are sure to be encountered in the game.

Recently, they announced that Serj Tankian joined their vocal cast. This game already has quite the star-studded cast behind the music of the game, so the soundtrack for this game is sure to be worth owning separately. I am definitely looking forward to what the complete soundtrack will sound like!

Conclusion

Metal: Hellsinger caught my attention with a trailer and has sold me on following this game’s process until release with this preview. The music was instantly enjoyable, the mixture of fast-paced action-FPS with rhythm game mechanics while not forcing the player to be accurate every time, but rather rewarding them for being accurate, is a solid mechanic. Truly a game that has me ready to rock out with my guns out!

Metal: Hellsinger is set to release in 2022 on PC via Steam, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S.