Should you venture through this Metal Garden?

Travel through an overgrown megastructure, and discover what lies beyond it. Metal Garden is a short, atmospheric singleplayer FPS game.

Metal Garden is a strange FPS. It looks and plays like an old-school one yet has some very basic textures and looks very generic. Enemy AI seems to be very dated and bad, while the overall gunplay doesn’t feel very satisfying.

The enemies are also weird in their design; I laughed out loud when I saw my first group of them…which is never a good sign. There’s no clear indication of where to go or what to do, so you have to rely on old-fashioned deduction, backtracking and so on.

The game also allows modifiers in the main menu to allow infinite health and ammo, alongside others to make things harder for you. None of these affect the Steam achievements, one of them actually requires you to complete the game with one of these enabled anyway. The weapons themselves lack the punch I would have hoped, and it just isn’t particularly fun.

Like I said, the visuals look old-school. I don’t know if this is intentional or not, I whacked up my settings to full and it still looks very basic and generic. I know the game is meant to be set in a “metal garden” but it all looks very washed out in terms of colour as well. It just lacks any personality or charm. The sound effects for guns and explosions are sub-par as well.

The Verdict

Metal Garden is perhaps a generic an FPS as you can get. It has no charm, no replayability and felt like a chore to go through. Avoid.

Score: 4.0

Disclosure: I received a free review copy of this product from https://www.keymailer.co