Metal Eden review: short and mostly sweet

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Metal Eden is Doom meets Ghostrunner with a little bit of Metroid thrown in. It’s a fast-paced sci-fi shooter all about clearing dense combat arenas, wall-running and jumping through parkour challenges, and occasionally turning into a large metal ball and rolling around.

Review information

Platform reviewed: PS5
Available on: PC, PS5, Xbox Series X and Series S
Release date: September 2, 2025

It’s easy to see the inspiration behind each of its constituent elements, but that doesn’t mean that the resulting formula isn’t a lot of fun. It’s elevated by a strong art direction, some surprisingly slick shooting that wouldn’t feel out of place in some of the best FPS games, and a couple of unique mechanics that help the game form an identity of its own.

Still, there is room for improvement, namely in the narrative department. The dialogue feels strangely written and occasionally hard to follow, almost like it’s been poorly translated. It’s unfortunate and undermines an enjoyable experience that I would otherwise wholeheartedly recommend.

Back to the future

A Metal Eden screenshot. — (Image credit: Deep Silver)

Hailing from the developers of the criminally underrated twin-stick shooter Ruiner, Metal Eden takes us to another far-flung future where things have gone seriously wrong. Humanity has developed Cores, little robotic disks that store an uploaded consciousness and can be slotted into artificial bodies, and the technology paved the way for space travel.

You play as Aska, a high-tech android warrior with a special regenerating core that effectively allows her to be repeatedly reprinted after death. Stranded on an abandoned lunar city, it’s your job to mow down legions of rogue security robots on a mission to rescue millions of colonists trapped as cores in storage.

The narrative focus on Aska’s regeneration seems like it would lend itself naturally to a roguelike format, but Metal Eden is actually a wholly linear experience with eight total levels that vary between about twenty to forty minutes in length. I love shorter games, but this brevity was a little disappointing.

I hit the credits in a single sitting and, while there is scope for some repeat playthroughs to chase high scores and find the small number of hidden resources scattered around each map, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect more given the $39.99 / £32.99 asking price.

That brief length does at least lead to a campaign that’s very tightly paced and engaging. The bulk of each mission is a combination of shooting and parkour, both of which are well-implemented.

The shooting is tight with high-quality animations and meaty sound effects across an impressively varied arsenal. This includes a range of projectile weapons such as your basic machine pistol, a shotgun, and an SMG, plus some more futuristic energy launchers.

Getting to the core of it

Stronger enemies are equipped with powerful armor that absorbs the bulk of projectile damage, forcing you to switch to an energy weapon to break through it, which lends encounters an enjoyable sense of rhythm. Combat arenas are compact, with walls that you can leap off and sometimes vertical layers to keep things interesting, and staying perpetually on the move is essential for survival.

With a foe’s armor out of the way, you can rip out its Core and consume it for a quick health top-up and to charge a powerful armor-destroying punch or throw it to trigger an explosion. You’re soon equipped with a jet-pack and elemental grenades, too, and quickly chaining all of your moves together to survive wave after wave of adversaries is a source of constant satisfaction.

It’s all so good that I really wish there was some kind of separate survival mode that challenges you to last as long as possible available after the credits roll. Fingers crossed, we’ll see something like that added in a future update.

Combat success is rewarded with vials of Dust, a currency used to upgrade your gear. Each weapon has two distinct upgrade paths that dramatically alter its abilities.

Your SMG, for example, can be outfitted with a powerful grenade launcher for taking out groups or a set of iron sights that enable a long-range semi-automatic sniper mode. These upgrades can dramatically affect the appearance of each weapon, too, so every choice feels satisfyingly substantial.

Aska has a robust skill tree, too, with plenty of impactful options that do everything from automatically reloading your last weapon when it’s not in use to causing you to regenerate armor on top of health with every core consumed.

Absolutely balling

New enemies and environmental hazards are introduced at a steady pace, forcing you to frequently tweak your strategies to maintain an advantage. The larger levels also unlock the imaginatively named Ball Mode, which, as the name would suggest, lets you transform into a fast-moving metal orb whenever you wish.

Rolling into enemies at high speed deals huge amounts of damage, and if that wasn’t enough, you’re armed with an electric blast and homing missiles too. It’s a tad overpowered, but it provides a refreshing break from the more intense encounters of other areas.

Best bit

Multiple levels feature rail riding mechanics. Whizzing down neon blue ziplines is a blast, especially when you add obstacles that you need to dodge and shooting flying enemies into the mix.

Unfortunately, every mission is filled with jarring, awkward dialogue that lets the overall package down. In early segments, Aska frequently chats with Nexus, an almost comically edgy companion that spouts melodramatic, cringeworthy cliches. His constant wittering is like nails on a chalkboard, and I almost cheered when he was replaced by a substantially less annoying figure later on.

The voice acting is serviceable on the whole, but line deliveries have very strange intonation that I found distracting at times. Conversations are also written in a manner that feels inescapably off. They’re sometimes hard to follow and have this stilted quality to them that’s reminiscent of dodgy machine translation. I can’t quite decide whether this is an intentional stylistic choice; most of the characters are robots after all, but it’s disappointing nevertheless.

It’s especially noticeable in the cutscenes, which are otherwise extremely high quality and absolutely gorgeous to look at. On that note, the whole game is visually impressive with a minimalist, industrial look, though there are occasional stutters even in console performance mode.

All of this would be a lot easier to forgive at a lower price point, but as it stands, it stops me from making a more wholehearted recommendation.

Play it if…

Don’t play it if…

Accessibility features

There are a few accessibility options in Metal Eden. This includes a few color blindness filters, the ability to enable subtitles, and adjust their size and background color. The game also features four difficulty levels to choose from.

I played Metal Eden for more than four hours on PlayStation 5 using the DualSense Wireless Controller and a pair of Final VR500 gaming earbuds.

In that time I reached the end credits on the standard difficulty and experienced the vast majority of what the game has to offer. I fully upgraded each of the weapons in my arsenal and unlocked the bulk of Aska’s upgrade tree, too.