Metal Hellsinger

Metal Hellsinger is a rhythm FPS game set to the badass beats of the metal soundtrack. As a part human, part demon, you become The Unknown and have to fight through the domains of hell, mowing down demons to get an epic showdown with The Red Judge. Narrated by Troy Baker, you will gather an incredible arsenal to fight like HELL through this Doom-like game. The real winner here is this incredible soundtrack though. The songs are insane and keep you going, getting louder and more intricate the higher combos you have.

This was a really hard review. In general, I like the game a lot. It has its issues, but the gameplay is solid and the music is incredible, though unfortunately, Steam Deck performance isn't as insane as the music is.

Metal Hellsinger: Max Settings

For starters, max settings is a definite no-go. Completely uncapped from everything, the game drains at 24.5W, temps up to 80c and higher, and framerate drops to 31 FPS, though it gets significantly worse in fights. For a game like this, framerate stability is huge, so any fluctuations very impactful on the smoothness of Metal Hellsinger. While we can make it better, it is still a bit far from optimal.

To Hell with Optimization

I started out aiming for 60 FPS. For a fast-paced shooter, the smoothness helps significantly. While there are parts that can hit the 60 mark, a majority go far below it, with bigger fights ranging from 38-40, even on the lowest quality settings. I would say it is closer to a 60/40 split, though it is still way too jarring for myself.

Those drops are very common, especially in fights. This one didn't have nearly as many people as the bigger ones though.

To mitigate this, I opted for a stable 40 FPS, which isn't 100% stable, but it does the job. The game did start to feel sluggish at the framerate though and it still had its drops during some heavier sequences. And yes, this is still all on the lowest settings with resolution being upscaled at 960x600. The visuals still look great though, so that is always a plus. I did also have to change the camera sensitivity as it was too low and found 60 was best.

The Demons of Metal Hellsinger

In the time spent playing, I was mostly troubleshooting bugs and issues. First, when running on Proton, there are some cutscenes that have the rainbow bars. Once you get past this, by just pressing a button immediately, the regular Proton does work. I did try Proton GE 7-33, which did fix the cutscene issue, but also crashed the game when loading into the actual game. After a couple tries, it seems this is specifically when trying to load certain levels, like the tutorial.

I also found that, whenever I exited the game, my Steam Deck client crashed and the client had to restart. This happened every time I closed the game and was a pretty big nuisance.

There were also a couple gameplay issues I found, though I am not sure if they were Steam Deck related. The combat felt a little bit spotty, with some hits not registering when it felt like they should. There is also a mechanic where you can zoom into people and do a special kill for health, but some of the time, the game stopped me from doing this and it wasn't obvious why not, especially since it gave me the prompt to do it.

Conclusion:

Metal Hellsinger has a lot of good going for it. It is gorgeous, fast-paced FPS madness with an incredible soundtrack that can't be beat. The music is so good, that it is what keeps me playing the game. Unfortunately, the performance on Steam Deck can't match up to the game's intensity and, due to the performance issues and a lot of crashing, I would probably stick to desktop over Deck for this one.

Our review is based on the PC version of this game.

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