So straight off the bat, the comparison between this game and Warframe are pretty evident. If you’ve spent any time running missions in Warframe, then you’ll be familiar with the movement systems for traversing the platform elements. Then add in the combat aesthetic of Devil May Cry with the enemy juggling and the style system and you have the TLDR of how Morbid Metal plays. For anyone brave enough for a more indepth look at the game feel free to read on. The first thing that strikes you upon entering the initial Biome is how gorgeous the game looks, nothing in the tutorial could prepare me for how incredible the game looks with the mountain top setting and the ruined remains of a lost civilisation sprinkled in for atmosphere. It is an incredible back drop to the gameplay, and I often held up the initial runs to take in the environment that had been built. The fact that you can also find hidden passages and items on top of these structures or layered into the geography encourages you to take a good look around not only in the connecting passages but the combat areas too as an extra skill upgrade or currency drop can come in handy once you start familiarising where they are. In terms of level design, the devil may cry inspiration is pretty evident as the stop/go nature of the linear map with corridors linked to combat rooms is better represented here then the breakneck speed seen in warframes get from point A to B as fast as possible style missions. Extra rooms or paths are noticeably present along the route containing bonus upgrade, some with puzzles whilst others the challenge is finding where the path has been hidden hence whilst you’ll spend some time looking around. There are also extra mini games that appear throughout the level that act as skill checks providing more rewards the better you do, personally I didn’t engage with these initially as they only seemed to help chip away at my health but you’ll find that they become more useful and rewarding as time goes on. The half way point is marked as you enter the void or the “shop” and can spend your currency on upgrades, health and abilities as per normal but I did particularly like that when you go to exit there is an option to continue on a “normal” route or a more challenging and rewarding experience in a “sub-biome”. After a few runs, you’ll be confident enough to tackle these find that the rewards are so much better that you just end up taking this option all the time so I’ll be interested to try these on a higher difficulty. After the second part of the biome we enter a smaller shop area that’s more limited in what it has to offer in comparison to the previous one that then leads into the boss arena. I expected the boss to be a one and done encounter, one health bar, long fight, maybe a phase 2 after depleting the health bar, but instead I found out that the boss has 3 distinct fights baked into the encounter each one separated with its own cutscene and a progressive escalation in difficulty. Naturally you can imagine my horror as I’m sitting on 40hp and after defeating the boss a second time he pops up again for round 3, spent half the fight running around like a headless chicken trying to avoid mechanics so that I wouldn’t lose all my progress. I really enjoyed the music aesthetic for the game too, the song in the trailer was an instant add to my playlist as well as the boss themes. They lean heavy on the metal genre as per the games name and I often found it added an extra level of intensity during the combat and especially the boss fights. On the topic of the shop, you have 3 main currencies to collect Nano chips are spent solely during the run for upgrades, void matter is used for your skill tree upgrades and carry across after each reset and soul cores drop from bosses to unlock secondary character skills and your range of core buffs. Initially I found that once you increased the percentage of how much void matter is dropped, I was unlocking a substantial portion of skills quite rapidly and I quickly noticed the progression in character strength after each run. On the other hand, Soul cores feel almost irrelevant to the game. Although the character skills are locked at the beginning of each playthrough the chests and rewards allow you to switch to the alternatives when you find them at no cost. As such the only reason to unlock these is if you want to use specific skills in the first few combat rooms before finding upgraded versions as you progress. Personally, I feel that if the skills were completely locked out of the game until you had unlocked them and then they became a reward option afterwards would make more sense and provide a reason for this section to exist. Also, the “corpora” that add buffs to your character like ‘reduced ability cooldown’, ‘increased base damage’, etc already has a decent pool of 11 when you start and naturally the more you unlock the more diluted the reward pool becomes meaning that its more likely that you won’t see the ones you want. By the time I completed the game I had only unlocked 4 extra corpora that were relevant to the skills I was using and that seemed to be enough to reliably acquire 6 in each run that were relevant and useful using the games recycle station that lets you trade current one for new ones. In regards to characters, I not only loved fluxed design, but her playstyle felt pretty intrinsic as the introductory character. A warp to enemy attack and a projectile launcher that slows time and allows you to aim it at enemies. I soon became familiar with the style and both abilities are great at handling mobs up until you run into the second character. Ekku, Is the wide swinging powerhouse of the team, and since this is my preferred method of tearing through packs of enemies my focus switched to learning what he could do. I quickly set him up with a wide aoe stun attack and a double sweeping strike which became the one two combo of clearing mobs. Having these two characters made the multiple character setup and the core switching mechanic at the centre of the games design feel so fluid However, when I obtained the 3rd playable character, Vekta things began to feel a bit more clunky. I had gotten so used to using the two character set up and she couldn’t replace flux as the main counter to aerial units. Although I understand her mechanics I couldn’t find a use for her, whats more upgrading her attacks and skills just seemed to syphon currency away from the other two. On the plus side though I found out by accident that you can control how many characters you deploy with each run, so if you want to run a solo or dual character setup the game actually allows you too should you find you have a preference in play styles. Overall, for early access, I’m pretty impressed by what’s on the table so far. My biggest issue is the games length. With only 12 hours played you can imagine my surprise as after beating the 2nd boss on the 12th run and expecting a 3rd level for all my hard work I was instead presented with a completion screen with my stats and a return to the main hub. At this point I had still yet to fully max out the talent tree and I was left wanting more, naturally I intend to try the harder difficulties now that I’ve unlocked hard mode. But I hadn’t prepared for the fact that there would only be 2 biomes for the whole game as in comparison with other roguelikes of this nature its common for them to aim for around 3 for a full experience. From what I understand of the road map the winter update has more bosses listed but whether this will include a third level is unclear. I would highly recommend this game but it may be worth waiting to see what gets added as part of the winter update, without a proper ending and how short it currently is it feels like this game could be so much more once its out of early access and there’s a full and complete game.