Metal Mind has a lot of promise, don’t get me wrong, it just underdelivers on the charm and depth of its twin-shooter roguelite competitors. The glossing over of nuanced gameplay systems, emptiness of its hub, and vagueness of the universe leads me to believe that some additional refinement is needed to fully realize its potential. Once you figure out its systems, the core gameplay is fun and challenging.
Several years ago, I became hooked on roguelite games because of how I could pick up and play them in short bursts. Fifteen minutes here, twenty minutes there, five minutes if I was unlucky. That sort of thing. Every run felt different because of the upgrades and enemies I came across, but the core gameplay was familiar enough for me to slowly but surely pick up on its nuances to demonstrate mastery. When Enter the Gungeon was released, I quickly became addicted to the notion of trial and error in the form of figuring out shmup bullet patterns while managing roguelite progression mechanics to make future runs slightly easier. While a silly thematic like bullets shooting guns and axolotls wielding weaponry might be icing on the proverbial cake, but they can also be ways of distinguishing a game by its thematic first and then its unique mechanics second.
We had the opportunity to review Metal Mind for the Nintendo Switch this past week, and I’m torn on how well it executes the roguelike gameplay loop.
The gist of Metal Mind is that a nefarious organization has enslaved robots. To overthrow them, you’re tasked with clearing waves and waves of robotic enemies in order to resist the organization and find liberation for robotkind.
Metal Mind plays like most other modern top-down shooters. You control a cute little mech that shoots guns and destroys other robotic enemies who are shooting right back at you. To help you survive, you can dash away from the bullets. Yep, it’s that simple. Stay alive as long as possible. Shoot anything that moves. Clear a room full of enemies, collect currency, and move on. Sometimes you’ll get a challenge room or a “helpful” NPC who might grant you a powerful upgrade in exchange for something else. When you die, you start over with basic weapons. Hopefully your next run is more successful, young mech!
Metal Mind features a pretty robust character customization system, albeit one that is not explained in a way that is made easy for players to understand. Your mech has a body, actuator, two weapons, and core. The body contains stats that pertain to armor and health, actuator deals with movement and weight, while the core deals with special abilities. At least, that’s what I was able to gather from the menus and the character customization screen. When I cleared a room, I would occasionally get a reward in the form of an armor or weapon upgrade I could choose to equip or disassemble for resources.
On paper, there are quite a few upgrades in Metal Mind – almost as many as the likes of Enter the Gungeon and Have a Nice Death. But not all of these upgrades involve weapons. Some of these provided base stats and abilities I struggled to understand, or at least needed some additional fine tuning to be just as powerful as similarly-specced counterparts. Melee weapons and abilities seemed vastly inferior to those that augmented my ranged weaponry. Either way, the gunplay and explosions make the game feel flashy. The guns that I picked up ranged from simple machine guns to outright silly.
The number of combinations made available to me felt like quite a bit at first, but the more I played, the less variance I felt like was “good” variance. In other words: some upgrades were vastly underpowered and lacked a clear use case compared to others of the same caliber.
Perhaps some of my initial struggles with recognizing Metal Mind’s variance and depth could have been addressed by easing me into its systems and how its litany of stats impacted my mech. The game’s prologue/introduction showed me a smidgen of what I was to experience and then let me loose in the deadly factories and industrial complexes full of deadly robots. Much of the game’s features and mechanics are hardly discussed, instead expecting me to learn via trial and error to figure out how things work and how I could build my character before I decide on how I should. For instance, what is weapon spinning? How can overheating be good? How do automatons work? What does each part truly do?
Part of the roguelite experience is navigating variance by selecting the lesser of three evils or the best of three benefits. Here, that involves optimizing armor and weapons that occasionally drop from completing rooms or found in a vending machine. On top of that, selecting run-specific perks to suit your loadout can enhance your character and take advantage of specific elements. For instance, I could spend all of my upgrade currency on base stats like attack speed and maximum structure (health) and armor or I could increase the degree to which my little mech overheats and the side effects of doing so.
There are quite a few upgrades to consider; it’s great to have the agency to select upgrades based on currently available currency. However, much of these mechanics are not properly explained. It’s one thing to lightly guide the player into testing out combinations, but it’s another thing to avoid explanation altogether. Even an in-game hint would help encourage the spirit of testing! Or perhaps a reward system for testing out combinations! Nothing, folks. Nothing rewarded me for exploring – instead, I learned from losing.
Let’s take the overheating mechanic. Firing a gun for too long can overheat my little mech. I learned during the tutorial that I can cool down by pressing a button to dissipate heat. If I overheat, I am unable to fire my weapon or dash away. Okay, cool. So why would I want to select a perk that increases the rate at which I overheat?
The answer ended up being simple yet incredibly effective: Some weapons become stronger when you overheat, and there is an unlockable perk that adds a burning effect to your bullets while you’re overheated. This means you can turn into a little flaming mech if you manage to collect the parts needed to capitalize on overheating.
It took several hours for me to figure out that overheating could be a good thing, no thanks to how I was taught to utilize the cooling off method so that I could continue dashing and shooting my weapon. Once I figured out how to utilize overheating, I felt powerful and was able to get just a little farther in my run, and then I was back to square one.
I died quite a bit in Metal Mind – sometimes it was because I was simply unlucky with my selection of upgrades, others because I chose an incorrect combination of upgrades that ended up making me weaker rather than stronger. There were times where I felt like the bullet collision was not properly illustrated and enemy projectiles weren’t properly telegraphed. Some of that could have been adjusted in the form of a border or Touhou-style orb at the center of my character to show me how close I could get to bullets without taking damage.
On the topic of bullet patterns and enemy designs, Metal Mind contains a light mix of melee and ranged enemies, most of which attack in a simple fashion rather than utilizing complex bullet patterns like you would expect from a shmup. Metal Mind’s bosses, though, presented a really good challenge, though most of them acted as bullet sponges because of how much health and shields were involved. Their bullet patterns skewed mildly advanced, occasionally creating waves and lines across my screen.
A good top-down shooter mixes it up with enemy patterns, and a great one ladders the difficulty to get players used to the flow of bullet patterns and weaponry. Metal Mind skews more toward a good top-down shooter in that there is a noticeable difficulty jump from trivial enemies in most rooms to bosses at the end of each biome. Some of this is because of bosses having a large amount of health and shield, but the fact remains that part of that difficulty curve is in need of smoothing for players to adjust themselves in a way beyond being patient and mindlessly shooting at a spongy boss. They’re a good challenge, but the challenge is more often than not overshadowed by sponginess.
Compared to other roguelites, I felt like I was progressing at a much slower rate every time I lost. Basically, this means that I didn’t feel like I was constantly growing and gaining access to additional tools that could help me in later runs. Sure, knowing “good” combinations is a form of advancement, but that was made less visible thanks to how infrequently I was unlocking additional characters and permanent upgrades that carried from run-to-run. In the hub, I could spend red currency on permanent upgrades and additional mechs to use in my runs, but I wasn’t gaining enough red tokens during my first few hours of play to unlock more than one or two upgrades at a time. After unlocking a specific number of upgrades, I would unlock a new armor upgrade or a new weapon to the pool – but the “weapon unlock” window didn’t say what specifically I unlocked. It only showed an image. No title. No description. Nothing.
It feels like I’m beating a dead horse when I say that Metal Mind skimps on illustrating critical information while also overloading the player with weapon/armor stats that do little to explain their power (or lack thereof). It’s a paradox as I read it aloud, but my journey often rubberbanded from not having enough information all the way to having too much information that prevented me from making the best decision. Some UI work could have resolved some of my qualms, as is information simplification.
I appreciated Metal Mind’s thematic – mini mechs? Angry robots? Corporate industrialism gone awry? All of it is unique! It managed to capture some of the silliness and charm that similar titles, namely Enter the Gungeon and AK-xolotl have successfully created. That said, much of Metal Mind’s charm just scratches the service with its nameless NPCs who make the briefest of silly statements, mech upgrades that transform my mech into a silly kitty, cyclops, and so much more. I kept waiting for quips, satire, and/or dry humor to emerge from my choices and encounters with the NPCs after clearing a room of enemies, but very little emerged to take advantage of the game’s thematic. As a result, my roguelite experience was a solitary one because of how isolated my little mech was in Metal Mind’s universe. I was simply a machine tasked with killing an endless horde of robots, most of which were as silent as I.
It may be petty to claim that a silent roguelite is an inferior roguelite, or at least one worthy of critique. But in a game where losing happens early and often, dialogue and a modicum of worldbuilding can soften those blows. Every time I lost in Hades, NPCs would comment on things I did in a recent run, how I died, and/or my actions up to that point. The lack of worldbuilding and life in Metal Mind’s hub made it seem like I had no action in the game’s universe, at least in between runs.
Before I wrap this up, I want to bring up the question of Metal Mind’s stability on the Nintendo Switch. While the game has been out for just under two years on Steam and now available on the Epic Store, it looks like the Switch version is less optimized than its PC counterparts. Aside from visual glitches in the form of text being hidden and/or keyboard icons emerging rather than Switch controller buttons, I encountered multiple bugs that impacted my runs. I occasionally clipped into a wall or out of bounds altogether, unable to get back to the areas I was supposed to be in. Several runs were abruptly ended because I would pick up a weapon or armor part that would subsequently crash the game. Yes, bugs are inevitable, but it’s frustrating to lose 20-30 minutes of progress (including currency!) because of a crash.
As a result, I’m inclined to recommend waiting for the Switch version of Metal Mind to improve. It’s fun once you figure out its small tricks and under-discussed mechanics, but the Switch version’s stability will hamper your experience and push you away before you can give it a proper chance.
Metal Mind has a lot of promise, don’t get me wrong, it just underdelivers on the charm and depth of its twin-shooter roguelite competitors. The glossing over of nuanced gameplay systems, emptiness of its hub, and vagueness of the universe leads me to believe that some additional refinement is needed to fully realize its potential. Once you figure out its systems, the core gameplay is fun and challenging.
A review copy of Metal Mind was provided for the purpose of this DigitalChumps review.
