Morbid Metal’s hack-and-slash gameplay isn’t exactly a new concept, but it sure is fun to play through. Developed by SCREEN JUICE and published by Ubisoft, Morbid Metal can be best described as a third person, hack-and-slash game with rogue lite elements.
Screen Juice’s newest entry shows a lot of promise, but there are few sections that could use some improvements. Granted, my experience was limited to the 30-minute long demo, it still left me with an overall positive impression.
Morbid Metal’s demo is fun, but restrictive as of its current build
Judging by the preview, Morbid Metal is shaping up to be a fun little game, with a huge focus on endless replayability and slick, hack-and-slash based combat scenarios.
You begin as an unnamed humanoid android, with one singular purpose – to kill everything in sight. The game plays out as your typical hack-and-slash title, but with roguelike elements thrown into the mix, which we will get into later.
The meat of the game is in its combat, which does appear to be rather simplified. You have access to a standard melee attack, which is further complemented by the addition of multiple skills (two of which were previewed).
These skills include a Sword Wave and a Blink/Dash ability, at least for the starter character – which do feel limited at present. One of my biggest gripes with the Sword Wave would be the fact that it does not auto target enemies, resulting in awkward gameplay segments.
There’s also an Ultimate ability that deals a ton of damage (while making your character practically invulnerable during the animation), but feels slow and interrupts the flow of combat.
To top it all off, we have the Dodge mechanic. It is possible to evade attacks at the press of a button, but purposefully delaying your dodges until the last moment helps trigger what is known as a ‘Perfect Dodge’. You can then follow up with a barrage of attacks, dismantling the enemy with ease.
Dodging is essential to survival, but it can get a bit overwhelming at times when foes gang up on you, so make sure to master it quickly.
Mid-way into the game, you unlock Ekku – the secondary character. Ekku specializes in heavy attacks, but is a lot slower which balances his (much higher) raw DPS output.
One of the more unique gimmicks of Morbid Metal is its ability to let players switch between characters on the fly. This is something you need to get accustomed to quickly, given that each character/class specializes in dealing with a particular type of enemy.
That’s as far as combat is concerned. However, a large portion of Morbid Metal’s gameplay is focused around rogue lite elements – which allows for infinite replayability. The mode reminds me of the Elysian Realm from Honkai Impact 3rd, and was a surprisingly good addition.
Completing a wave/region unlocks three cards to choose from, which offer various buffs and/or status effects. These can be used to power up your character. There’s also the Deal with the Devil statue.
Interacting with it can provide a powerful buff – but at the cost of some negative effects. While risky, it does make for some unique high-risk-high-reward segments which do feel fairly satisfying to go through.
There’s not much of a story to go over here, but that’s fine. Not every game needs a profound backstory, and having addictive gameplay is more than enough.
The demo shows promise
That’s as far as the preview goes. With just over 30 minutes of content, it does offer a fair bit of replayability, but feels heavily restrictive. For example, there are only 2 characters to choose from in the demo, none of which seem to be particularly effective against aerial enemies.
The demo also features only one biome, and does feel a tad too limited for my tastes. I would have loved to play through more of the game, since it feels like the demo isn’t a proper representation of what the game really has to offer here.
Everything ranging from the combat to the classes and their movesets feels incomplete, and I hope that the full version of the game addresses this, at least when it’s out later this year.
The game did pique my interest though, and could be fun to revisit again when it’s officially out – I just hope that the admittedly nitpicky complaints I have are dealt with by then.
