As you load up the game and get to the main menu you’re greeted with some heavy metal riffs, which, as you can tell by the title of the game, is the running theme, I’m already banging my head. EleMetals: Death Metal Death Match is a fast paced 2-4 player platformer, where you’ll chaotically try and be the last one standing. There’s 6 characters and 3 realms to choose from.

EleMetals: Death Metal Death Match is a fun party game for when you have friends over but too shallow for a long stay.

The characters themselves are designed with a cool demonic metal aesthetic as are the levels. The characters though looking different don’t really add any differences in play style and really the only thing separating them is the colour of their charged attack, which is a shame. It would have been nice to see them each have unique moves or abilities to differentiate them and fit various play styles. There’s 30 levels across the 3 realms, all full of platforming, traps and other ways to manoeuvre and down your opponents. After each level, the levels ramp up in difficulty too. Having this variety in level not carry across to the play characters is a little disappointing.

The fast and chaotic matches mean that each time you play it doesn’t out stay it’s welcome as some matches can be finished very quickly. You start off with 3 projectiles that you can fire one by one or charge for all 3. To reload you press and hold the headbang button to recharge but also making you vulnerable to attacks. If you do get hit you die but you can tap the headbang button to stop your soul from ascending to the top of the screen where you’ll be eliminated from the match and the more you die the harder that gets. There’s also a good mechanic with dashing to deflect projectiles but if I’m being honest, it was too chaotic for me to nail that down.

EleMetals: Death Metal Death Match feature image

EleMetals has the ‘fundametals’ down but sadly lacks key modern elements

Unfortunately this game suffers in an age where there’s a bit more variation to these kind of games. There is no online, it’s local multiplayer only, which is lovely to see the local play being kept alive, but in 2022 and to reach a larger audience, there should be some form of online play even if it’s just with friends.

The best part of the game is ultimately the music and sound design, crunchy riffs across the board with the sound effects that compliment the art design and those two things go together fantastically.

To sum up this review is that Elemetal: Death Metal Death Match is a fun little game you can play when you have friends over but I feel after about an hour you’ll be looking at what else to play and would definitely benefit from being on Xbox Game Pass. A fun game with local multiplayer but missing a few key tricks to give the game any longevity. I hope it get’s supported moving forward to add more depth to the game because it definitely has the potential in the gameplay loop and sound design.

2/5

Elemetal: Death Metal Death Match was reviewed on the Xbox Series X. It released on June 3rd also on Xbox Series S, Xbox One and Nintendo Switch.