I fondly recall the time I’d spent after school on Fridays wandering the game aisles at Blockbuster Video. For the readers who aren’t dinosaurs, in ancient times gamers used to peruse the games available and rent one for the weekend. This outing became even more exciting once they started to sell used games, and while the internet was very much alive in those days, sometimes a cheap price tag was all it took to convince me to buy something.

“Why do you bring this up, Max?” you might ask. “You’re far too young, witty, and devilishly handsome for a retirement home! Is… is this a cry for help?”

No, this isn’t a cry for help so much as it is the setup for a clumsy metaphor. You see, like most games of the 2008 era, Metal Eden looks nice! Plays nice too! Despite the flashy exterior, however, Metal Eden struggles to stand on its own. There are clearly elements from other, better first-person arena shooters here, but when mashed together into the final product, Metal Eden feels like one of those games you’d buy at Blockbuster for $8.99.

Get HYPED!

Developed by Reikon Games, the studio behind the cyberpunk action arcade game RUINER, and published by Deep Silver, Metal Eden once again tells us a cautionary tale of what happens when humans invent groundbreaking new technology:

They KILL each other over it, of course!

With the ability to upload minds into units known as CORES, humans can finally conquer the final frontier. That’s what it says on the label, at least. Set in the distant future, players don the helmet of ASKA: a combat android also known as a ‘HYPER UNIT’.

Don’t worry, they’ll remind you plenty of times in the demo.

Tasked with infiltrating the defunct human colony MOEBIUS, players will have to zipline, wall run, and gun their way through beautifully crafted environments and armies of enemies to complete their mission!

Like their previous game RUINER, Metal Eden’s presentation is gorgeous. The cutscenes are crisp, the environments are sleek, and there’s clearly a lot of love put into the overall design. There are a few hitches in the game’s performance, of course, along with a few instances where the music volume was very low, but it’s still a demo. 

What matters to ME, however, and what I suspect matters to YOU is the GAMEPLAY.

HYPER? I ‘ardly Know ‘Er!

As mentioned in my rambling diatribe above, Metal Eden has the elements of a fun game. ASKA is quick and nimble as she runs along walls and leaps over obstacles. Similar to iD Software’s Doom Eternal, players can smack enemies around and chip away at armor to replenish her supplies. The game sets you up in arena-style battles with waves of increasingly varied enemies, each one requiring slightly different strategies to defeat.

Despite being similar to several successful predecessors, however, Metal Eden struggles to establish its own unique identity. Maybe it’s just the nature of the demo, but the arena battles never felt very tense when I played, and I was gunning it on hard mode! In an attempt to mix things up, Metal Eden provides the player with some, quite frankly, peculiar mechanics.

For example, one type of enemy has armor. While the player can simply chisel away at it until it’s depleted, the game instructs you to circumvent this using enemy CORES. How, you might ask? It’s on a cooldown, but essentially, you’re able to rip the CORE out of almost any enemy you want. Like PlatinumGames’ Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance, this will heal you a bit. Unlike Metal Gear you can perform the action from far away and do a number of things with your newly extracted prize.

Your first option is to chuck the CORE at an enemy, causing it to explode. Your second option is to ‘consume’ the CORE, gain some HP and a boost of power, and then, quote, ‘SUPER PUNCH’ the armor off of an enemy. I regret to inform the reader that this doesn’t look or feel as cool as it sounds. Moreover, in the time the player does all this they could easily just plink away at the enemy’s armor with their recharging SMG (another peculiar mechanic choice) and kill it that way. The game treats all of these CORE mechanics like the backbone of the game, but to be completely honest they really aren’t that interesting.

I’m All Done Eden…

In conclusion, while Metal Eden looks really cool, it feels like a game from my high school days. That’s not to say games back then were bad, oh no, but everything Metal Eden tries to do has been done already and much better, I might add. Give it a download if you’re eager to give a new arena shooter a try, but don’t expect anything too groundbreaking.

Metal Eden’s demo is currently featured on Steam Next Fest: June 2025. Give it a whirl and see what you think about it!