The great rhythm shooter Metal: Hellsinger recently received the Essential Hits Pack, a paid add-on that expands the game’s soundtrack with eight new tracks. We tell in the review whether the DLC is worth the money.
Metal: Hellsinger is a fast-paced rhythm shooter where you have to smash the demons in Hell to the sound of heavy metal from Two Feathers, Serj Tankian, Matt Heafy, Alyssa White-Gluz and more. You need to fight with a sense of tact: if you do not adjust your actions to the rhythm of the soundtrack, the score multiplier will not increase, and the basic melody that plays from the beginning of the level will not grow with new components.
The game from a popular online games provider website Friv2Online Games Studio is very heavy: both in terms of the soundtrack and in terms of complexity. For gamers who do not consider themselves metal connoisseurs, Metal: Hellsinger can be quite uncomfortable: the musical accompaniment here is extremely aggressive, it can make your head ache out of habit.
Metal: HellsingerTherefore, the developers have released an add-on for those who want to play with a lighter soundtrack. The Essential Hits Pack includes eight hits that can be used on any completed levels, including boss fights:
Gorillaz – Feel Good Inc.
Muse – Uprising
Depeche Mode
Icona Pop – I Love It (feat. Charli XCX)
DVBBS & Borgeous – Tsunami
Disturbed – Down With the Sickness
Galantis – Runaway (U&I)
Paramore – Misery Business
The initiative is definitely commendable: for me, some tracks from the original friv game turned out to be a little heavy, and I didn’t want to listen to them in isolation from the shootings. However, the implementation of the integration of new songs proved to be weak.
Tracks from the base game are woven into the gameplay: as the multiplier increases, more and more new instruments are connected to a simple melody, and with the highest multiplier, the vocal of the performer is added. This motivates you to play as cool as possible, destroy demons exactly to the rhythm and not make mistakes so as not to “break” the track.
In turn, the songs from the Essential Hits Pack are initially whole, not divided into components. That is, you choose a track, go into battle – and it just plays from beginning to end, after which it starts again from the beginning, and so on until you complete the level. As if you just turned on the song in the background. You can fight well or badly, hit the beat or not – it won’t matter to the music. So, you can not try to play better.
Metal: HellsingerOf course, it’s quite fun to clear Hell with Uprising by Muse (although I would like to see Handler in place of this track) or I Love It by Icona Pop and Charli XCX, but it still feels like new songs are just added to the friv game by mods, without taking into account its gameplay features.
Therefore, speaking about the usefulness of the Essential Hits Pack add-on, I will not recommend it for purchase on PC. You can integrate these same tracks into Metal: Hellsinger for free using the modding tool: a guide to customizing the game’s soundtrack can be found on the Steam Community. You will have to tinker with the definition of BPM tracks and other nuances, but it’s worth it.
The owners of the game on consoles, alas, have no choice but to buy DLC if they want to expand the track list. However, it is worth considering the above: in terms of the level of implementation into the friv game, new songs do not reach the original ones.
At the same time, I would like to mention one more addition for Metal: Hellsinger, which was released in March of this year. It’s called Dream of the Beast and adds a bunch of new content to the game:
two heavy tracks – Dream of the Beast by Cristina Scabbia (Lacuna Coil) and Leviathan by Will Ramos (Lorna Shore);
new weapon – Scarlet right hand, something like a machine gun, rather difficult to master, but at the same time powerful;
three costumes for the demoness: Dark adept activates a one-time shield from the found rage bonus, Morning star restores health from the found rage bonus, Angel’s Eyes grants an increase to the ammo limit when reloading quickly.