A Smaller Double-Review ("Metal: Hellsinger" and "PowerWash Simulator")

Available for: Microsoft Windows, Playstation 5, Xbox Series X/S

Reviewed for: Playstation 5

Metal: Hellsinger fills a void that has long existed within the hearts of metalhead gamers everywhere. It's a void that BPM: Bullets per Minute attempted to fill but fell just short of. This void I speak of is the lack of a dedicated metal rhythm game. Sure, games like Guitar Hero III will feature songs by Slayer or Dragonforce, but until this game, we haven't yet had a rhythm game exclusive to the genre, and I couldn't be more thrilled that the first official attempt at this kind of game has such clear passion behind it!

There is a story in Hellsinger, but I skipped through all the cutscenes on this one so all I can really say is this: you play as a demon named "The Unknown", and you spend the game's runtime moving through the various layers of hell killing other demons and angels alike to the beat of several unique metal songs. Yes, every song on this soundtrack was written exclusively for the game, and each track features a well-known metal vocalist. Lamb of God's Randy Blythe, Trivium's Matt Heafy, Arch Enemy's Alissa White-Gluz, System of a Down's Serj Tankian, these are just some of the big names to be featured on this soundtrack, and let's be honest, if you're even remotely a metalhead, you recognized more than one of those bands! But let's step back a bit and talk about gameplay before we continue down that rabbit hole.

As I stated, this is essentially a rhythm game, but it's also a first-person shooter. You start off with a sword and a talking skull that helps you keep your combo going even when demons aren't around, but as you make your way through the game, you gradually unlock a handful of other weapons that you can equip on top of those two starting weapons. Different weapons have different firing/attacking speeds, and more damage is done when dealt to the beat of a given level's track. Therefore, the flow of combat totally changes depending on the weapon you use. The twin pistols, for instance, can fire on every beat, while the shotgun fires on one beat, then *chk-cka*s on the next. So depending on your loadout choices and what you happen to be using against a particular crowd of enemies, how you contribute to the pounding of the track's rhythm could be "bang-bang-bang-bang" or "bang-chkcka-bang-chkcka" to name just one example. Now, to be clear, the kind of metal used in this soundtrack isn't the super speed mosh pit kind, so it's not like you're going to be firing alongside a nonstop double bass pedal. But with the amount of enemies you face and the aggression they attack with, the easily maintainable speeds these tracks run at nonetheless have you gripping your controller with all your might just because of how much you have to be doing at the same time. In any given combat encounter, you'll be shooting to the beat, reloading and attempting to "active reload" at the right beat to make the reload time shorter, dodging out of the way of enemy attacks, sprinting through the area, and making prioritizing decisions between swift melee enemies and ranged enemies in the distance. That might not sound like much, but even at the tame tempos on display here, it's quite demanding! 

So, why make combat demanding? Well, do you remember that list of big names in the genre who take part in this soundtrack? That list is more than just a way of selling the game to metalheads, it's also a means of compelling players to get better at the game. See, when you load a level, you start out with no combo, and if you continue to shoot things on beat without taking much damage, you end up building your combo up through various degrees of "fury". Until you get to 4X fury, the music is just the basics like bare-bones rhythm guitar and bass. Once you reach 4X fury, more layers get added onto the music. At 8X fury, the full instrumental mix begins to play. And finally, once you get to the max of 16X fury, the vocals are added. You can get up to 16X fury within a couple seconds of a combat encounter, so it's really not that difficult to do if you handle yourself well. But now you can see what I mean: the devs know that you're here because you want to hear your favorite metal vocalist(s) in a brand new track, so they make you engage with the gameplay loop in order to do so! My favorite metal band is Lamb of God, so if I want to hear Randy Blythe's jungle cat roar, then I have to earn it, in other words. With that in mind, I'd have to say that if you're like me and you're just here to shoot some demons listening to some of your favorite metal bands, you're going to want to play this game on easy mode. Trust me. On paper, the developer's intentions with the fury system are flawless...but on normal and harder difficulties, what this means is that you might get a couple seconds of vocals, get hit once, and then be back to instrumentals, perform a little better for a second and get less than a second of vocals, etc. If that doesn't bother you and you're here to be challenged, disregard everything I just said. But if the music is what you're here for, you're going to be disappointed on anything other than easy.

From a tech standpoint, things are mostly solid save for a handful of smaller issues. The graphics do their job, though they're nothing to write home about. The framerate remains solid throughout, the textures never pop in, there aren't any audio or animation glitches to contend with, etc. Just about everything you'd want in a technical package is here, save for those smaller things. Firstly, when it comes to melee enemies, it's difficult to tell how far their attacks actually reach, so more often than not you'll end up thinking you're far away enough only to get hit. Secondly, the control scheme does the gameplay a sizable disservice. The dodge is mapped to L1 on the PS5 controller, which doesn't quite feel right, as a dodge button should be neutrally placed on the controller and have its direction dictated by the analog sticks. The direction is indeed still dictated by the analog sticks, but the button to actually do the dodge leans all the way to the left, which just makes things feel strange. It's a small thing that may be unique to me, I know, but it still bothered me on several occasions. Thirdly, the guns simply don't feel accurate enough some of the time. Even with the shotgun, there's no real indication of the window of damage your weapon is going to do, which can sometimes be frustrating. There were times that I'd be aiming for one melee enemy with my dual pistols and I'd end up shooting about 12 times before I finally hit because I'd been just a pixel or so off with my aiming. Now...is that partly on me? Obviously yes. But some better aiming indicators would've been welcome here.

This is one of those games where I don't feel like my voice is going to matter all that much. If you spend your evenings drinking tea, reading books, and listening to the Milk Carton Kids, I highly doubt you're going to read this review, go "oh s**t, Matt Heafy is in this?!", and run out to buy a PS5. Similarly, if you're a metalhead gamer you already purchased this when it came out. But, as always, I like to have these reviews out there for posterity, and who knows? Maybe some day years from now, someone will stumble across this review, decide to take a chance on this game, and have the time of their lives! For my money, Metal: Hellsinger is the kind of game I've wanted for a long time, and it mixes excellent original metal music with a compelling gameplay loop that, despite some small complains, is imminently replayable and re-enjoyable. 

Let us review (smaller scale scoring standard):

-Frustrating on higher difficulty if here for music - 1.0

-Tech woes - 1.0

The final score for Metal: Hellsinger is...

8.0/10 - Great

Great work, the outsiders, great work

Available for: Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One, Microsoft Windows

Reviewed for: Microsoft Windows

The title of this game tells you basically everything you need to know, but I believe just leaving it at that would be doing this game a massive disservice. Essentially, you play as the owner of a brand new powerwashing business in the fictional English city of Muckingham (the single filthiest town in the world, judging how much work you get), and as the game progresses, you take on larger and more complicated jobs as you make a name for yourself with your work. There is an underlying story at play here about a missing cat and the mayor's possible use of this missing cat to divert attention away from a massive fraud scheme (conveyed to you through text messages from clients and friends), but your role in this story is just to do the powerwashing while the story plays out in the background. 

So that's the story and premise, and the gameplay isn't much more complicated. You're given a thing to clean, and whether it's a car, an entire property, an amusement park ride, etc, you clean the thing from top to bottom with your trusty powerwasher. Each powerwasher model has a series of nozzles of varying sizes, with the smaller nozzles providing more pressure and with the larger nozzles providing a wider area of effect, but with less effectiveness. Also available are soap nozzles that get to the heart of their respective grime types faster than anything else, as well as extension nozzles that help you wash surfaces that are out of your reach. Every job you complete earns you money, so as you become more and more well known as a service, the more money you make and the more intensive washing gear you can procure, which in turn makes doing your job easier and quicker, etc. 

It's really that simple, but I want to mention the value for money proposition here. I purchased PowerWash Simulator in July, and I'm still going through the "career mode" (which is the story campaign) as I write this review. So while playing on and off again, for $25 that's some serious bang for your buck. And that's not even counting the other modes you have at your disposal! You also have a co-op mode where you can powerwash with your friends, a challenge mode where you have to clean within a time limit or water constraint, and a free play mode where you can just choose a job and play it again at your leisure. So if this game clicks with you, you can do a lot with it!

I've realized that I haven't really said anything about whether the game is fun or not, and that's probably because I feel like it's self-evidently fun. Everybody likes power washing! But I'll go ahead and say on the record that not only is the game fun, it's also a zen experience if you need it. Looking at the problem ahead of you, figuring out the most satisfying pattern to clean in to make the happy brain chemicals come out, and finally seeing the before and after in the post-clean playback simply never gets old! But the game isn't without its faults. There are some technical issues like the "find dirt" button not working when you boot the game up sometimes, necessitating a restart, and even with the settings edited, your guy turns around sooooooo slowly that it can end up a bit frustrating when you're cleaning in such a way that you need to turn yourself around frequently. But the biggest frustration simply comes as a biproduct of the type of game this is. Any game needs to increase in difficulty, so use your head, dear reader: how do you increase the difficulty of a game based on cleaning? Make it more difficult to clean. What this means in practice is that in some of the later jobs, you'll have done more than enough cleaning for an item to be considered clean and checked off your list, but it'll demand that you track down one itty bitty last bit of dirt that is basically invisible, so you'll just spray willy nilly hoping you hit the correct spot of dirt. You'll succeed, eventually, but the game is imminently less fun in these instances. Another way the game increases difficulty is by giving you smaller and smaller components to clean. You'd think these would be a cinch, but a lot of the time you clean these things with the aforementioned last bit of dirt strategy. It just feels like the game increases its difficulty through artificial means. It doesn't make it any less satisfying to do, but I found myself frustrated by that on several occasions. I don't feel the need for a conclusion on this one, PowerWash Simulator basically either sells itself or doesn't, so...

Let us review (smaller scale scoring standards):

-Tech woes - 0.3

-Artificial difficulty towards the end - 0.7

The final score for PowerWash Simulator is...

9.0/10 - Fantastic

Excellent work, Futurlab, excellent work!