METAL EDEN

Very satisfying fast paced FPS. The shooting part feels very good, satisfying animations, great sounds and fun movement. The upgrade system is also fun, which each upgrade to the player character and the weapon feels substantial. When you're not shooting stuff you're moving from arena to arena, usually using ziplines and wallruning from place to place, these sections are also great, with some simple secrets to discover. There are also alternative exploration sections, where you have to turn into a ball, akin to Metroid games, and have to traverse moderately long levels. These sections unfortunately are pretty bad, unlike Metroid the ball is very stiff and unfun to control, and you have 2 very boring and unstaisfying attacks. Thankfully I think devs realised how unfun these are and those sections are very rare and brief. When it comes to the story, it's being presented to you in form of exposition dumps during the aforementioned exploration moments. These exposition dumps are told to you by an unbearably cringy, cliche edgelord character. The writing and voice acting were so bad and annoying that I muted the voices and turned off subtitles, so I don't have much else when it comes to the story. I also feel like the game has minor visibility issues, for instance, the ammo counter is placed physically on weapons, while it's not a bad idea, the weapon animations are very wobbly and it was hard for me to focus and check on the fly how much ammo I have in some weapons. which lead to reloading animation kicking in in very unfortunate moments. One other visual issue I have is damage feedback - very often I had the feeling that I took massive damage, with screen turning red, flashing, and so on, only to look at my health and armor counters and see that they're still well above 100. This brings me to another issue - I rarely ever fell below 100 armor and health in this game. Normal difficulty is way too easy, offering almost no friction in pretty much any moment of the game. Arenas are littered with respawning armor, health and ammo pickups, and any bigger arena has a respawning powerful gatling gun that allows you to melt through enemies. Speaking of enemies, their AI is extremely simple too - they either mindlessly charge at you or keep their distance, stand in one spot and shoot at you. Overall, all of this led to me finishing the game with over 10 one ups. Nevertheless, I had decent amount of fun in this game, all thanks to the core gameplay being extremely satisfying. But I do recommend getting this game at a steep discount, it's pretty hard to recommend for the full price.