Roguelikes seem to be the genre that benefits most from an Early Access release. The core gameplay loop and the various ways that it evolves throughout a run are so crucial to the success of this type of game, and it’s hard for developers to get a sense of how it will all play out until you get it in the hands of players. Morbid Metal, the debut title from Screen Juice, is a slick new hack-and-slash roguelike that just hit Early Access, and it seems like the perfect case for this type of in-progress release.
Right off the bat, you can see why Ubisoft decided to publish a small game like this. Every part of the moment-to-moment experience is undeniably slick, with a rock solid game feel that immediately grabs you. I’ve seen it pitched as Devil May Cry meets Returnal, and that’s not entirely far off, at least at first glance.
Morbid Metal is a third person action game with extremely mobile combat, throwing you into small arenas where you slash your way through hordes of enemies with fast-paced melee combat that has an amazingly kinetic feel thanks to great audio-visual effects. Between these encounters, which probably last about a minute at most depending on enemy composition, you’ll find yourself a combination of traversal and light exploration, using your double jump and dash to do some rudimentary platforming.
Meet Flux, Ekku, and Vekta: Character Playstyles in a Post-Apocalyptic Setting
There’s some very light story content that sets up why you’re stuck in this roguelike loop, but at the moment, it doesn’t feel particularly fleshed out. Best I can tell is that you’re an AI in a post-apocalyptic setting that’s being run through a simulation by the mysterious Operator to help eliminate corrupted robots. In parallel to this, an entity known as Eden is trying to help you from the shadows, giving you a safe space known as the Void to hide out between runs. It’s not a ton to go on, but the voice acting is strong enough in the limited dialogue you get that you have a sense of who the Operator and Eden are, hopefully setting up for some solid story content in later versions.
While this doesn’t sound entirely unique, the big hook of the game, aside from how good it feels, is that you have a set of characters that you can instantly swap between in the heat of the battle. There are three in the current build of the game, with a fourth planned to be added before the game hits 1.0. Each of the characters has the same movement options, but their suite of skills and attacks varies. Flux is much faster in their basic attacks, with skills focused on closing the gap between you and your enemies. Ekku is extremely slow with their strikes, but hits like a truck, with skills focused on popping enemies into the air or knocking them off their feet. Vekta relies on projectiles, focusing more on crowd control.
Each of these skills, which can be swapped out for another option during your run, has a cooldown before you can use it again, which means that combat sometimes breaks down to you using each skill, then switching to the next character, using their skills, and so on, as you try to waste time between cooldowns. For me, this had the effect of not really treating each character as their own distinct individual, but rather the option of where you spam a skill from.
Routines and Upgrades: How Progression Works in Morbid Metal
The main issue that leads to this for me is the fact that the encounter variety isn’t really there yet, especially given that you’re going to run through them over and over due to the roguelike structure. The robotic enemies you face fall into pretty basic archetypes – fodder, flyer, heavy – and it doesn’t really feel like there’s a ton of thought required for strategizing how you approach the fight. It seems like I’m starting every single fight in the exact same way, using Flux to zip up to a flyer to take one out, before landing on the ground as Ekku to do a big sweeping slash to try to stun as many of the smaller enemies as I can, before turning my focus to a heavy. Being able to get into a rhythm is a good thing for a fast-action game like this, but it felt like I was getting into the same rhythm every time, which meant I never really had an encounter or run that stood out to me.
After each encounter, you’re given the option to pick from a series of upgrades, called routines. These can either be universal routines that apply to all characters or routines that apply only to specific ones. With how much swapping you do, I found the universal routines to be the ones that I leaned towards the most, especially since these give you options to do a lot of passive damage through things like applying leak (this game’s version of bleed) and deploying drones. While I definitely felt myself getting more powerful during a run, I never really ran across options that changed how I played; instead, they just enhanced how I already played.
Occasionally, you’ll run into optional trial rooms that will give you very specific tests that will provide greater rewards. These can be anything from “survive for a certain amount of time” to “swap characters every five seconds.” While the rewards for these were better, it wasn’t something I was really psyched to actually do. The swapping one, which felt like the most common, felt like a task rather than a fun challenge, even though theoretically it should be highlighting the unique mechanic of the game. Hopefully, these are reconceptualized a little bit as time goes on, because the risk-reward calculation of doing an optional fight like this is a great choice to have to make.
Secrets, Traversal, and Exploration Mechanics
The traversal between arenas helps it not feel like an endless string of repetitive fights, but it’s not the most substantial part of the game. It’s very clear that there’s a limited set of these connecting pieces, and you will quickly see all of them within a few runs. You are rewarded for trying to push the edges of the maps, using your movement mechanics to reach parts of the level to find more upgrades, but once you know which world piece you’re on, it’s pretty easy to remember where to find the barely hidden secrets.
When you are in the Void between runs, you can buy various unlocks with the Void Matter currency you pick up during runs. These can come in the form of upgrades to your basic stats, like max HP and attack power, or additional options that will present themselves throughout your runs. This gives you something to chase while you’re getting better at the game, but I never really got one that made me go “oh hell yeah” while thinking about the possibilities it provided.
Even though you see the same map sections over and over, it’s still really nice to look at. Given the robotic nature of your characters, which all convey so much character in their silhouettes, I was surprised at how the biomes looked. The Void is an abstract cyberspace, but the actual biomes are more man-made temple-like structures in cliffsides and forests. Perhaps it will make a bit more sense once the narrative is fleshed out more in future updates, but for now, it gave me a little bit of tonal whiplash, even if it’s generally pretty. Occasionally, there’s a bit of pop-in that mars the visual splendor, but overall, I didn’t have too many visual bugs, even playing on the Steam Deck.
Both of the biomes have their own boss to fight, and these are good challenges that make up the most difficult portions of the game. Most of the time, deaths in Morbid Metal came after several encounters where I took small amounts of damage that just finally caught up to me, but bosses are enough of a test that you can go in with a full health bar and still get demolished. One of the difficult things with the roguelike structure, as opposed to something like a soulslike, is that if you die to a boss, you’ll have a pretty long run to get back to it to try again, making it take longer to get used to the patterns, but for the most part, they were pretty readable from the jump. The boss fights are a highlight of the game for me, combat-wise, so I hope they take the time to add in as many as they can, allowing for alternates in each biome to keep things interesting.
Morbid Metal Early Access Verdict
Aside from the occasional visual pop-in, I did have a few bugs that popped up here and there. The worst offender put me in a state where my dash would do the animation, but not actually move me through the level at all, removing a key piece of my defensive arsenal. There have also been several times when the camera acted erratically, both with lock-on and without, which is frustrating for a fast-paced game like this one.
I know I’ve had a lot of nitpicks about Morbid Metal, but everything I saw in my time with the Early Access build is a great foundation for something that could turn out to be pretty special. Given how great the core combat feels, I hope they take the time to find ways to add meaningful complexity to both the encounters and the build options, as those are the real secret sauce of any roguelike.
This is exactly what Early Access is for, so I’m looking forward to seeing what Morbid Metal looks like when it hits 1.0 somewhere down the road.
Early Access code provided by publisher. Morbid Metal is currently available on Steam.
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