Metal Eden review – sci-fi parkour that’s beautifully difficult

A daring new mix of first person shooter and Mirror’s Edge style parkour game is one of the hardest, and most rewarding, games of the year.

The French invention of parkour has always been a favourite of video game developers. The Assassin’s Creed franchise makes liberal use of street acrobatics, as does Spider-Man, while Mirror’s Edge and Dying Light were essentially built around being able to run fast and smoothly through urban environments. It feels pretty good when it’s done right.

Metal Eden also uses parkour as its foundation. It’s a first person shooter and, like Polish developer Reikon’s first game, Ruiner it has a dystopian futuristic setting and a savagely hard difficulty level. You play as ASKA, a robot with a human consciousness implanted in it, and it’s your job to break into a digital prison on a distant planet and free the millions of digitised humans stored there.

At least we think that’s what it was about. The plot’s hilariously gnomic in both its delivery and weird complexity, and since all the dialogue is between ASKA and the oddly creepy AI subroutines she recruits to help her, you’ll be listening to it while sprinting, zip-lining, and wall running through shiny, dizzyingly tall, and partly destroyed environments at breakneck speed.

The sense of pace is magnificent, with your running and double-jump-with-jetpack abilities assisted by a grappling hook that fires you high into the air. You’ll regularly be required to chain those skills together, zip-lining into a wall run, then catapulting yourself through the air with your grapple, generally landing in an enclosed arena where you’ll find wave after wave of murderous robotic assailants coming your way.

That’s because while Metal Eden’s traversal is truly memorable, the meat of the game is its equally frenetic combat. Starting with an automatic pistol with unlimited ammo, but a habit of rapidly overheating if you keep the trigger held down for too long, you swiftly gain access to a far wider arsenal of weaponry, all of which comes with strictly limited ammunition.

That’s not so bad, because everywhere you fight has regenerating ammo drops, but the skill required to manoeuvre around those spaces while shooting accurately, managing ammunition, and choosing the right weapon for the right moment is something you’ll need to learn, and quickly.

Taking advantage of your nimbleness, the corridors you run through, and stadia you fight in, are multi-layered, with various levels of bridges, tunnels, and overpasses that you can reach with your grapple hook, and via Halo-style glowing jump platforms that fling you into the air. You’ll spend a reasonable proportion of your time either airborne or running along walls, some of which are curved. In Metal Eden, standing still is instant death.

The enemies you face are perfectly designed for their environments and come in an inspiring variety of flavours. Some hover, firing explosive rockets or sniping you with deadly accuracy if you’re too slow, while most are ground-based, but with the ability to jump up or down levels, pursuing you relentlessly. Many come with force fields that you break either with a melee attack or using one of the energy weapons you unlock.

The final element of combat is ripping cores. That’s the part of enemies into which their personality has been downloaded, and you can finish them off by tearing theirs out. Once you’ve got it in hand, you can either lob it for a grenade style explosion, or consume it, putting ASKA into a temporary berserk state where her melee attack is massively more powerful and, once you unlock a few perks, her gunfire as well.

The perk trees increase your firepower, add abilities to the robotic suit ASKA inhabits, and others associated with the ripped out cores. You can also power-up each of the eight guns you’ll eventually unlock. While your default machine pistol gets extra damage and overheats less quickly, all the other guns get secondary fire modes, although few feel all that useful.

The perks are great though, adding a bullet time slow motion effect, freeze grenades, and beefing up your armour and damage while in berserker mode. It’s a lot to take in, and enemies give you absolutely no quarter. Even the opening training mission proves brutally taxing, let alone some of the later arena battles against multiple shielded colossi, sometimes with the floor either turned into lava or seething with dangerous electrical currents, punishing every single mistake in your parkour. And that’s with the difficulty set to normal.

To add to the chaos, in a couple of chapters you take a break from the metallic skyscrapers to traverse chunks of the distant planet’s red-earthed soil, where you can also transform from an android into a Metroid inspired morph ball that rolls and boosts across the landscape, electrocuting enemies at range and launching homing missiles at them.

The game is built to ensure you never get comfortable, even for a moment. Zip lines have dead ends, forcing you to jump to different tracks, or have special pads you need to shoot with an energy weapon to open the way ahead, or suddenly end, forcing you to grapple your way to a distant platform or wall run. It’s palm sweating stuff even outside of combat.

It does have a few bugs though. We had to restart checkpoints a few times, and in one particularly annoying episode had to redo an entire 90 minute mission because the boss fight glitched. Metal Eden’s launch was delayed to allow time for additional bug fixing, and that boss fight was flagged as a known issue by the developers, so it will hopefully be patched shortly.

We also found quite a few of the weapons either weren’t that useful or were only briefly relevant, until they were supplanted by more powerful guns you discover later on. The shotgun, for example, is amazing when you first get hold of it, but after unlocking the grenade launcher we literally never used it again.

It’s worth coming back to the difficulty level, which is utterly harrowing. Normal is a significant and sometimes debilitating challenge, that regularly requires breaks from gameplay to stretch hands that had been spending too much time on multiple shoulder buttons. By contrast, easy is just too straightforward, giving the game almost no challenge at all.

When it’s all working though, the effect is mesmerising, the sleek futuristic interiors rushing past, and battles that are at least as much about sprinting and flying around the environment as they are about aiming and firing weapons. The emphasis on shield-breaking melee attacks also means you can’t just keep your distance but need to rush right up to even the largest and most imposing enemies.

The game also has some refreshing takes on longstanding tropes, like the solo King of the Hill sections, where you need to occupy an energy sphere that moves occasionally, while defending yourself from waves of attackers. In these, you know arena battles are over when the game enters brief slow motion, as you dispatch the final enemy, which is not only useful but looks cool.

In spite of its sparkly good looks and whirlwind pace, Metal Eden is fundamentally old school. You’re effectively running along corridors gunning down baddies, then heading into arenas where you take down waves of them and then repeating the process. The setting may be gravity-defying, taking place amongst glittering towers and glorious industrial arcologies, but when you boil it down, it’s Doom with prettier set dressing, and genuinely none the worse for it.

If you like a merciless challenge, Metal Eden really delivers and while it’s not perfect, its particular brand of ultra-kinetic action is executed with real panache. Once its bugs are ironed out this could well find itself with a devoted and long term cult following.

Formats: PlayStation 5 (reviewed), Xbox Series X/S, and PC
Price: TBA
Publisher: Deep Silver
Developer: Reikon Games
Release Date: 2nd September 2025
Age Rating: 16

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