Last summer at PAX West, we did a preview for Morbid Metal, Ubisoft’s new fast-paced hack and slash that clearly draws inspiration from titles like Devil May Cry and Nier: Automata. With Morbid Metal set to release in Early Access next week, we’re back again to run the robo-gauntlet so you can see what’s in store for the game’s upcoming launch.

In the previous demo, there were only two playable characters: Flux, a robot girl with a katana who uses her agility to dash around the battle field and smash enemies with jumping attacks, back stabs, and high critical hit chances; and Ekku, a robot monk who’s slower and more methodical, using his giant polearm axe to dish out high damage, ground slams, and shatter enemy defenses.

The early access build gives you access to the second biome, in which you will rescue Vekta, a ranged cyborg who dispatches foes with cybernetic shrikens and telepathic force pulls to keep enemies at whatever range he chooses.

While the seminal experience for me was finding proper ways to min/max Flux’s output, stringing combos together while juggling each of the three characters helps keep combat from feeling too similar on repeated loops.

Speaking of which, loop you will, as each iteration gives you a chance to spend previously collected soul cores and void shards to unlock permanent upgrades. While people might be starting to get tired of the roguelike experiences being shoehorned into everything, Morbid Metal makes it feel rewarding.

Morbid Metal makes for a fun roguelike by ensuring it’s a core component of the gameplay cycle. I highly recommend saving your void shards until you can unlock the perk which grants more for kills, since that will reduce a lot of your grind time before you can start doing more cool things.

At first I was struggling pretty badly as the normal enemies aren’t too bad, but the first biome boss was soul crushing because I couldn’t figure out his attack patterns or his phase structure.

Eventually I had survived long enough to face off with him, as the intermingled trial rooms can be quite challenging until you get the swing of things. I opted to make Flux focus on guaranteed critical chance on dash or backstab, traded my dash for the backstab routine (skill), and then focused on choosing passive abilities that granted me more uses of each skill.

This allowed me to turn Flux into a killing machine who could easily dash around and pick off lesser enemies almost instantly, and then I could swap to Ekku to face tank everything with his passive that gave him super armor.

In later runs, I would shift to Vekta and pick off any flying enemies before shifting to Flux to clear weaker enemies, and then clean up the brutes and shielded enemies with Ekku’s massive force swings.

While Morbid Metal is in no way perfect, it’s a lot of fun and will keep you coming back for more. It’s not impossibly punishing some like of it’s inspirations can be, so even mediocre old people like me can still manage to pull off SSS rated combos.

Morbid Metal is still definitely challenging enough to keep seasoned veterans coming back for more. Hilariously, I encountered a glitch where I went to zero health and didn’t die, so for the rest of the run I was invincible.

This was fun for the purposes of finishing the considerably harder second biome cause that boss fight is significantly harder than anything the first boss even dares to dream up. There’s a bit of a story here too where you’re trying to stave off an enemy AI, but like most of this game, it’s still very barebones and isn’t fully fleshed out yet.

All and all, because this is being published by Ubisoft, I was worried that they’d try to price Morbid Metal too high for what it is, but I’m happy to report that it’s coming out at a very reasonable $17.99 with a 25% launch discount which will make this game $13.49.

I’ve paid a lot more for a lot less content, even if it’s fairly shallow in its current iteration (you see runs are called iterations if you didn’t notice early so this clearly a clever pun pls clap i’m so lonely) and there’s a lot of promise here if Ubisoft gives them time to cook and improve it.

If there are any complaints, I’d like to see more gap closer options, cause having to waste a dash charge to sprint is pretty silly while in combat, and I’d like to see the platforming areas expanded a little bit more.

There’s a bunch of side paths that feel like they could hide some easy powerups, extra credits, void shards, or hidden upgrades, which leaves an already extremely linear path feeling even more unrealized.

I’m very satisfied with this Morbid Metal appetizer, and I can’t wait to see how robust the main course winds up. This thing runs like a dream on my desktop at full Ultra settings, but it also runs surprisingly well at medium on the Steam Deck. Give me a fourth character, more Blue Stahli tunes, flesh out the story some more cause the world itself is interesting, and more exploration options and I’ll be a very happy boy.

Morbid Metal is set to launch next week for Windows PC (via Steam) on April 8th, via early access. To celebrate the release, the game will be 25% off for a limited time.