Metal Eden is an adrenaline-fueled sci-fi action FPS set in a bleak, post-human future. Read our review to see what it did well, what it didn’t do well, and if it’s worth buying.
Metal Eden Review Overview
What is Metal Eden?
Metal Eden is a sci-fi first-person action shooter set on the orbital city of Moebius, which itself is floating on top of the exoplanet Vulcan. Taking the role of a hyper-advanced combat android called a "Hyper Unit", players must undertake a suicide mission of planetary proportions as they try to break into the orbital city and rescue its imprisoned citizens from a city-sized experiment gone wrong.
Armed with an expanding arsenal of weapons, an advanced phantom core, and the resources to upgrade both, it’ll be up to Aska to fight through the hordes of defenses the city could muster and bring forth a Metal Eden.
Metal Eden features:
⚫︎ Expanding armory of upgradeable weapons with branching paths
⚫︎ Branching core upgrade tree
⚫︎ Unique core-rip combat mechanic for instant kills
⚫︎ Dedicated PvE experience with multiple chapters
⚫︎ Fully voiced dialogue with pre-rendered cinematics
⚫︎ Parkour and air-mobility mechanics
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| Price | $39.99 | ||||||||||
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Metal Eden Pros & Cons
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
 Beautifully Grim Techno World Unique Combat Loop Intriguing Post-Humanity World-Building Runs Incredibly Well |
So Much Map Space Wasted By Ziplines Weird and Repetitive Dialogue Ineffective Narrative Pacing |
Metal Eden Story - 7/10
Metal Eden’s story intrigues through novelty with its post-humanity setting and dark techno dystopic world-building, but fails to upkeep its initial bombast with effective dialogue or efficient pacing.
Metal Eden Gameplay - 7/10
Decent and varied gunplay is supplemented by a refreshingly unique insta-kill mechanic and brought home by expansive upgrade trees. If only the game weren’t 30% rail shooter sequences without the shooting and 30% isolated gunfights.
Metal Eden Visuals - 9/10
Quite simply stunning across most visual fronts, from the ruinous skyline of Moebius to the undoubtedly dark mechanical build of Aska herself. Perhaps it gets visually exhausting eventually, but the direction is there, and it works!
Metal Eden Audio - 8/10
The game’s music is nothing to scoff at, but the voice acting is the real treasure here, ignoring some odd line deliveries now and again. The soundscape complements the world-building perfectly, creating an evocative experience that pairs well with its initially evocative story.
Metal Eden Value for Money - 7/10
Despite its high-quality visuals, more than passable audio, and fun gameplay, Metal Eden is just a tad too short and lean to be completely worth its $40 price tag. It’s a fun PvE title that would’ve been worth it if it were much longer.
Metal Eden Overall Score - 76/100
A little bit more. Metal Eden is a game that needs a little more to truly stand out. With such an intriguing story, it could’ve done with a bit more efficiency with its pacing and fleshing out of its dialogue to excel. With its great and refreshing gunplay, it could’ve done with a bit more variety and modularity. With its great music and sound, it could’ve done a bit more with a second or third take.
It falls just shy of most things, with the notable exception of its visuals being as stellar as its setting, but it isn’t awful; just not quite the best.
Metal Eden Review: Just Shy of That Dark-Techno Paradise
Sci-fi is my jam. Whether it’s the hydroponic garden-variety with robots, futuristic tech, and starships; the space opera kind with mystical forces and chosen ones; or the post-human dystopias where civilization crumbles and clawed-out survivors try to stitch it all back together, you can bet your eddies I’m all over it, no matter the medium.
Metal Eden taps right into that last flavor of sci-fi, the one where humanity’s final card has been played and the world left behind is equal parts ruin and possibility. It’s a hauntingly charming setup, and the kind of bombastic concept that practically begs for an FPS treatment brimming with style and spectacle.
Well, let me be the first to say: Metal Eden is… not quite that. But it comes close! Just shy of the dark techno-paradise it sets out to be, the game doesn’t hit every note cleanly. It's bright ideas often wrestle with its flaws, and the result is something rough around the edges, but still loud enough to make a splash.
So, let’s dig in. Time to give ‘em hell, hyper!
The Orbital City of Imprisoned Digital Souls
Sci-fi stories, especially those of dystopian persuasion, live and die by their setting, and Metal Eden’s world doesn’t exactly paint a rosy picture of the future. We’re talking about a post-humanity era of machines and lingering digital souls, where most of your time is spent on the exoplanet Vulcan and its orbiting city, Moebius. And since this is sci-fi, you’re not just some random grunt with a blaster. No, this is full-on Alita: Battle Angel territory.
Metal Eden puts you in the high-tech battlesuit of Aska, an android soldier classified as a Hyper Unit, tasked with an impossible mission: breach Moebius’ fortified walls, carve a path through swarms of cybernetic defenses, and reach the city’s heart. There lie the Cores—digital imprints of human psyches, consciousnesses preserved in data form. Think of them as humanity’s souls, uploaded in a desperate bid for survival… and now waiting to be saved after that bid went awry.
You’re not tackling this mission alone, either. At your side is Nexus, your sentient ship and ever-chatty guide through the chaos—more on that guy in a bit. Backing you up is an ever-expanding arsenal of weapons, each one designed to shred through the relentless IDC units standing between you and Moebius’ core. It’s the kind of setup you’d want from a setting like this, nailed right down to the details, and nowhere is that clearer than in the game’s central combat loop.
Rip and Tear Out Their Cores Until It’s Done
If I had to pin down Metal Eden’s FPS action-parkour gameplay, I’d call it DOOM Eternal at its core, with a dash of Returnal, Destiny, and Ghostrunner sprinkled in for flavor. The foundation is classic FPS stuff: shoot, don’t get shot, repeat. But it’s the way the game handles its arsenal that really earns that DOOM Eternal comparison.
Weapons in Metal Eden aren’t just tools; they evolve as you play. Each one branches into upgrade paths and unlocks new perks through missions, giving you a sense of progression without overwhelming you right out of the gate. I really like this system because it forces you to actually use and master each weapon before investing deeper, making every burst of gunplay feel worthwhile. The arsenal itself is solid, and that’s before you even factor in the variety that comes from all those upgrades.
Damage from your weapons can either be kinetic or energy. This matters because enemies could be completely resistant to one of those and vulnerable to another, again evoking the specialized use of weapons that DOOM: Eternal had with its weapon mod system.
What really sets Metal Eden’s combat apart is its use of enemy cores.
Think of it like DOOM’s glory kills, but cranked up and made more versatile. Fodder enemies can be executed by tearing out their cores, which then become tools of destruction in your hands. You can chuck a core like a grenade, absorb it to restore health, supercharge your next attack to shatter enemy defenses, or cash it in for a guaranteed kill. Each option ties neatly into a core upgrade tree, letting you fine-tune how you want to use them.
Naturally, there are some limits—executions run on a cooldown, and armored enemies are off the table to keep things balanced—but the mechanic still lets you swing the flow of combat in your favor. Overwhelmed by a swarm? Rip one and blast the rest. Low on health? Absorb and push on. Facing a shielded brute? Drain a core and jab their defenses until they collapse.
It all adds up to a rhythm of gunplay I don’t see often: enemies aren’t just obstacles, they’re resources, fuel for a rampage that never really slows down.
That rampage is fueled even further by your absurdly high mobility. Aska’s cybernetic body gives you the works right out of the gate: hovering, double jumps, quick dodges, and ledge grapples that keep the pace blistering. As you unlock core upgrades and push through missions, your movement only gets wilder with wall runs, extended dashes, longer hovers, and even extra jumps layered on top of it all.
The game ties this mobility to a steady stream of power-up pick-ups, too. One moment you’re tearing through enemies with a high-damage, infinite-ammo berserk mode; the next, you’re grabbing armor packs, extra ammo, healing items, 1-Ups, or refreshes for your core executions.
Put together, you feel less like a soldier and more like a natural disaster—fast, unrelenting, and devastating. And while the game usually throws enough enemies and projectiles your way to keep the chaos from getting stale, it’s not all smooth sailing. For all the thrills of its combat, Metal Eden has some noticeable hiccups in execution.
Basically A Rail Shooter Half the Time
The first major hiccup comes down to how Metal Eden structures its levels. I don’t mean progression-wise, as chapter-based progression in FPS games is nothing new. What I mean is how each chapter spaces out its fights. Battles are the heart of the game, but they’re separated by huge stretches of empty terrain that you move across using ziplines or by turning into a Ramball, which is the game’s very own Metroid-style morph ball mode.
You’ll see this a lot, especially early on: firefight, zipline, firefight, zipline, repeat until the chapter ends. Maybe you’ll get a cinematic to break things up, maybe even two if you’re lucky, but that’s about it. Unlike other shooters that pepper their maps with secrets, collectibles, or the occasional puzzle to spice things up, Metal Eden keeps things too barebones to be fun. You shoot, you parkour, and… that’s it.
This stripped-down approach keeps the gameplay loop from ever reaching its full potential. The isolation between fights makes the pacing uneven, and half the time I feel like I’m sitting around just as much as I’m tearing through enemies. It drains some of the momentum, and in a game that’s otherwise built for speed and chaos, that slowdown stings particularly harder.
Having Some Robot Spout DMC Quotes at Me Doesn’t Help
Another stumble comes from the story and dialogue, which never quite find their rhythm. The pacing swings between dragging its feet and rushing headlong, and neither extreme does the narrative any favors. Then there’s the dialogue—half the time it sounds like Vergil wandered in from Devil May Cry to narrate your mission.
Let’s start with the pacing. Metal Eden has a lot of groundwork to lay because of its unique setting, and that’s fair. But the execution shows the developers bit off more than they could chew. The world-building is intricate and intriguing, but the way it’s delivered bogs things down. Instead of easing you into the lore, the game drops paragraph-long exposition dumps filled with jargon you can’t parse without context.
When it’s not jargon, it’s Nexus filling the air with lofty platitudes about the fall of humanity—again, without the context you need to actually care. And on the flip side, some chapters drag on with nothing but empty landscapes, leaving you stranded in stretches of narrative desert.
This uneven pacing undercuts what could have been a gripping story. Worse, Nexus himself wears thin after a while. At certain beats, he just drones on, cryptic and dramatic, while you’re trying to focus on blasting through waves of robots. The result isn’t so much immersive as it is sensory overload, only without the clarity to make any of it stick.
Well Optimized, Well Designed, and Well Voiced
It’s not all bad, of course. Metal Eden wouldn’t come close to paradise if it was nothing but flaws, now would it? Beyond its inventive combat loop and the variety baked into its upgrade system, the game shines in its technical performance. It’s impressively well-optimized, running smoothly even on lower-end rigs. Outside of the occasional frame drop—which is rare enough to be a non-issue—Metal Eden is a headache-free experience, and that kind of accessibility goes a long way.
Better yet, this optimization doesn’t come at the expense of style. On the contrary, Metal Eden is a visual feast. Its landscapes of technological ruin strike a perfect balance between awe and dread, presenting a future that feels both bleak and beautiful. Admittedly, the uniformity of the setting can lead to a bit of visual fatigue over time, but in the moment, it’s a striking world to tear through.
The presentation stays strong on the audio side as well. The soundtrack doesn’t really offer any earworms to hum long after you’ve logged off, but the soundscape is immersive, and the voice work carries a lot of weight. Nexus may drone on narratively, but his voice actor delivers a smooth performance that makes his lines far more tolerable. Aska’s VA holds her own, too, which matters when these two voices are practically all you’ll be hearing.
Not Quite Eden, But It’s Paradise In Its Own Right
And so we come to the end. Metal Eden is a game that wears its effort proudly; its story, combat system, and presentation all show clear signs of serious elbow grease being put into them. But effort doesn’t always equal execution, and in each of those same areas, the cracks are just as visible as the craftsmanship.
What we’re left with is a game that never quite reaches the paradise it aims for, yet still offers enough to be worth a look. If you can bear this Garden of Eden analogy for a bit longer, you may be able to accept that you won’t be walking through the gates and find contentment peering in from the outside.
Is Metal Eden Worth It?
Perhaps A Bit Too Short and Flawed for $40
At $40, Metal Eden isn’t exactly overpriced for an action FPS, even for a mid-budget AA title, but it does feel like it’s pushing its luck just a bit. The campaign runs a little too short to feel fully satisfying, and the replay value is practically nonexistent. By the end of a casual playthrough, you’ll have unlocked nearly everything, leaving only higher difficulty levels as your incentive to dive back in.
A $30–35 price tag would feel far more fitting for what’s on offer here. Still, the gap isn’t wide enough to be a deal-breaker. If you can stomach its shortcomings, Metal Eden won’t leave you with much buyer’s remorse if it comes to that.
| Steam |
PSN |
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| Price | $39.99 | ||||||||||
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Metal Eden FAQ
Can You Backtrack to Previous Areas in Metal Eden?
No. You cannot backtrack to previous parts of a level in Metal Eden once you pass a certain point, but you may replay previously finished chapters.
Is Metal Eden an Open World Game?
No. Metal Eden is a linear single-player experience that rewards players for exploring levels with resources they can use to upgrade their weapons, but it isn’t a true open-world game.
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Metal Eden Product Information
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| Title | METAL EDEN |
|---|---|
| Release Date | September 2, 2025 (PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S) |
| Developer | Reikon Games |
| Publisher | Deep Silver |
| Supported Platforms | PC (Steam) PlayStation 5 Xbox Series X|S |
| Genre | Action, Shooting |
| Number of Players | 1 |
| ESRB Rating | ESRB M 17+ |
| Official Website | Metal Eden Website |
