Metal: Hellsinger Review: Rhythm-Based Shooter Is a Tubular Experience

Heavy metal’s roots in the evolution of first-person shooters go deep, from the original Doom’s soundtrack just barely filing the serial numbers off of songs like Metallica’s “Master of Puppets” and Slayer’s “Criminally Insane,” to Quake’s brooding Nine Inch Nails soundtrack, to Steve Vai’s wailing guitars being a permanent fixture of the Halo theme, up through Mick Gordon’s djent-fueled inferno of a score for Doom 2016 and its sequel.

But the games that truly, un-ironically live and breathe metal—not just aesthetically, but as an attitude, as context, as the very lifeblood pushing players into action rather than the backdrop to their actions—are few and far between. Weirdly, the two best examples, DmC: Devil May Cry and Brutal Legend, were wild misunderstandings of what their target audiences wanted out of the games otherwise (they were also secret masterpieces, but that’s neither here or there).

There are no misunderstandings when it comes to Metal: Hellsinger. It’s exactly what it portends itself to be: a straightforward, no-nonsense FPS set in Hell—literally seven hells, in fact. But there’s a twist. Sharp aiming, dodging skills, and smart use of powerups won’t save you. The only thing that leads to victory in this game is to speak the language of metal.

It’s easy to imagine the elevator pitch: “Doom Eternal: The Musical.” In the game, you play as a winged, sword-wielding, mute angel of death named The Unknown, who, after coming across a talking, fire-belching skull named Paz (Troy Baker, doing his best Sam Elliott impression) has been marked for death by the Red Judge (Jennifer Hale), the dead-skin-mask-wearing presence presiding over all of perdition. Prophecy says that The Unknown might be The Hellsinger, a fallen angel whose demonic song means the end of Hell as we know it, and so the Red Judge sends all of Hell’s legions after her to no avail. The Unknown now has music on her side, empowering her every move. Music, and a bunch of vicious, demonic weapons.

And what music the creatures of the night make. Surrounding the expected target reticle in the center of your field of view is a perpetual rhythm indicator. Your guns and blades are varied enough. Paz belching fire acts as a basic pistol, but by the end of the game you’re firing explosive crossbows and twisted, razor-sharp boomerangs. A bullet fired at random will only do chip damage, but a bullet fired on the beat can make heads explode. One shot can also hollow out a torso, destroy angels, and tear demons to shreds. And all the while, keeping you on point is an absolute ripper of a gothic/metalcore soundtrack by Two Feathers (whose most famous game work, Aragami, gives zero indication that they had this in them). That soundtrack is enhanced even further by a murderer’s row of modern metal’s most illustrious voices singing, screaming, and growling hymns to the abyss while you slay your way through your enemies.

There’s not really a way to grace this up: Metal: Hellsinger fucking rules, and it knows it. It’s one thing to have Mick Gordon’s guitars underscore your curbstomping of demons. It’s another entirely to find yourself in the middle of this sneering, blood-drenched interpretive dance of guns, razors, and knives, constantly reorienting, recalculating the right tool for the job, dodging bullet-hell lightshows of fire from Hell’s worst and weirdest, while Alissa White-Gluz from Arch Enemy or Randy Blythe from Lamb of God tells you the grim legacy of the very land you stain.

This could’ve been an easy high concept to get wrong. The gunplay could’ve been stale and repetitive, but the way you increase damage, points, and unlock perks during combat relies on hitting targets in streaks, choosing a loadout that plans for any and every type of threat and hitting them reliably on beat. The environments aren’t quite as varied as we’ve seen in recent FPSes, or even something like Devil May Cry, which plays around in a similar aesthetic sandbox. But they’re utilized well, and they’re designed to keep the player moving and dancing even with obstacles in their road, a harder conceptual ask than it seems, and one that certainly asks the player to shoulder their weight. Metal: Hellsinger isn’t an easy game by any stretch, but one that’s short enough and forgiving enough to encourage bashing your head against the wall multiple times to get it right or score higher, and smiling a bloody grin at even meager progress.

This game was reviewed with code provided by Funcom.