Metal: Hellsinger

Every few years a game arrives with an idea so obvious in hindsight that you wonder why nobody shipped it sooner. Metal: Hellsinger is that game for 2022. Swedish studio The Outsiders — founded by David Goldfarb of Battlefield 3 and Payday 2 pedigree — took the unspoken truth that shooters have always flirted with musicality (Doom 2016’s combat practically begged you to play on beat) and made it the entire design. Published by Funcom and released September 15, 2022 at $29.99 on Steam, it’s a first-person shooter where firing on the beat is not a flourish; it’s the whole economy.

You play The Unknown, a half-human, half-demon fury carving through eight realms of Hell to reclaim her stolen voice from The Red Judge. The story is serviceable pulp, elevated considerably by Troy Baker’s narration, which he delivers with the gravelly relish of a man who knows exactly what kind of game he’s in. But nobody is here for the plot. They’re here because The Outsiders convinced Serj Tankian, Randy Blythe, Alissa White-Gluz, and a murderers’ row of other metal vocalists to front original tracks composed by Two Feathers — and then wired those tracks directly into the combat system.

The market positioning is shrewd. At a mid-tier price point on Steam, it slots between rhythm curiosities like BPM: Bullets Per Minute and AAA boomer shooters, borrowing credibility from both. The bet is a sound one: the core loop is built to deliver something no other shooter does.

• Beat-Synced Combat: Every shot, dash, reload, and execution lands harder when timed to the music. A Fury multiplier climbs to 16x, scaling both damage and score. Miss the beat and the shots barely register.
• Dynamic Soundtrack Layering: The music builds with performance. Play sloppily and the mix drops to muted drums; sustain the streak and the full track roars in, vocals unlocking only at maximum Fury. The design literally rewards skill with more song.
• Leviathan Mode: A wave-based roguelike mode with escalating modifiers and upgrade choices, bolted on to extend a short campaign. It’s the score-chaser’s home, feeding global leaderboards that give every level a competitive afterlife.

The Loop

Here’s what The Outsiders understood that most rhythm hybrids don’t: the beat cannot be a tax; it has to be a reward. In lesser rhythm games, timing requirements feel like a metronome scolding you. Hellsinger inverts this. Off-beat shots still fire — they’re just weak. On-beat shots crack like thunder, spike the multiplier, and pull another instrumental layer into the mix. The design never punishes you into frustration; it seduces you into precision.

The result is a structure engineered for flow state. At 16x Fury, with White-Gluz screaming over the mix and a shotgun punctuating every downbeat, the distinction between playing a game and performing music is designed to dissolve. This is not marketing hyperbole. It’s a deliberate design outcome: the inputs and the audio engine are meant to be the same instrument.

The arsenal is small but purposeful. The skull companion Paz gives you an infinite-ammo beat-keeper — a smart onboarding tool, since the rhythm can always be practiced without resource pressure. The dual pistols reward fast subdivisions; the shotgun demands patient, heavy downbeats; the blade turns melee into a percussion fill. Each weapon carries an Ultimate ability that charges through sustained rhythm, closing the loop between performance and power. Executions (“slaughters”) restore health and sustain the streak, borrowing Doom’s glory-kill economy and syncing it to the bar line.

Where It Runs Thin

Now the firm part of the critique. The campaign runs four to five hours, and the eight realms — while visually distinct — recycle a structural template almost immediately: arena, corridor, arena, boss. Worse, the enemy variety is inadequate. The full bestiary appears well before the halfway mark, and several bosses are the same encounter re-skinned with a larger health pool. In a game about musical escalation, the combat encounters themselves stop escalating conceptually around hour two.

The difficulty tuning also has a flat spot. On default settings, the campaign is built so a competent FPS player will rarely die; the real game is the scoreboard, and the game undersells this. Treated as a campaign to finish, it leaves you satisfied but slightly hungry. Treated as a set of songs to master — chasing perfect streaks on higher torments, climbing the leaderboards — the value proposition roughly triples. Leviathan mode helps, adding roguelike modifiers and upgrade decisions to the wave format, though it feels more like a well-made encore than a second act.

The Soundtrack as System

Two Feathers deserves specific credit. Writing original metal that must function at four intensity layers, loop indefinitely without fatigue, and stand alone as actual songs is a brutal brief, and they cleared it. Tracks like “Stygia” (Tankian) and “No Tomorrow” (Blythe) would survive on a playlist with no game attached. That matters because the entire design collapses if the music is mediocre. It isn’t. This is the rare licensed-talent project where the talent shaped the product instead of decorating it.

Aesthetically, Hellsinger goes for stylized infernal grandeur — vast bone cathedrals, ember-choked skies, silhouetted colossi on the horizon — and the art reads as built for motion rather than screenshots. The art direction’s smartest move is restraint in the playspace: arenas stay visually legible at speed, because at 16x Fury there is zero attention budget for clutter.

The UI is where the design discipline shows. The beat indicator — two lines converging on the crosshair — sits exactly where the eyes already are. It’s the single most important interface element in the game, and it’s nearly invisible until needed. The design intends for players to eventually stop looking at it entirely and play by ear, which is the point.

By design, the game’s make-or-break technical requirement is audio latency, and The Outsiders shipped a calibration tool to address it — a sensible inclusion for a game of this scope, which is also light on hardware by 2D-adjacent shooter standards. One design-level warning: Bluetooth audio is a genuine liability for a rhythm shooter. Wireless latency that’s invisible in other games would quietly wreck timing here. Wired headphones are the sensible pairing.

On Steam, this is the game at its best, and the platform’s features aren’t incidental — they’re load-bearing. Global leaderboards are the real endgame, and the Steam community around score-chasing gives the four-hour campaign its long tail. Mouse-and-keyboard is the natural fit: flick aiming lets targeting become a solved problem, freeing attention for timing, which is where the game lives. Controller support exists, but analog aiming adds cognitive load exactly where the design can’t afford it.

The Steam version also received post-launch DLC tracks (the Dream of the Beast and Purgatory packs), which matter more here than DLC usually does — new songs are effectively new levels. Note what’s absent: no Switch or mobile version exists, and a platform with sleep-mode audio quirks and Joy-Con latency would be hostile territory for this design. The separate VR adaptation is its own product; on flat Steam, the calibration menu is the first stop before judging anything.

Metal: Hellsinger is a one-idea game, and that’s largely a compliment — the idea is strong and the execution is disciplined. The Outsiders didn’t hedge with bloated systems or open-world padding; they built a tight, loud, mechanically honest machine around a single insight: shooters have always wanted to be rhythm games. But the short campaign and shallow bestiary are real flaws that matter, and they keep this from the top tier. We rate it a solid, flawed effort: recommend it to the right audience — score-chasers and metal fans — and temper expectations of a long campaign. Judged as a shooter, it’s good. Judged as an instrument, it’s something special. Wire in real headphones and play it loud enough to annoy someone.