Posted on 22 Jan 2020 by Jay Shaw

Metal Unit

The Defence

Developer: JellySnow Studio
Publisher: NEOWIZ
Genre: Action, Adventure, Platformer, Roguelike
Platform: PC
Review copy: Yes
Release date: 03 Feb 2020

The Prosecution

Minimum
Recommended
OS: Windows
CPU: Intel Core i5 +
AMD equivalent
VGA: Nvidia GeForce 450 GTS
AMD Radeon HD 5750
RAM: 2 GB
HDD: 500 MB
DirectX: 10
Controller: Full
Mod Support: Unknown
VR: No
FOV Slider: No
FPS Lock: 120+
OS: Windows
CPU: Intel Core i5 + GHz
AMD equivalent
VGA: Nvidia GeForce GTX 460
AMD Radeon HD 7800
RAM: 4 GB
HDD: 500 MB
DirectX: 11
Controller: Full
Mod Support: Unknown
VR: No
FOV Slider: No
FPS Lock: 120+

Right from the introduction it’s made obvious that Metal Unit isn’t taking itself seriously. The story revolves around humans discovering tunnels leading to the centre of the earth after a series of apocalyptic earthquakes have damaged the surface of the planet. Monsters emerge from these tunnels to terrorize humanity but they’ve got cute slime monsters among their ranks, make no mistake, they’ll still shank you for nothing but they’re adorable. Aliens show up too, and they’re not really elaborated on after that, at least not in the beta build we played.

Metal Unit comes from JellySnow Studio who are comprised of 3 members, one in South Korea and two in Canada; so, to address the elephant in the room, the translation at this stage is pretty bad but it’s still early days. The story proper kicks off with you investigating some kind of lab or base that has been destroyed by monsters. The cute is offset by the burning equipment and dying humans everywhere, not to mention our first real look at heroine 11 and her uh… assets. Her avatar in conversations is strikingly animated and while her assets don’t jiggle her Gantz-like outfit leaves nothing to the imagination. Later we’re introduced to Yuna, a fellow Metal Unit pilot who looks like D.Va’s face on Hatsune Miku’s body. The character designs feel equal parts fan service and work in progress; we’re not puritans who’d call for less revealing outfits or smaller assets (quite the opposite) but it will be interesting to see how these characters evolve to better convey the their own personalities beyond being cute badasses.

This is hands down my favourite bit of the game.

Gameplay itself feels somewhat close to Rogue Legacy; it’s a 2D platformer where 11 is armed with a Metal Unit suit that allows her to wield a melee weapon, ranged weapon, automatic rocket launcher, armour type, and two abilities. The swords and guns we had a chance to see were all fairly basic stuff but tight, responsive controls and moderately high difficulty make you feel awesome when you dash through multiple attacks, freezing the enemies that launched them via an armour mod, then fire off an ability that generates a whirlwind of death that shows up as a near quarter-screen gigantic, well animated sprite.

We did have some complaints about gameplay though: flying enemies can come at you from off-screen so fast that you don’t have time to dodge and you can only dodge through a few attacks at a time so traps like arrow towers (just fires like 8 arrows when you get in front of it) can leave you with no escape. These aren’t insurmountable issues and could probably be fixed fairly easily but it was super frustrating to lose a good gun and sword to an otherwise avoidable death. Boss battles make up for this somewhat with large sprites, well telegraphed attacks with a good variety that play into making you exercise the Metal Unit’s abilities.

And she's my second favourite.

The town/safe area you visit between missions is delightfully compact. So many games spread their safe zones out with empty areas between useful NPCs but Metal Unit keeps that to a minimum and it makes popping to the shop or dashing off to the next mission a trip that takes a few seconds instead of over a minute. Regular level design is pretty bare-bones right now but the world is supposed to be desolate. Combined with the difficulty level, the short levels work incredibly well for providing bite size chunks of combat that feel a lot like getting locked in an intricate arena with enemies you have to eliminate to continue. It may not be to everyone’s tastes but in the setting it makes sense that you’d be under orders to kill everything you come across.

Unfortunately, that’s about all we can say about the game at this point. The beta we played was both fairly short and time limited (due to an unfortunate bit of timing on our part, no fault of the developers) so we could only spend a few hours with it. What we played was very enjoyable and there’s the potential of a good action platformer in there. We don’t know how old the build we played was but with more polish, especially in translation, we’d absolutely be down for playing a lot more. Metal Unit is heading to Steam Early Access on 4 February 2020.

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