Morbid Metal (PC) Early Access Preview

I’ve had a look at the current Early Access version of Morbid Metal, developed by Screen Juice and published by Ubisoft. Morbid Metal is a “hack-and-slash action Roguelite” in which you’ll “[e]xplore the remains of a distant dystopian future and survive a brutal world.” The simplest way I can describe Morbid Metal is that it’s a lot like Devil May Cry, except with robots instead of demons and with all the usual Roguelite elements added into the mix. That is, you start relatively weak because you’re intended to fail frequently early on, while acquiring permanent upgrades between runs that help you fail progressively less often.

One thing that helps Morbid Metal stand out is that, unlike in games like Devil May Cry, you switch between characters rather than just switching weapons. You can change characters on the fly just as quickly and seamlessly as you can in most FPS games, and Morbid Metal’s core gameplay loop encourages you to do so. There are currently three playable characters in Morbid Metal, though you are only able to play as one of them at the start. Developer Screen Juice reportedly plans to add one more playable character as Morbid Metal’s development progresses. Each character has their own skills, strengths, and weaknesses.

However, there are things they’re all equally good at, like dodging enemy attacks. On that note, there’s a lot I really like about Morbid Metal’s core gameplay loop, but I also have several concerns about it. Most of my concerns are from an accessibility standpoint, which is why I mentioned dodging attacks. Morbid Metal offers both keyboard-and-mouse and gamepad control schemes. There are pros and cons to each, and obviously, you can stick with whichever you prefer. That being said, if you have issues with dexterity as I often do, I’d highly recommend playing with a gamepad if you can.

Since you’ll be engaging in fast-paced combat very frequently during each run, and you’re expected to use certain traversal abilities both in and out of combat, playing with a gamepad has made gameplay much easier for me than playing with a mouse and keyboard. Even though that’s the case, there are still parts of the gameplay that I think could present accessibility concerns for certain players. You’ll frequently encounter what Morbid Metal calls “grapple points,” but you don’t grapple to them and swing from them as you might expect. Rather, you teleport to them and are immediately dropped on the other side of them.

Thus, you’ll need to react quickly to land safely. Reaction time is also critically important during combat, which is another potential accessibility problem for some players (myself included). Even though I eventually managed to get to a point where I thought I was fairly okay at combat (despite still dying a lot), I still found myself almost constantly hammering on the dodge button for dear life. That ended poorly more often than not. I think Morbid Metal would benefit hugely from the addition of certain accessibility options to help players who struggle with things like dexterity and quick reactions.

In fairness, each enemy in Morbid Metal shows indicators that help you figure out when to dodge. The issue I have is that in the heat of battle, it can be difficult to see those indicators. That’s not just because I tend to focus (perhaps too) intensely on combat, either: There are also the unhelpful facts that different enemy types all look quite similar and, depending on what you’re up against and what skills you’ve used recently, there might also be a lot of particle effects on-screen at any given time. Accessibility options to help everything clearly stand out would be great.

Morbid Metal’s setting centers around science fiction and futuristic technology. Thus, it relies on several different terms to refer to things like different types of permanent and temporary upgrades, as well as the currencies with which you can buy those upgrades. I suspect some of the terminology used in Morbid Metal only makes any sense to me at all because I’m fairly tech-savvy, which obviously won’t be the case for all players. Even then, there are so many different keywords that unless you go out of your way to memorize Morbid Metal’s entire glossary, it’s needlessly hard to keep track of what’s what.

With all those complaints out of the way, now I get to gush about the more enjoyable aspects of Morbid Metal. Despite my particular accessibility issues, combat looks and feels amazing once you start getting the hang of it. You get graded on your performance at the end of each fight, just as you do in games like Devil May Cry. These grades range from D all the way up to SSS; they’re affected by things like how much damage you take and how much you deal, as well as how many different characters and skills you use during a fight.

Considering I died within two or three minutes of starting my first few runs, it was exhilarating when I managed to earn my first SSS rank. Since each character you can switch between has its own set of skills, all of which have their own cooldown timers between uses, switching between characters during fights starts to feel more natural and enjoyable once you’ve had enough time to get used to that. I always love it when Rogue-likes and Roguelites allow the player to both see and feel how much stronger they’ve become between each run, thanks to unlocking new, permanent upgrades.

Morbid Metal is an absolutely gorgeous-looking game, and it’s always run at a consistently buttery-smooth frame rate in my experience. That consistent performance may be because I don’t have every available graphics setting maxed out, and I’ve turned off things like bloom and motion blur, but none of that has detracted even slightly from how great every aspect of Morbid Metal looks. Also, the voice acting I’ve encountered has been of particularly high quality. All of that demonstrates that tons of care and attention have already been poured into Morbid Metal even though it’s probably still a ways off from its 1.0 launch.

I take that as quite a promising sign. I’ll definitely be keeping a close eye on how Morbid Metal’s development progresses during its time in Early Access, especially to see whether (and to what extent) those accessibility concerns I discussed are addressed in future updates. As of the time of writing, there’s no word as to how much Morbid Metal will cost or whether it will eventually make its way to any consoles. Even so, if anything I’ve said about Morbid Metal has piqued your interest, especially if you typically enjoy similar games, I’d strongly suggest keeping Morbid Metal on your radar.

A PC review copy of Morbid Metal was provided by Ubisoft for this preview.