Metal Garden

2025-11-30

Ah. Been a while since I played through something based off of a few words of feedback. I only have a vague recollection as to what prompted me to put this very game onto my list-to-play. It was a tweet by Hakita, creator of ultrakill, who did a short, single-tweet mention of the game, simply stating that it was good. I trusted him on the take and here we are.

Metal Garden is a first person shooter with a good balance of focus on every aspect of a game. That is to say, It strikes a nice balance between worldbuilding and mechanics, level design, visuals and plotline. And thing is, the baseline for each of these aspects here is set high.

I suppose I shall start off with a basic plot. It draws similar inspiration from [Lorn's Lure], in that the game takes place in a mega structure. You are a nomad, with the game starting off with you taking a smoke after realizing that you've just reached your vehicle's final resting spot. You grab your gear and emergency supplies and head out. Shortly after, you run into some enemies and a king. They, in their dying breath, tell you that they have finally found a hole in the megastructure. The rest of the game involves traversal through various parts of said structure, with the end goal being reaching the hole in question and leaving. There's more to it than what I wrote but I'm leaving the details deliberately opaque as to not spoil the entirety of this short game.

Gameplay-wise, Metal Garden strikes an unusual balance. You move ... slowly. All of your weapons have slow rates of fire. I would say that Metal Garden's gunplay feels a little like half-life 2, but slowed down by 20 percent. The enemies don't dodge your shots, engagements go from point blank to 500m max, and enemies are relatively few, but each can deal heavy damage. One thing i did enjoy, mostly at the start of the game, was the lack of ammo. Felt more fitting to the vibe of the entire game to always move into upcoming encounters on my last magazine. By the end, ammo was plentiful, however.

I would like to take a paragraph to point out that this game.. is not very hard. I picked the hardest difficulty it had to offer and I did not die once, only suffered 'injuries', i'm not even sure if it's possible to die in the game. Frankly between the various platforming sections and the slow gameplay, this game makes for a great introduciton to first person shooters to game-illiterate people.

I'd say that the best parts of the game lie in it's visuals, level design and setting. Metal Garden stands out in it's looks. It is very, very gray. Few modern games do that due to how much the look was shunned during the 2010s. Everyone got tired of the washed out colors in games of that time, and so the aesthetic died out over time. But, when not everyone is doing it.. I'd say that it can certainly be appreicated from time to time. The level design is also great. Like.. an entire game made out of just the best parts of lorn's lure. Though I will note that the levels certainly do not hit the breath taking scales of lorn's lure, but they do come close. I never realized how much fun a sniper battle could be in an industrial megastructure setting. I also have a soft spot for the UI they made for it. Kinda looks like the old CS 1.6 UI, which I love.

On a technical level, the game is excecuted well. Runs great on linux, zero lag on my system, controls rebound fine, so on and so forth. One odd thing of note is that Metal Garden is made on the Unreal engine, yet it pulls off a look and feel of an id-tech 3 based game, which is impressive considering how easily developers tend to leave telltale signs of their engine of choice, especially for Unreal-based games. (see: amid evil, talos principle II, )

I will note that the AI is too basic for this game. Sometimes it can't even walk around objects, and the enemies are also pretty easy to dodge and juke. A simple F.E.A.R. style flanking system and some voicelines would've done wonders. My only other complaint here is that the game is too short. I want to play more of it.

Go play this. it's like 7 bucks on steam at the moment.