New Steam hack-n-slash roguelite shows off unique gameplay, giant swords, and powerful melee combos set to a heavy metal soundtrack
The Triple-I Initiative played host to some of the best indie game showcases this year so far, including another fast-paced roguelite FPS that's free to play until late April. One that seemed particularly interesting for fans of high-action melee combat, endless combos, and unique roguelite gameplay is Morbid Metal. The indie game is slated to launch in Summer 2025 (sometime between June 20 and late September), and it will be published by Ubisoft, although the developer is Screen Juice, a small team based in Germany.
Morbid Metal gameplay
It's still a while before Morbid Metal launches on Steam, but the developer has shown off some testing gameplay, which demonstrates an exceptional amount of visual polish and the fast-paced gameplay promised on the Steam Store page. There also appears to be plenty of variation between the abilities of each character and their character designs and play styles.
According to the developer, Morbid Metal will feature all of the following:
- Action packed combat
- Realtime shapeshifting
- Stylish combos
- Next-Gen graphics
- Diverse environments
- Semi-procedurally generated levels
- Run-based rogue-lite gameplay
- Unique and satisfying Upgrades
- Permanent upgrades and character unlocks
- Rich lore and compelling world of the distant future
As a roguelite, Morbid Metal features permanent death, meaning all progress and collected items collected in each run are lost every time you die, but you can unlock new characters and upgrades to those characters, all of which persist from run to run. As for the premise, players take on the identity of an AI whose job it is to find a solution for the current climate crisis, but in order to do so, you must prove yourself superior to the other AI.
Mid-fight character switching
Aside from the clean visuals, high-action combat, and the fluid movement mechanics, Screen Juice also showed off what it arguably Morbid Metal's headline feature — on-the-fly character switching. Morbid Metal will allow players to switch between up to four different characters in the middle of the fight, with one shot from the preview even showing what looks like combos carrying over from one character to the next.
This feature promises to both keep things interesting and give players a wide variety of tactics to take down their enemies, since each character will have its own weapons, characteristics, and special abilities. Screen Juice has so far published a few clips showing off the various characters' weapons, abilities, and designs, and they seem to be quite varied in terms of fighting range, attack speed, damage output, and general movement speed. Obviously, it remains to be seen how this plays out in practice, but what we've seen so far is a promising start.
So far, the minimum system requirements have not been announced, but the lead developer says he has been getting around 70 FPS at 1440p native on an Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Ti. With modern upscaling tools and lowered resolution and in-game settings, it should be possible to get playable frame-rates even on handheld devices, like the Lenovo Legion Go (curr. $599.99 at Best Buy).
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