Despite all the flack that Ubisoft has rightfully taken over the last several years, the game-development titan has earned a lot of respect from me with Morbid Metal. As the gap between big-budget triple-A games and scrappy indie releases grows wider, I always thought it would be smart business for these companies with triple-A funds to go out of their way to support and help publish smaller, indie-adjacent releases. So I was pretty excited to see Morbid Metal pop up – a flashy action roguelike debut from relatively unknown studio SCREEN JUICE that is published by Ubisoft.
Despite being an Early Access release, Morbid Metal already has a really sound foundation. It takes place in a grey, dystopian future that sees you exploring a variety of arenas and biomes as a shapeshifting mechanical warrior. It’s a blend of roguelike progression and third-person character action, but I was impressed by how the shapeshifting element put such a unique spin on the gameplay. Instead of finding different weapons on each run or swapping between multiple weapons in your arsenal, you transform between multiple characters at any time. You can even transform mid-combo, letting you utilise your different characters’ skills to chain into each other in really exciting ways.
Those characters – Flux, Ekku, and Vekta – each come with distinct specialisations in terms of their gear and speed, and you’ll need them all to success. I was getting pretty thoroughly demolished whenever I tried sticking to just one character. The game really rewards and encourages frequent swapping, and if you’re at home with the kind of constant swapping and resource-management of something like Ninja Gaiden or Doom Eternal, you’ll be right at home here.
Unfortunately, the roguelike side of things is a bit lacking in Morbid Metal. I’m a sucker for meaningful and weird upgrades in roguelikes, but this game plays it safe with pretty much every system on offer. Routines, which are your primary pick-3 upgrades you collect throughout a run, only slightly modify the existing parameters of your skills and abilities. Corporas are also pretty boring minor percentage buffs. And then there are Devil’s Bargains, which in theory are an exciting risk/reward mechanic, but in practice just don’t take or give enough to feel all that exciting.
The thrill of combat in Morbid Metal is still undeniable, and that fun is enough to carry me through the hours of time needed to traverse the two main biomes available in the game right now. Now that I’ve seen them, though, I just struggle to imagine a reason to come back to them with how tame the roguelike systems are at the moment.
I’d also love to see some polish get applied to the visuals and presentation of the game here and there as it exits Early Access. The few cutscenes currently in the game have an odd weightlessness to the animations, and there are some UI and text popups that feel a little too basic compared to the high-fidelity visuals of the characters and environments. Thankfully, the game is absolutely not lacking in the music department. That ‘Metal’ in the title doesn’t just represent your robotic protagonist, the soundscapes that complement every battle in the game are full of brutal drums and nasty, shredding guitars that had me grinning from cheek to cheek.
Overall, Morbid Metal is full of soul and spirit, and it’s already an incredibly fun action game, but it’s got some ways to go with improving and expanding the roguelike progression mechanics. With the publishing support of Ubisoft behind the game, though, I’m confident that it’ll shred through that Early Access roadmap and come out the other side as an unforgettable action experience.
Morbid Metal is an action-packed arena brawler, and even though the roguelike subsystems under the hood are currently a bit lacking, it’s still an absolute joy to shred through metallic foes while equally metal music blares in the background.
