Metal Eden

Think of Metal Eden as an arena shooter that refuses to let you stand still. Aska moves like a parkour athlete with a gun: she dashes between cover, swings off gravity hooks, runs along walls and fires her jetpack to hang above the battlefield. Staying grounded is how you die, so the real skill is chaining those moves into a line that keeps you out of enemy sightlines while your shots land.

The enemy roster is built to punish lazy routes. Agile mecha soldiers close distance fast, heavier units soak damage, and elemental forces change how a room has to be played. Many encounters are protected by the Internal Defence Corps' shields, and ripping energy cores out of enemies is how you break them and tip a battle zone in your favour. That gives fights a rhythm: harvest, break the shield, then push.

When the gun is not enough, Aska can transform into an armoured ramball and charge through the machines, which is as much an escape tool as an attack. Between missions you develop your arsenal and combat capabilities, so later arenas assume you have the tools and reflexes to handle denser, nastier waves. It is a single-player campaign with Steam Cloud saves, 26 achievements to chase and DualShock pad support alongside mouse and keyboard.

Moebius hangs high above a planet called Vulcan, a brutalist monolith of a city built to shelter what was left of humanity. It was run by the enigmatic Engineers and guarded around a structure known as the Hive Tower. Something went badly wrong: the colony's people now exist only as consciousness locked inside reinforced storage Cores, and the city's own defences have turned on anyone who comes looking.

Aska is a Hyper Unit, an advanced android built for protection and recon and powered by a Phantom Core. She is sent in knowing the odds are terrible, with orders to recover the citizens' Cores, fight through the Internal Defence Corps and face the Engineers themselves. Along the way she digs into what project Eden really was, and why a home meant for humanity ended up hunting it.

Metal Eden is out now on Windows PC through Steam at US$19.99. Southeast Asian prices are RM62.90 in Malaysia, S$25.99 in Singapore, ₱794.30 in the Philippines, ฿474.38 in Thailand, Rp 214,000 in Indonesia and 333.000₫ in Vietnam. It supports 12 interface languages, including English, Japanese, Korean and both Chinese scripts, but no Southeast Asian languages. The minimum spec is demanding for its price: a Ryzen 7 3700X or Core i7-10700K, 16 GB of RAM and a GTX 1080 or RX 5700 XT for 1080p at 30 fps, plus 25 GB on an NVMe SSD, which is mandatory. DualShock controllers work with partial support.