Metal: Hellsinger has one idea, and it will not let go of you. The Outsiders built a first-person shooter where the shooting only works if you shoot on the beat. Fire in time with the metal track and your damage climbs. Fire off the beat and you are just another lost soul with a gun.
Trailer, via Funcom.
Paz Is a Talking Skull
The game was released four years ago, on September 15, 2022, for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S. Funcom published it. The Outsiders, a Swedish studio, developed it. That is the whole setup, and it is enough.
You play The Unknown, a lost soul who arrives in Hell and has her memories, her voice, and her song taken. Hell steals the memories of everyone who lives there, sometimes leaving just enough behind to make them suffer. She wants them back. To get them she has to reach The Red Judge, the ruler of Hell, who locked her away behind an unbreakable Anguish Gate below the Hells.
What frees her is Paz, a talking skull who narrates the game. Paz has a “pulse,” which the game calls the rhythm of the universe. The Unknown harnesses that pulse as her own song. With it she can break through Anguish Gates and climb back up through the Hells toward The Red Judge.
Nine Layers, Eight Hells, One Judge
The game is split across nine layers of hell, counting the tutorial. Each one ends in a boss fight against an aspect of The Judge. The first is Voke. Then Stygia. Then Yhelm, then Incaustis, and on up. Kill an aspect and you weaken The Red Judge while restoring a piece of The Unknown’s voice and a piece of Paz’s memory.
The Red Judge does not sit still for this. After she learns The Unknown survived and that Paz survived with her, she sends the armies of hell to stop the climb and posts her other aspects to guard the remaining Hells. She researches her enemy and finds a prophecy: the Hells will fall when an Archangel is slain at the Infernal Throne by a Hellsinger. To prevent that, she tries the “Ritual of Spears” to bind The Unknown to her will after the third hell, Yhelm. The Unknown resists. By the fourth hell, Incaustis, the demons are convinced The Unknown is the Hellsinger, and The Red Judge is panicking.
That is a lot of plot for a game whose real subject is timing. It works because the plot stays out of the way of the trigger.
The Beat Is the Whole Game
Metal: Hellsinger mixes first-person shooting with rhythm games, and it draws particular reference from the rebooted Doom franchise. While you move through the demonic world you face an array of demons backed by a heavy metal score. Attacks synced to the beat do extra damage. As the fury meter rises, more instruments join the song.
The meter is not just about shooting. Dashing and reloading on the beat keep it alive too. The beat shows up in the environment as well, in fire animations and the like, what the game calls the “natural rhythm of the universe.” Challenge levels called Torments can be beaten to unlock power-ups.
The game also borrows from bullet hell. Some fights throw large numbers of projectiles onto the battlefield. You have a high level of manoeuvrability to survive them: double jump, dash forward in mid-air, the way Doom Eternal does it. In those bullet hell segments, moving well is not a bonus. It is the fight.
Doom With a Metronome
Here is the thing about rhythm shooters: most of them are rhythm games wearing a shooter’s clothes. The beat is a scoring layer bolted onto combat that would work fine without it. Metal: Hellsinger is not that. Take the beat away and the game does not have a combat system. It has a mess.
That is the achievement. The Outsiders tied damage, the fury meter, reloading, and dashing to a single clock, then asked players to keep that clock while demons shoot back. The result is a shooter that demands a kind of attention most shooters never ask for. You are not just aiming. You are listening, counting, and moving at the same time, and the game punishes you the moment you stop listening.
The Doom lineage is obvious and the game does not hide it. Double jumping, air dashing, bullet hell crowds, a metal soundtrack, a Hell full of demons with an angry protagonist cutting through them. What Metal: Hellsinger adds is the constraint. Doom Eternal wants you to move constantly. Metal: Hellsinger wants you to move constantly and on time.
Players deal extra damage if their attacks are synchronised to the beat of the music, with additional instruments joining the song as the fury meter increases.
That line matters more than it looks. When the beat lives in the fire and the walls and not just the screen, the player stops treating it as a mechanic and starts treating it as a place. The Hells have a tempo. You are either in it or you are not.
Eight Hells Is Enough
The structure is lean by design. Nine layers, eight of them real, each capped by an aspect of The Judge. No open world, no side quests padding the run, no loot treadmill. The Unknown wants her voice back and The Red Judge is in the way, and the game moves you toward that fight without detours.
That leanness is a virtue and a limit. A game built on one mechanic has to keep that mechanic interesting for the full run, and Metal: Hellsinger leans hard on new instruments joining the song and on Torments to unlock power-ups. It does not have a second idea in reserve. If the beat does not grab you in the first Hell, Voke, it will not grab you in the fourth.
The plot carries more weight than the premise suggests. The Red Judge is not a silent final boss. She researches her enemy, finds a prophecy about an Archangel and a Hellsinger, tries a ritual to bind The Unknown, and grows more frightened as the climb continues. She has orders to safeguard the Hells. She is failing them. That is a better antagonist than the genre usually bothers with.
The Score
Metal: Hellsinger was nominated for the British Academy Games Award for Audio Achievement at the 19th British Academy Games Awards. That nomination is the correct one. The audio is not decoration here. It is the rules.
The game earned positive reviews from critics, and the aggregate sits at 8.6 out of 10 across six outlets. That number is fair. Metal: Hellsinger is not a long game and it is not a broad one. It picks a single, difficult idea and executes it with real discipline, and it trusts the player to keep up. The places it falls short are the places any one-note game falls short, and the note it plays is loud enough to cover them.
If you have ever wanted a shooter to make you feel the music instead of just playing it at you, this is the one. The Unknown fights through eight Hells for vengeance. You fight through them for the beat. Both are worth it.
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