First, I should make it clear that I’m probably not the right person for this review. Nobody on our team is a dedicated rogue-like enthusiast, so the job fell to me. Think of this less as an expert breakdown and more as a first impression from someone who’s largely outside the genre. I won’t be able to tell you what Morbid Metal brings to the rogue-like table compared to its peers — because I barely know the table.
With that caveat out of the way: Morbid Metal is a rogue-like. One of those games where you start from scratch every run. Outside of picking up Dead Cells for an hour every couple of years, I have virtually no experience with the genre.
A Simulation
The premise puts you inside a simulation; each run boots up a new session. The game drops you into a mostly linear environment and, after every enemy encounter, offers you three choices — different abilities, upgrades, and the like. You pick and stack them to shape your build for that particular run.
There are three playable characters. Unfortunately, the review period wasn’t long enough for me to unlock the third. You can swap between characters at any point during gameplay — mid-fight, mid-air, mid-everything — with a single button press, and honestly, it feels great.
Each character has three abilities with individual cooldowns. Instead of waiting around for one character’s cooldowns to refresh, you switch to another and use theirs. It creates a genuinely fluid combat loop. The action system is hack-and-slash at its core: you’re swinging your weapon at swarms of enemies. The pacing is fast and the game constantly demands movement — stand still and you’ll be punished quickly.
You can also swap out each character’s abilities with ones you find during a run. Higher damage but longer cooldown, or lower damage with a shorter cooldown — there’s room to experiment with different combinations.
Picture the progression as dungeon after dungeon, connected by corridors. Don’t let the word “dungeon” mislead you though; the game takes place in a bright, vibrant, open-feeling environment — at least the first area does. After clearing each dungeon, you’re presented with three upgrade options. These can be general improvements or character-specific enhancements. The closest experience I’ve had to something like this was Vampire Survivors.
Personally, I can’t say the upgrades — at least in the early game — dramatically change how the game feels. Similarly, there isn’t a massive difference between the first two characters’ playstyles. But as you progress and unlock permanent upgrades, I’d expect this to shift.
There are also occasional platforming sections scattered across the map. You dodge lasers, jump across gaps — that sort of thing. They feel like filler. No real depth or challenge to them, at least as far as I played. You can pick up abilities or health from some of these segments, but most of them feel like busywork.
The Technical Side
Although Morbid Metal is published under Ubisoft, this isn’t a big-budget production. Temper your expectations accordingly. The developer, Felix Schade, built the game’s first version as a university project ten years ago. A few years later, he posted a gameplay clip on Reddit, got a positive response, and assembled a team of ten people. They cite Bayonetta, NieR: Automata, Devil May Cry, Returnal, and Hades as inspirations, and say they kept asking themselves “Is the game fun enough?” throughout the development process. After seven years of work, here we are.
First off, I genuinely liked how the game looks. It reminded me a bit of Bright Memory. It has a photorealistic, good-looking world. There’s some blurriness and softness in the image, but the game is still in early access and I was pushing max settings on an RTX 4060, so that’s somewhat expected.
One technical issue really bothered me. Morbid Metal is naturally a game where you die and restart — a lot. You die, sit through a long loading screen, arrive at the simulation’s hub area, walk to the center to start a new run, and then sit through another long loading screen. Despite having a modern M2 SSD, the loading times felt excessive. Two lengthy loading screens back-to-back really break the game’s momentum.
Beyond that, there’s a design issue that bugged me. The map doesn’t always make it clear where you can and can’t go. I’m not talking about whether your abilities are sufficient to reach a certain spot — I mean it’s sometimes genuinely unclear whether a location is out of bounds or somewhere you’re supposed to head toward.
The Bottom Line
If you’re into rogue-likes, I’d say give Morbid Metal a look. There’s already a free demo available, so try it out and see if it clicks. Speaking as someone who’s largely indifferent to the genre, the game managed to pull me in. I enjoy hopping on for two or three runs whenever I find time between work. That’s essentially what the game promises, and it delivers.
According to the developers, there’s currently about 10 hours of content. However, the game has high replayability, and more content will be added as the early access period continues.
Thanks to Ubisoft for providing a review code.