Metal: Hellsinger clearly struck a chord with a lot of gamers, coming out to rave reviews and winning awards. Funcom have now brought this mix of FPS, rhythm, and heavy metal into virtual reality with Metal: Hellsinger VR.
Revenge Will Be Mine
Metal: Hellsinger VR has you take on the role of ‘Unknown’, who has been condemned to hell with her voice, memories, and ‘song’ stolen by the Red Judge. Your mission is to make your way through the various hells, with the assistance of the talking skull Paz, and take back what’s yours.
While there is further story about a prophecy saying that a Hellsinger will cause the Hells to fall, with some partially animated artwork with voiceovers between each stage expanding on this, the story is fairly minimal. Despite this, it works well enough to build a world that you’d expect when you think of metal, with hell, demons, and angels aplenty. It sets the scene and gives you a reason to push forward, which is all I feel this type of game needs.
Perhaps more important is the very brief mention that the hells work on a rhythm.
Slice and Shoot to the Beat
Heavy metal constantly plays in the background as you go through the hells. Any of your attacks that hit on the beat do more damage, as well as increase your fury meter (a damage and score multiplier). Dashing and reloading also benefit from being on the beat.
It’s an interesting concept, and dashing around while slaughtering demons and angels to a rhythm is just sheer fun. It encourages you to keep up the momentum by having the fury meter decrease when you’re not killing enemies and accuracy by granting you various boons for keeping up a hit streak. It can get chaotic at times with projectiles flying around, dozens of enemies, the need to dash about to avoid death, the occasional chance to teleport to insta-kill, and the feeling of always needing to be shooting. The mechanics tie together really well to achieve this.
With the ability to switch between up to four weapons (each with its own unique ultimate skill), a small but varied set of enemies, and combat that encourages staying constantly on the go, Metal: Hellsinger VR kept me constantly invested. The excellent heavy metal soundtrack that pairs so well with the hellscape and gameplay concept certainly was a large part of why too.
The gameplay isn’t perfect of course. Not all weapons are built equal. For example, I found the throwing weapon awkward to stay on the beat with for long-range throws, while I could easily keep the rhythm with the skull or shotgun. Getting the timing to do quick on-the-beat reloads for the handguns was much more difficult than for the explosive crossbow. This led to me most often limiting my arsenal to weapons that were more manageable either immediately or after some practice. Still, that shoot, shoot, shoot, reload rhythm feels so satisfying when it works.
Hell and Tormenting Challenges
Metal: Hellsinger VR is not exactly a long game. If you’re just aiming to make your way through the eight levels, you’ll be done within a few hours. That’s not all there is to it, but some will miss out by playing like this.
The main campaign involves making your way through the 15-minute or so long levels, putting down demons and angels along the way, culminating in a boss battle. The same boss does repeatedly appear at the end of most levels, but the mechanics change each time, so these battles still feel unique.
After most levels, three ‘torments’ are unlocked. These are short challenges that unlock sigils, giving you useful bonuses like a little protection against losing your hit streak. While there is a standard “kill X amount of enemies within Y seconds”’ type of challenge, most of them are far more interesting. A favorite of mine was one that automatically switched my weapon every time I got a kill. Another torment had me only kill enemies with ultimate skills, which led to me learning more about the mechanic and having to play very differently by purposely weakening but not killing enemies, while initially avoiding the weaker ones that I’d usually be killing, to build up the fury meter.
You can replay on the four difficulties (which have their own in-game names, but I’ll refer to as Easy, Normal, Hard, and Very Hard), with the last needing game completion to unlock. These are fairly standard settings with weaker or stronger enemies, a lack of retries on higher difficulties, and more flexibility on beat matching on the lowest. Each one has leaderboards to try and compete for scores. The normal difficulty was slightly challenging, with the final boss providing a particular challenge due to a lack of many health pickups dotted around the arena and them becoming inaccessible at points. Diving into the higher difficulties involved a lot more thinking about how not to die.
There are some hidden collectibles to find which unlock weapon skins. As well as finding them, some required difficult jumps with the right timing which adds another challenge. What is somewhat of a pain though is that they seem to require being touched very precisely. I jumped through them without picking them up far more than once.
There are also several achievements to unlock which can add some replayability. These are a mix between the standard progression ones, playing in different ways like only using the skull weapon for a level, and performing some difficult tasks.
While Metal: Hellsinger VR is short, it’s certainly not short on content or ways to play. Plus, it was fun enough that I found myself just jumping back into levels for a higher score or just to experience them again.
Virtual Heaven or Hell?
Non-VR games don’t always work brilliantly when VR versions are released. Metal: Hellsinger VR manages to succeed here for the most part, but there are some points where I feel it could’ve done better or things that just don’t work well.
I mentioned that not all weapons are equal and I think that part of the reason is how they work in VR. Getting an attack on beat with a melee weapon like the sword or the throwing weapon that requires physically making a throwing motion just isn’t as easy as pointing and pressing a trigger to the beat. Some of the ranged weapon reloading issues mentioned earlier are due to timing, but there’s also the difficulty in making the exact flicking motion the game needs. Some of this comes with practice, but realistically, it’s a short game. Most people aren’t going to get much experience with it and will be tempted to stick with weapons that feel better to use, like the incredibly satisfying shotgun.
The other notable major issue is the gauges. Health and ultimate are found on the back of the wrist. The indicator for whether my hit was good or perfect is at the bottom of the screen. All of these are important to keep track of, but having to specifically move an arm or head to look is required, which is often inconvenient with hordes of demons attacking. Health does give an audiovisual cue when low, but I found myself not realizing when my ultimate had been charged up often. Luckily the beat indicator is front and center.
There are some other little snags too, like the occasional jarring change of point of view for the cinematics, the insta-kill teleport control taking some getting used to, or the tutorial control images not always being the clearest. The game mostly works well, but these sorts of things do stand out.
Options are a positive, even if the readability of the menus isn’t always great. It has the standard VR comfort options around smooth turning versus snap turning, vignettes to prevent motion sickness, and so on. Smooth locomotion is the only movement option. While there is no teleport locomotion, but I don’t think it would’ve worked well with the pace this game needs to keep.
It goes further than the standard though. There are quite a lot of changes you can make around the indicators. There’s an accessibility option to always be on beat (which understandably disables leaderboards) and a few changes you can make about how it plays in VR. One that was interesting to have for immersion but I felt didn’t work in practice was manually pumping the weapons for each shot. It’s just too slow to use here.
Sights and Songs
I’m playing Metal: Hellsinger VR on the Meta Quest 2 and it looks rather good (considering the platform) while keeping the performance up without any issues aside from the very occasional dip.
Visually, the graphics work well to create the atmosphere of hell. It’s a fairly typical image with dark environments, rocky areas, and the occasional pit of lava. There aren’t a huge amount of different enemies to fight, but each looks unique. As a bonus, there’s even an art book in-game to see the concept art.
The story is mostly narrated by Paz, played by Troy Baker. He does a brilliant job setting the tone of the series, with a slightly over-the-top tone in a very Southern American accent.
The songs stand out as you’d expect from a game centered around music. They’re composed by Two Feathers and feature many well-known metal vocalists such as Serj Tankian of System of a Down and Randy Blythe of Lamb of God. As you’d expect of the heavy metal genre, there are lots of guitars, drums, guttural voices, and so on. It’s perfect for some headbanging (though I don’t advise it while you’re wearing an expensive VR headset).
One very interesting feature is that the music builds up as you increase your fury meter. More instruments are added in and it feels more and more intense until the vocals finally kick in.
Verdict
Metal: Hellsinger VR is an absurdly fun version of the original with the same great mechanics perfectly paired with amazing music. While not perfectly adapted to the medium, experiencing it through VR is well worth your time.
METAL: HELLSINGER VR IS RECOMMENDED
If you are looking for another VR game with angels and demons, you might want to check out In Death: Unchained – VR.
Many thanks go to Funcom for a Meta Quest 2 review code for Metal: Hellsinger VR.

A gamer since the days of Amstrad and DOS and someone who has dabbled in a variety of professions. He enjoys a wide variety of genres, but has been focusing on visual novels and virtual reality in recent years. Head Editor of NookGaming. Follow him and the website on @NookSite.