MetalHeart: Replicants Rampage Review

In the last year and a half, I’ve spent far too much time on the M3, commuting the forty-odd miles from my home to the office; in that time, in those twenty thousand-plus miles, I’ve seen the wreckage of plenty of crashes. We’ve all been there, crawling slowly past a car wreck at 10 mph, almost being unable to take your eyes off the mangled metal scattered over the carriageway. It’s captivating, yet horrifying all at once. Sometimes, you can’t help smile and admire the artistry with which a driver has somehow managed to get their Vauxhall Omega twenty-five feet up a 45 degree embankment at the side of the road, the car pointing completely the opposite way to the flow of traffic. “Good effort!”

This is what playing MetalHeart is like. It’s a Toyota Supra mashed into the central reservation, blocking the outside lane both ways and causing three hour tailbacks. You know it’s terrible, you know you shouldn’t laugh, you know that if you were involved with it, it wouldn’t be funny and would probably have been very painful. You know that you’re a bad person for deriving any kind of twisted enjoyment out of another person’s tragedy.

There are so many things wrong with MetalHeart, it’s difficult to know where to start. It’s clearly inspired by the Fallout series, which is no bad thing in itself, and is in fact one of the game’s stronger selling points. The problem is that they’ve made such a hash of it. Visually, the game is about as strong as a 2D isometric RPG can get. The landscapes are quite finely detailed, but the design is quite lazy, with some definite evidence of cut-and-paste taking place, particularly in the urban areas. So, whilst the game is initially graphically impressive (in a retro kind of way), things soon become very generic. There is also very little interactivity with the environment. You don’t have the feeling of being able to just wander and explore, like in Baldur’s Gate II for example, and this isn’t helped by some erratic pathfinding, either. This lack of interactivity is even more evident within buildings, where you’d normally expect to be able to see what’s lying around on desks, take a poke in storage crates, etc. There’s none of that. Some buildings that you can enter are pointlessly empty and you can’t do anything in them at all; which makes you wonder why they’re there in the first place.

The biggest problem, however, is with the script. MetalHeart was written by a Russian development team, and it shows. Not that I have anything in particular against Russians, but I’m fairly certain that this particular group of Russians didn’t have their translated script proof-read by a native English speaker. As a consequence, it makes about as much sense as Boris Johnson’s haircut. It’s littered with typos and some of the dialogue just plain doesn’t make sense. “Your life is not worth a pin!” Eh? And that’s one of the less nonsensical examples. You can sense the confusion of the voice cast, as they frantically ad-lib and deviate wildly from the script in front of them to try and inject some coherence into their performance.

Even worse, the main character, Lanthan, just isn’t likeable. In fact, he’s rather abrasive, stubborn and discourteous, at best. Early in the game, you’re confronted with a representative of the Empire who offers to help you and guarantee your safety and even give you a job. Lanthan (without giving you a dialogue choice) tells him to take a long walk off a short pier (except using much cruder language). He similarly goes out of his way to affront and swear at just about everyone he meets, in a very one dimensional way. He even pimps out his female partner, Cheris, to do some pole dancing (yes, I did say pole dancing) in a desperately ill-advised bar scene to raise some cash. You’re just queuing up to buy the game now, I can tell.

The story’s not much to write home about, either. You start the game having crash landed on the planet Procyon, and your task is to insult, sorry, quest your way to the local spaceport and get transport back to the Solar System. To do this, you need to contact Metal Heart, a resistance group who are about as popular with the Empire as you are. It’s pretty uninspired stuff, and the sub-quests are of similar quality: “kill this person”; “find a necklace I let fall down a drain”; “bring me something from a vendor”. Dear me.

If there are any positives to take at all, it’s that the interface is functional, without being anything special, and that at least the combat is well-implemented. Like Fallout, the game moves from real-time to turn-based during engagements with hostiles, and it works well. Line of sight is implemented in the combat model, which allows you to use cover and set ambushes, plus the ability to kneel or go prone with party members steadies your aim with ranged weapons and presents a smaller target to attackers, to boot. I actually found the combat more satisfying than that of Fallout 2, though that might not be saying very much, given how much of a snore-fest that was…

Overall, MetalHeart is badly flawed, with moderately good looks and pretensions of greatness. So then, not unlike that other great Russian export, Anna Kournikova. What? Was that too bitchy? Okay, maybe that’s a little hard on the game… In all seriousness, it’s hard to find much to commend: it does have that certain car crash value, in that you want to play it just to find out just how bad it gets. However, even for people as bad and broken as I am, you can only derive a fleeting thrill from watching the carnage. Before too long you’ll be glad it didn’t happen to you, and that you can just cruise away into the distance before it gets too painful to look at.