You boot up a level to the sound of a faint instrumental and a cool Wild West narrator telling you about your journey through hell. You kill a few demons, shooting to the beat of the music as the instrumental slowly gets louder and more instruments join in. You clear an area, giving you a little bit of downtime as you dash on to the next one, still tapping your mouse rhythmically to the beat. In the next area, you finally build up your combo to full. Now, the instrumental is blaring and accompanied by some sick vocals... WAIT... is that f*** Serj Tankian from SOAD?! You're now jamming out, not even realizing that you're in a flow state, effortlessly dodging all projectiles, mowing down demons, dashing, jumping, stomping, and switching weapons on the fly. Until you take some damage and the vocals go away, reminding you to focus up so you can earn them back. You do this just in time, entering the next area with a full combo and it's a sick boss fight. The music speeds up, which forces you to speed up too. Everything gets more hectic but you kill the boss with just enough health to spare, as the music cuts out and you're greeted with badges and your score.

Maybe this game only works for a niche audience, or maybe not. All I know is that I'm a fan of metal, rhythm games, and shooting things in the head. And I loved the hell out of this game.

Metal hellsinger created one of the best locked in/in the zone feeling that i've ever experienced in a video game, that's for sure. Gunplay is satisfying, there are some cool weapons beside more traditional ones, and everything is enhanced by very polished audio-visual feedback. Game also looks very good, there are nice views here and there, pretty cool environments (albeit slightly generic in a 'hellish' kind of way, which tbf is a no problem for me cause I love this kind of aesthetics) and overall crispy visuals and nice character models. I also didn't encounter any technical problems (just some occasional collision jank here and there). The narrative is fine, I guess it works, though I can't say I was particularly engaged with it.

Now, OST is pretty amazing. Maybe I'm not the biggest fan of THIS kind of metal (mainly melodic death, progressive-ish metalcore groove metal etc., though I was a huge Lamb of God fan back in the day, and listened to a fair share of Trivium and Arch Enemy; JInjer's pretty cool too I guess), but to give credit where credit's due, majority of the tracks are just killer. Flashy, groovy riffs, catchy as hell melodies, overall just very solid songwriting and performances. I liked how the songs were clearly written as an actual OST that is supposed to work with the main mechanic, meaning that specific parts of the song loop with each other seamlessly (everything being in 4/4 ofc helps too). Some don't like that your performance in the game is connected with how many stems of the song you hear at once (so highest multiplicator = every instrument + vocals). I didn't mind that cause for me it was still like 40% of the time during a level with full song playing, and when I sucked more I enjoyed just listening to an instrumental or sometimes (when I sucked even more) to just bass + drums, and since you have only one song playing through the level you don't really miss out on anything. Moreover, this actually motivated me to play better to get the whole song playing when I knew my fav part was coming up.

I have just two complaints, one small, one big.

big one is that I absolutely despise how dying works in this game. So, on the lamb and the goat (1st and 2nd difficulty levels) you have limited continues (3 and 2 respectively) that take chunk of your points if you decide to use them. On the beast (highest difficulty before you unlock even higher one by beating the game for the first time) you have none. This just seem illogical, you should just have one, but well. Though imo they should ditch THIS PIECE OF ASS IDEA with ressurections limited to some arbitrary number to begin with. Why not just let people continue how much they want and taking some portion of the score until it goes to zero and only then, all fair and square, making them play the whole level again. Some just don't care about the score or leaderboards, but want to beat the level on the difficulty that they think is fun for them.
So in my case, I beat every level on the beast, some with problems, some not. Then it's time for the final one, up until the boss I'd say it's slightly on the easier side (at least in comparison with the previous one or two), but the boss' 1st phase is just the pureest form of difficulty spike ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ I have seen in a loooong time. Meaning that now I have to play whole ass level that takes up to 15 minutes so I can get my ass kicked and die in 10 seconds during the boss fight, over and over again.
Some would say skill issue right? Yeah, ok sure, I'll admit that, but that's the point you donkey. I'd like my skill to be, in fact, not an issue, so I need to somehow get good at fighting this boss, but in order to achieve that now I need to spend some godless amounts of time on playing whole ass level that I know by heart at this point, is easy as pie, and no matter how much I enjoy the game, bores me to death cause I've seen it so many times and serves as just something I have to do to get to the interesting part, truly peak game deisgn right there. Also it's not like I can somehow make a level go faster by a significant amount (you can just shoot better and thus kill necessary amount of enemies slightly faster), cause all the levels are just glorified autoscrollers. Also also, a gap between goat and beast is pretty big, the goat is way too easy imo, so beating the level on it is not at all satisfying.
Idk man, just use checkpoints, or if you think it doesn't work with shorter levels in a game based on getting a score, just use the mechanic that's already in the game (subtracting points) but without some arbitrary ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ number of how many times you can do it. The only one that should exist is the amount of your actual points in a given moment, so that people who want to just beat the level on whatever difficulty can do it without playing the whole thing over and over, and those who want the biggest score or for whatever other reason can just reset, especially since difficulty options already vary in things like amount of damage taken, enemies' health, damage output and so on.

smaller thing is that I just didn't really like this thick cowboy accent they gave the narrator, and odd choice for sure, maybe interesting, but it just bothered me throughout the gam.

Aside from my main problem with the game (that's also only a problem because of the final boss tbh, in previous levels I just played the whole thing again no problem because there are no difficulty spikes like that) that slightly soured my experience, and the fact that I'm not the biggest fan of FPS games that leans so heavily on arenas, Metal Hellsinger is still a rad game. Good idea, very well executed gameplay-wise, tons of fun, metal as ♥♥♥♥, wicked.

Variety of enemies and level design could be better but still fun.

Good ass music and fun gunplay.

Awesome, leagues better than doom eternal in both gameplay and soundtrack

It's DOOM, but actually good.

im very sad that i encountered a huge bug in this game,
a few minutes (10) into the game the audio cuts completely out. only if i completely restart the game do i have audio again. i really liked this game and its unplayable for me, i cant get through 1 level without the audio cutting out completely. i still have audio on the rest of my pc except the game.
i tried:
reinstalling the game
restarting pc
updating pc
updating graphics drives
changing headphone settings.

i really hope the devs fix this issue because i will definitely repurchase the game and play it alot.
for now i have refunded the game.

Good idea, poor realization.

Very short when you don't go for the challenge/highscore/replay at other difficulties type stuff which I don't particuarly do, still this is a solid game and a great palate cleanser with a great narration, a hardcore soundtrack and fun combat. Enjoyed very much my time with it.

Loved it. Basically everything about the game is great. Play the game.