Tears of Metal

I went into Tears of Metal expecting a breezy button-masher dressed in kilts. What I got was a game that killed me, repeatedly and without apology, then made me immediately queue up another run. That tension sits at the heart of what Paper Cult has built here: it wears the approachable surface of a musou brawler but underneath it runs a proper roguelite with genuine bite. The loop is tight. You pick a hero, load into a node-based overhead campaign map, and route across three acts through battles, merchant stops, charm rewards, and NPC events while a climbing threat level stacks harder modifiers onto every upcoming fight. Combat itself is third-person hack-and-slash at musou scale, meaning dozens of soldiers shatter under each sweep of your weapon, with powerful captains and bosses breaking up the horde work. The roguelite layer comes from emblems, eight families of them, each with branching tier upgrades that let you chase wildly different builds run to run. Spread toxic flames, chain glass shards between enemies, summon self-homing spirits, or lean into explosive timed blasts. Pair that with over a hundred artifacts and persistent village meta-progression between campaigns and there is genuine build depth here, not just the illusion of it. What does need work is the difficulty curve in co-op: in two-to-four player runs, regular battles can feel almost trivially easy right up until a boss arrives and wallops the whole group, which suggests enemy scaling still needs tuning during Early Access. For co-op specifically, the news is mostly good. Up to four players can run the full campaign together online, and the moment-to-moment feel of coordinating horde clearance with friends is exactly as chaotic and satisfying as it sounds. There is no local split-screen, which is a genuine miss for the couch-crowd, so four drunk friends will need four copies and a group call rather than one TV. Technically the online side works well, with the main caveat being that large battles put real load on the GPU, so if you're hosting a four-player lobby on older hardware, dropping particle density is the first dial to turn. The game is also available on PC Game Pass day one, which lowers the barrier considerably for anyone already subscribed. The presentation earns its own paragraph. Paper Cult's hand-drawn ink-and-marker art style gives the whole thing a graphic-novel energy that stands apart from anything else in the genre. The Highlands, The Mire, and The Scar each bring distinct handcrafted medieval environments, from menhir fields to pitch-black graveyards, and the bagpipe-metal soundtrack is the kind of thing that makes you turn the volume up rather than down. The Scottish theming is not a costume layered over a generic musou, it genuinely shapes the game's personality. The one rough edge worth flagging right now is the absence of a mid-run save. Runs can clear an hour when things are going well, and losing progress to a crash or an emergency logout stings harder than any boss. Paper Cult is already focused on balance and bug fixes in the weeks following launch, so this feels like a solvable problem, but it is the most friction you will currently feel as a player. At 85% Very Positive across well over a thousand Steam reviews within its first week, the community verdict is already in. This is a strong Early Access foundation with a developer that shipped a complete three-act loop on day one and has a clear, short runway to full release. If you want a game that rewards emblem theorycrafting and battalion management as much as it rewards mashing through a thousand soldiers, Tears of Metal is ready for you right now.

Riley · Scout Team

Sports & racing

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