Top-down shooter roguelites aren’t uncommon, made popular by the likes of The Binding of Isaac. Music is also very popular in video games, the likes of Avenged Sevenfold and Eminem in Call of Duty, or the obvious with how popular rhythm games like Guitar Hero and Rock Band have been. Metal Tales: Overkill takes all of this, and shoves it all together harder than a death metal mosh pit. Picking from four characters, you battle through headbangers, beer bottles, and ultra stereotypes of the metal sub-genres alongside a handpicked soundtrack filled with a variety of obscure bands.

The art style of Metal Tales is pretty basic, but it works for the game. Each area is easy to distinguish: from someone’s basement/house show, to a proper concert hall festival, to outdoors at the likes of Bloodstock or Wacken. There aren’t a huge amount of enemies in the game, but they are pretty easy to tell apart too, and the different types of enemies work really well. A singer will blast out a beam that will damage you, while a death metal vocalist will shoot out a blast of bullets to avoid.

The soundtrack is excellent of course, with bosses having their own song that matches their visual style. For example, a cyberpunk styled character features an industrial metal style song called “Cyborg.” While I am big into metal, a lot of this soundtrack was new to me, and it’s not all death metal or thrash metal, and arguably there’s something for everyone on the soundtrack. If you’re into metal, think of it as kind of like a lite version of Brutal Legend.

The gameplay feels good, but a couple changes (that can be made in the options) really help the feeling of the game flow. Changing the setting to shoot whenever you’re pressing the direction with the right stick helps a lot because using the stick and the trigger to shoot just doesn’t feel intuitive. As you progress through the festivals, you’ll be able to find different abilities and guitars. Guitars are simply your weapon, different shooting speeds, range, all the normal stuff.

As a whole, Metal Tales: Overkill does feel like a very bare-bones version of The Binding of Isaac, just mixed with arguably a much better soundtrack, but a lot less item variety. It’s a good start, a solid foundation for better things to come, and if the game continues to get updated, it could really pull a lot of fans of the game genre, and music genre, into the game’s atmosphere. As it stands now, it’s a good start, but definitely not a huge amount of variety from run to run.

 

Graphics: 6.0 Metal Tales: Overkill looks alright. The characters and backgrounds are mostly distinguishable, but adding something like a border around enemies could help this quite a bit, especially in darker areas.	Gameplay: 7.0 While pretty simple and not really bringing anything new to the genre, Metal Tales: Overkill is fairly confident in what it does have to offer. The same way Metallica were confident that fans would like Load and Reload.
Sound: 9.0 It’s hard to complain too much about a soundtrack comprised of underground metal. The enemies all sound different from each other, but it really does all come back to the sountrack.	Fun Factor: 7.5 Not groundbreaking, but confident. Metal Tales: Overkill is a safe top-down roguelite shooter that doesn’t expand on the genre, but more rifts off the games that came before it.
Final Verdict: 7.0

Metal Tales: Overkill is available now on Nintendo Switch, PC, PS4, Xbox One.

Reviewed on Switch.

A copy of Metal Tales: Overkill was provided by the publisher.