Morbid Metal – Preview
Johnny Mnemonic's nightmare: cyber ninjas armed to the teeth
You wake up in an antechamber bathed in pale, blue light. In its centre, a small terminal invites you to start a new run. Iteration number 7. You close your eyes. You start the simulation, and artefacts and glitches appear on the screen.
When you open them again, you find yourself in front of the same torii gate that greets you at the beginning of each iteration. You breathe in the Japanese mountain air, before realising you're a robot in a simulation, and your gasping is probably just a figure of speech from whoever programmed you.
You have three abilities, six if you count your body's colleague's. More than enough to deal with the metal beasts waiting for you in the next area. You stretch your neck, trying to make it crack, but because you're a robot, it just creaks.
Red eyes stare at you from a distance. Let the slaughter begin!
It’s Morbid’ time!
Morbid Metal is pretty much what would come out of a lift if Devil May Cry, Ghostrunner and Dead Cells had met in it nine months ago. Developed by a team formed in Cologne in 2022 and published by Ubi, the title combines fast-paced combat with fluid traversal and a perk system that differs from run to run to deliver a title with visible inspirations, both aesthetic and mechanical, but with some unique and potential-filled features.
In Morbid Metal, you won't have to choose a specialisation or class, mainly because you'll have them all in your pocket in every run. Although in the demo version we can only switch between two forms (Flux and Ekko), we are promised twice as many at launch.
The interesting part is that you can switch between forms at any time, even during a combo, thus having access to multiple kits within the same encounter. And if Flux excels in fast attacks and increased mobility, Ekko has a heavier and (apparently) slower hand. Thus, you can start a combo using Flux's Blink Strike to approach the target, transform into Ekko for a stun, and return to the first form to use the projectiles of some other ability.
The accelerated tempo encourages an aggressive playstyle, with numerous possibilities to chain abilities, cancel animations, or react on the fly, which encourages improvisation. Moreover, you don't have a button to block, and the only way to avoid hits and deliver ripostes, if you have good timing – is the dodge.
At the end of each fight, you get to choose a passive upgrade, ranging from improving certain abilities to drones that deal small but constant damage to your opponents. In the demo version of Morbid Metal, an iteration lasts around ten minutes, which means we don't have much to discover about synergies or snowball effects of various builds, and at first glance, they seem significantly more conservative and simpler than in Risk of Rain 2.
However, the activation conditions of some of them (for example, having to kill an enemy with a certain ability to receive a benefit) can alter your playstyle and produce interesting results when you methodically chain your ability rotation.
Between combat arenas, you'll find chests with perks (dubbed, in the game's internal jargon, Routines) or containers from which you can recover some health, and the transition between zones involves a touch of platforming, where you'll have to make use of the sprint, dash, and double jump we'll have already gotten used to by the end of the tutorial.
The brawling itself will probably be the main attraction, as it allows for a free, explosive, and spectacular ballet, which will undoubtedly be amplified in complexity once we see some boss fights with other variables thrown into the equation.
In the demo version, we have three types of enemies: simple androids, the cannon fodder on which we can practice our counterattacks, heavier robots equipped with a shield, and flyers. For those already hardened in the fires of a Devil May Cry, Darksiders, or Bayonetta, the generous reaction windows and the pace of battles will not pose any obstacle. I imagine that once modifiers, more complex enemies, or more cues to pay attention to appear, things will get complicated, but strictly from the point of view of the time windows in which you can dodge hits, Morbid Metal is quite friendly to newcomers to the genre.
Cyberpunk Sushi à la Mikutsou Cekurai
Visually, Morbid Metal sits at the intersection of cyberpunk and Japanese culture, a familiar yet always interesting ground to revisit. The biome in the demo – a series of islands lost in the fog – outlines a mysterious and interesting setting, to which I hope the game will add some lore and context at launch.
The walls and floors are packed with industrial elements, cables, and panels, but the abundant vegetation suggests an abandoned world, clad in sheet metal and then left to rot in oblivion. The trailers suggest that the convention will be maintained in the worlds awaiting us at launch, but that much more content awaits us, bosses that each bring an inferno of bullets and laser beams, and, of course, abilities with which to navigate any such challenge.
The soundtrack, of course, had to get your blood pumping, and a name not at all unfamiliar to the industry leaves its signature on it: Blue Stahli. From KickBeat to Cyberpunk 2077, Bret Autrey's music is more than fitting between the dodges, hits, and teleports it punctuates.
We still have about two and a half months until the Early Access launch, but we can already see that Morbid Metal has a foundation with potential. The main gimmick – form-shifting – allows for any permutations in building a combo, and the most creative and efficient among us will find numerous builds and iterations in which to create a spectacle in every encounter.
Played on: PC
Release date: 20 August 2025
Developer: Screen Juice
Publisher: Ubisoft
