Metal Bringer

I got Samurai Bringer for free and enjoyed it so much that I bought Metal Bringers to support the dev team that created it. Metal Bringers is equally great and even better in some ways. I whole-hearted recommend them both. For everyone asking them to "remove the filter" on their games, there's something you need to understand. It's not just "pixely", they made a decision on purpose to present their games in a 64/128 bit aesthetic. For the players too young to remember, this art style *dominated* the games market for like 5-10 years and its bad-ness is nostalgic to players of a certain age, just like that one blocky 3D aesthetic is nostalgic for people who grew up on Minecraft. Would you buy a game that used a Minecraft aesthetic and then complain that the characters are too "boxy"?

I loved Samurai Bringer, it is a great game with a good amount of polish and style. It stands out as being a unique entry in the roguelike field. Metal Bringer could be the same, but I'll never find out because they are missing rudimentary features like key bind customization.

PLEASE ADD COOP SURVIVAL

Normally I would play a little longer before posting a review, but this game is so sludge-like to play, I can't bring myself to it. I notice most negative reviews are about the bugs, so I'll talk about the gameplay. It's a completely miserable roguelike if you're trying to play it and not button-mash around with your brain off. Your run is, the first few times, dictated by what you find. Both your Labor (the giant robot) and your android avatar. Weapons have little to no meaningful difference in how they play. You essentially have three kinds: 1) Melee 2) Fast ranged 3) Slow ranged The animations for melee weapons come in two kinds: thrusting and spinning. Thrusts are (situationally) good for bigger Labors, spinning is (generally) good for mobs. Explosives (slow ranged) can be good against both, but without proper mods you're likely to miss shots, and even with mods you can still miss. Fast ranged attacks suffer a similar problem unless you're completely up Labor enemy asses, or a half a block away from smaller mobs. Most of the mods (apps) are obnoxious small percentage bonuses to random stats. You'll be balancing things like "+1% to thunder defense damage" or "+1% thunder damage on attacks". A few of the apps are useful on paper, but poor in execution, such as bullet speed. Even fewer are apps that are good in execution and worthwhile. You spend coins on most everything in the game. Analyzing parts lets you take them with you on the next run, and this includes apps and Labor parts. Over time you're likely to build a specific machine you want, and you're less likely to work with whatever you find in the game. Meaning the more you play this roguelike, the less rogue it becomes, which is bizarre design. The game also has the habit of many roguelites where you need to unlock things like movement speed or jump skills, so the first few hours of play is a complete slog and feels like ass. This isn't the sort of game where that gets better quickly unless you happen to come across the "game doesn't feel like walking through buckets of horse semen" app. The default camera and controls are also designed to frustrate. Despite playing slow, the game has you zoomed in far too close with an abysmal FOV. The level design also puts a lot of things like buildings, bridges, and trees in between your character and the camera. You can turn on the option to highlight your character, but it's small comfort when the overly pixelated aesthetic makes the amorphous blob of your avatar hard to read. Are you facing forward or backwards? How high is your character? Are you in an attack animation or jump animation, or has it ended? Who knows? Who cares? Clearly not PLAYISM. All of that, of course, could be waved away, tolerated even, if the way to acquire mech parts wasn't so very against the very nature of the game. Let me explain, the draw of Metal Bringer is that you can customize your mech, the Labor, BUT that requires gaining Labor parts from enemies. First, downing an enemy isn't a guarantee you'll get a part, and often you'll be fighting several Labors at once, so when a piece finally drops you might not be able to use it right away. THEN, if the enemy is defeated, AND you can equip the part (just because you have a Labor doesn't mean you can use a part), you have to contend with the part likely being broken as all get out. If you want to repair it you'll need to find one of the random repair shops and happen to be carrying a fat stack of money to repair it. If you get hit by any one of a hundred bullets or mobs (made hard to distinguish because of the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ aesthetic) there's a real chance your new part will break. Can you go back and get the old part? No, of course not. When you go to a new map that's it, you can't go back. So, we have a roguelite game that absolutely does not want to be played like a rogue game. You have to grind to make it playable, everything is hard to make out and sluggish so you need to mash buttons, and you're always better off not trying new builds or options. I haven't even gotten into the completely boring and lazy world building, where the whitest girl in history fights an idiot's concept of Hindu beings (I say beings because gods, monsters, and demigods are all thrown together based on visual aesthetics, and in no way make logical sense). Imagine a christian mecha game where the bosses are the archangel Michael, Dante, Beelzebub, and the Virgin Mary. It sounds cool, only because of how stupid it is. Seeing how precious the country of India is over how Hinduism is represented, I how the government of India arrests the devs and breaks their hands with bricks for wasting my time on this idiot zone of a game.

Fun and scratch some of the itch of mech customization games. Lots of build and interactive way to use the gears and the weapon. If any complain: 1. The FOV distance is too close. 2. The lock on distance is also too close (No Install apps to adjust this) 3. Would be great if Build preset is available (ARMS + Installed apps), currently build presets is only for the ARMS. I'm aware that player is suppose to change parts now and then in the run, but preserving the original mech is also possible play.

Disappointed that the girl doesn't look like she does in the promotional illustration... but the game is fun

Metal Bringer is a game about collecting parts for mechs and praying that RNG is on your side for that chip drop. Unlike Samurai Bringer when you spends hours looking at menu, you will now spend minutes looking at chips and more time getting into the action.

Great game overall, the variety in mech parts, weapons, and app modifiers really change your playstyle in a meaningful and substantial ways, so it gets the main part of why rogue-lites are good by not having a shallow system, that feels the same each run. The customization is certainly a highlight, treading between Armored core and Custom Robo levels of fine tuning. The combat is great, giving unique move sets for every melee weapon type and a unique moveset for if you are dual wielding the same weapons too; There is also a matching level of thought put into the movesets for the little pilot as well, so every aspect of combat is pretty well thought out; It's not DMC or Bayo levels of complex, but it's certainly a cut above your typical hack and slash or Souls-like game. It's satisfying doing combos, shooting, blowing everything up, and becoming stronger. The rogue lite elements definitely let you become more OP if you use the right combo of apps and just play more to increase your collection. So even if you are bad at the game, you'll eventually level your character with OS tunings to be more survivable, which also increases your capacity for how many apps you can have installed. Now for the Bad, which there aren't many things to list, but it's a problem nonetheless for me. 1: The Music sucks hard, it's generic, monotonous chiptune sounding rubbish that has no soul in my opinion (There are definitely thousands of good examples of quality chiptune music, this just sucks though). So I definitely recommend using another game's playlist in the background while playing. I had various electronic themed game OSTs playing in the background like Einhander, One step from Eden, BallisticNG, and Assault Spy. 2: The visuals settings don't give you the option to turn off the pixel filter, which I don't even think looks very good the way they implemented it. The low poly 3d models would look fine on their own, so I think it's just a poorly executed visual gimmick. Still waiting for someone to make a mod that removes the pixelation, but this game is a year old already so I don't think that is happening. Also the explosions and other VFX can cause big frame drops if a lot of them are happening at once, even on my rig with the game limiting framerates to 120fps maximum. 3: Lack of Statistical Transparency. Metal Bringer does that annoying gormless developer thing where they don't give you specific and accurate numbers for your stats when customizing your builds, i.e. "X App Raises or lowers your attack or defense", but they never give you an amount, just a vague notion that said stat, moved one way or another. No idea why they did this since the Mechs do have pretty detailed stats and visuals for how their movement and thrusters are calculated, but nothing for how Apps influence your total stats on anything. 4: No savable Equipment/Build sets. You can't make and save equipment sets to quickly swap between playstyles before you go on a run. This is mainly a problem when it comes to your App customization since that dictates what playstyle and equipment you'll want to be running every time, i.e. Melee focused, gun focused, solid dmg, beam damage, defensive, apps, offensive glass canon apps, etc... Ideally you'd be able to conveniently swap between all these like most action rpg games with this level of customization (like monster hunter). All in all I still recommend Metal Bringer and perhaps this review has informed you enough to know whether or not this game will be to your liking. I hope AlphaWIng makes another game like this but bigger and better down the line and fixes all my complaints in their next entry.

Fun and stylistic

go into this game expecting a Diablo esque hack n slash with decent customization but a lack of content. Details which exist in the early game as limitations become alterable values which you can build a mech around. You can start the game with a mech that has an overheating issue and end it with a bullet spewing god who gets deadlier the hotter they get. A neat idea but a bit short.