Metal Mind makes me feel very old. Not because my reflexes have slowed and I can’t dodge like I used to. Not just because of that, anyway. No, it’s because part of being an adult is having a constant conveyor belt of responsibilities. That makes roguelikes a bit tricky. It’s hard to take a break from the dishes or cleaning the house, when you know you’re just going to be greeted with a stream of failures. It’s why roguelikes live and die on how they feel. They need to sink their hooks in right from the get-go.
That means not just excellent combat but an interesting world or some sort of gimmick. Unfortunately, that’s where Metal Mind falls down somewhat. It has a few interesting notes in the core gameplay loop but that’s sort of all it has. It serves to remind me how crucial the surrounding elements are to a roguelike. Every death has a percentage chance to make the player drop the game, and it’s those elements that shrink that percentage. Metal Mind isn’t a bad game, but to truly damn it with the finest praise, I could describe it in one word: competent.
Chrome Cranium
Most of Metal Mind’s gameplay revolves around the fact that we’re a little robot. We’re assembled and booted into the world to fight back against the AWC, an organisation that doesn’t like our robot friends having intelligence. They’re rounding them up and, presumably, crushing them into cubes. Being a robot makes us wonderfully modular. Our head, core and engine can all be swapped out freely, though better gear is heavier, slowing us down. It’s not a bad system; the different skills and types of gear (and weapons) provide a decent smattering of different playstyles. As you pump money into upgrades, you unlock a steady stream of new ones too.
Our metal man progresses in a way that’s reminiscient of something like The Binding of Isaac. Each level comprises a series of connected rooms and when you charge into them, a horde of enemies will spawn and the doors will lock. You gotta shoot ’em all to escape. The shooting itself isn’t too bad, with a couple of gimmicks. Rather than ammo, you have ‘heat’. When it gets too high, your gun overheats, which can cause special new effects depending on the gun. Like the Corgi gun, whose single shot turns into a spray when overheated. The downside is the gun locking up to cool down, so you need to balance heat against the special effects. Not bad stuff.
Steel Skull
I do have a couple of big issues with Metal Mind, though. Movement speed, for one. It’s largely based on the weight of your gear, but even with low weight, it’s still painfully slow. One of the earlier enemies are fast moving dogs, that nick at your armour constantly as you try and outrun them. Much more frustrating, however, is the aiming. There are two modes: auto-aim and magnetic targeting. It’d be fine if they stayed in their lane, but magnetic targeting keeps snapping to enemies anyway. It feels awful to have your character suddenly spin ninety degrees. It also keeps targeting invisible – and impervious – enemies, which frequently caused me to start shooting into the wall.
These problems would seem more surmountable if Metal Mind had more of a reason to press on. The story presence is so light it would fit on a post-it note. Hell, the final boss is a giant, unsmiling machine with interchangeable giant hands. I would like to know more about that, but Metal Mind is tight-lipped. It doesn’t have much going for it visually, either. It’s not bad looking but it’s not particularly interesting to look at either. It’s a series of boxy, grey environments filled with fairly similar enemies. It’s crying out for some sort of uniqueness in design, but all the tweaks have gone into the main gameplay gimmicks.
Metal Mind – Mind Over Soul
They aren’t bad gimmicks. Our modular robot and the overheating system are nice, but they’re just evolutions of an inventory and ammunition. In the end, I found I tended to gravitate towards the same guns and gear each time. Stripped of its gimmicks, Metal Mind feels very repetitive. Each run is against the same enemies in the same room types. With only four levels in total, you can reach the final boss without encountering anything new from run-to-run. That’s a death knell for a roguelike.
I used the word competent before, in an effort to be diplomatic, but the truth is that, much like its protagonist, Metal Mind is lacking in soul. It constructed a reasonable gameplay loop and then left it at that. The fact that it has fatal flaws, like the aiming, is almost tragic. There are little pockets of fun when the gameplay all clicks together but the chosen genre makes it a slog to get to them. The roguelike elements being nothing but flat stat boosts make Metal Mind simply a slow march to inevitable victory. In such a saturated genre, I’d recommend wearing out your walking boots elsewhere.
