Metal Tales Overkill Review A Metal Music Thriller

Recently released, The Zerouno Games release Metal Tales: Overkill brings players a top-down shooter featuring a soundtrack packed with various metal artists. Released on the 21st of April, the small indie title is now available on all devices. So, how is the Zerouno Games release? Find out in our review of Metal Tales: Overkill.

Story: An interesting idea, but not much to be found

In Metal Tales: Overkill, the god Kuk has possessed all of the guitar gods and, through them, possesses the metalheads. Through the infinite concerts, the god Kuk and his legion of possessed metalhead zombies wipe out every original creation of metal bands along with their fans. As these metalhead fans are stripped of their passion for metal, one person can stand against the god Kuk.

This synopsis provided is all there is to the story. Metal Tales: Overkill sums up the entirety of its story with two images with scrolling text. So, if you’re looking for a more substantial story, you may want to look elsewhere.

Gameplay: A fun shooter but inconsistent

The gameplay in Metal Tales: Overkill is all over the place, going excellent of becoming disconnected depending on the run and character. Offering four characters with two reasonably balanced starters and two unlockable ones provides a more significant challenge with more unbalance stats. Additionally, each character will come with their items and different guitars with their differences.

Once the player has decided on their character, they will then drop into the game and have to perform basic top-down shooter room cleaning tasks. Defeat all the enemies in each room, and the doors to the following rooms will unlock. Destructible objects in each room may bear items once destroyed as well. The player will clear each room at the concert, also discovering the shop, challenge room, trap room, treasure room, and the boss room. Fighting and defeating the boss and former guitar god will free them and allow you to pass to the next concert.

The player can also pick up or buy various items that offer upgrades or debuff them. These items will be essential to improve your character and help ease the challenge as you move through each concert. For example, guitars will change how your character fires their weapon. Strings offer a one-time use item that temporarily augments some part of your character. Beware, not all are helpful. Pedals and books allow players to drain health, increase fire speed, or damage significantly. Lastly, the summons that the player will unlock as they defeat each boss room.

Tons of options in your metal music adventure

The player has various options as they progress through Metal Tales: Overkill, but their options are widely different. The significant difference creates inconsistent gameplay that only becomes more noticeable the longer you play. Each run is radically different from the last, and not in a good way. It makes it difficult to know what may be a successful run or run that will be wasteful.

There are upgrades in Metal Tales: Overkill, allowing the player to add more items on each concert floor, but earning points to unlock them can take a long time. There still weren’t enough points to unlock anything after completing five runs up to the 4th boss. This difference in runs swings in the other direction as well.

During our Metal Tales: Overkill review, we received a pick-up that allowed us to one-shot everything, including bosses. This sounds great, but in a game that had been delivered a fair challenge up to that point, walking through the entire game in under 20 minutes was surprising.

Metal Tales: Overkill offers an enjoyable top-down shoot for a while, but the inconsistencies in difficulty and items will start to ruin it as you progress into the game in one direction or another. Hopefully, the developers at Zerouno games will patch Metal Tales: Overkill later, balancing out the items more. But, for now, we say purchase at your discretion.

Graphics/Audio: Nostalgic artwork with a killer soundtrack

Metal Tales: Overkill does offer two shining points that will, in many cases, make up for the other issues that players may find. The art style of Metal Tales: Overkill is a delightful calling back to the art style of my younger years. A passionate young metalhead scribbling the names of my favorite bands in my notebooks during school. The art style maintains the fonts and style so well known in the metal music genre and continues with its stage, characters, and enemies design, all having their very metal style. There were some minor graphical issues with the main character clipping above everything else, unable to interact with anything until you left the room. But these are minor bugs that we found which took little away from the art style of Metal Tales: Overkill.

By playing Metal Tales: Overkill, you can probably be sure of one thing. The developers who made this game are fans of the metal genre of music. Metal Tales: Overkill features an extensive library of metal bands from all over the world, featuring: Striker, Nameless Day Ritual, Through The Noise, Nereis, and more. Each concert floor and boss’s metal music theme set the stage for your metal adventure.

With a great art style and a killer soundtrack, The Zerouno release Metal Tales: Overkill will have much to offer. Even if the gameplay and story aren’t up your alley, it’ll be worth checking out.

Conclusion: A fun game, but maybe wait for balancing

If you’re looking for something that will offer a fantastic soundtrack and keeps you occupied for a few hours, Metal Tales: Overkill is worth recommending. But, it’s also fair to be wary due to the unbalanced gameplay that some may want to wait until the developers at Zerouno Games balance it out.

But, after reading our review, you’re interested in picking up the Zerouno Games release Metal Tales: Overkill. It’s currently available on Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4 & 5, Steam, and Xbox One & Series S|X for $17.99. Additionally, you can see any of the other games from Zerouno Games on their development page.