Morbid Metal is a deeply satisfying hack ‘n’ slash with some subpar roguelike elements, but hey, that’s what early access is for

Morbid Metal released into early access last week, and I finally got the chance to sit down and play it—and while developer Screen Juice’s new roguelike needs some proper work on its secondary elements, the good news is that the bones are good. Really good, in fact.

Given their repetitive nature, the most important thing about a roguelike is how it feels to play. No-one’s gonna try and achieve mastery when basic combat feels like pulling teeth: Luckily, Morbid Metal’s already slick as oil, and I’m certainly not surprised it hooked fellow PCG writer Elie Gould when they played it at Gamescom last year.

Its potent character action fundamentals are underpinned by its “shapeshift” system. Basically, you’ve got three characters that you can shapeshift between at the press of a button—and given each character has two abilities (and an ultimate) which have their own respective cooldowns, you’ll be hotswapping a lot just to make use of your attacks.

In terms of your defensive options, you can dodge, and that’s about it—but a perfect dodge nets you a sick as hell counter, one that’s distinct between characters. For example, heavy-hitter Ekku’s dodge counter tosses enemies up into the air, letting you flow into a juggle.

Morbid Metal already feels very, very good. Chaining together your skills, shapeshifting between the trio of characters, and obliterating your enemies with ultimates all feels great and responsive. And while the shapeshifting itself is a mindbender to get around, it’s an appealing skill ceiling. Ain’t nothing wrong with a complex system that encourages mastery, especially in a genre built on repetition.

The runs themselves see you dashing in a distinctly Warframe-esque fashion through floating islands rife with technological overgrowth. If you’ve played a roguelike, you know what’s in store here—you enter a room. There are enemies there. You get an upgrade, you rinse and repeat.

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And this is the only glitch in Morbid Metal’s present program—as far as this central loop goes, it’s a little dry. Routines, which are the major modifiers to your abilities, just aren’t all that game-changing in practice because they lack the variety to back each other up with the kind of synergies that make a game like Hades pop.

Other layers to this system don’t help in their relative milquetoastness—Corporas mostly just apply flat stat boosts, for instance. Devil’s Bargains seem slightly more interesting, insofar as they ask you to make a trade-off (as the name suggests), but they take a while to unlock.

There’s also a bit of friction between the skills, too, which you can find upgraded versions of. Basically, if you’ve got a bunch of Routines that work off a specific skill, you can often find yourself in a situation where you’ve run into a powerful skill that you don’t take because, well, it doesn’t gel with your Routines.

Which is a problem, because even in roguelikes where you miss an opportunity for a synergy, you’re usually given a lesser upgrade to be getting on with. It doesn’t feel great to leave what’s meant to be a reward on the ground entirely because it doesn’t mesh with the choices I nabbed in previous rooms.

The good news is that this is all stuff that can be worked on—Morbid Metal is, after all, in early access, and it’s entirely within the developer’s power to add more impactful and wider-reaching abilities as the patches proceed apace. It’s harder for a studio to make sure that the moment-to-moment feels good if it launches all janky, and fortunately, Morbid Metal is already there.

Helping my opinion is the price—Morbid Metal’s very humbly costed at the moment, at £18/£16 on Steam (not including the current 25% discount, which’ll be available until April 21). That’s pretty reasonable for a game with bones this sturdy, and if Screen Juice is given the time it needs to expand on what’s already there, I can see this game making its way comfortably into my roguelike rotation.

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