Tears of Metal: Scottish Warriors, Roguelike Bones, and a Whole Lot of Blood

At the moment-to-moment level, Tears of Metal is a horde brawler with more structure than its Dynasty Warriors lineage usually bothers with. You have basic strikes, a heavier attack, a dodge, a guard, and special moves fed by a meter that fills as you fight. Characters are not interchangeable: one hero leans on commanding archers to soften a crowd before you reach it, another is built around close hand-to-hand pressure, and learning what each one actually wants to do is a real part of the early hours.

Runs are built across three acts, and the structure has a genuinely smart wrinkle. Individual levels come with mini-objectives, capturing a point or tearing down a structure, and each one you clear feeds a rising penalty bar. Push through more levels and you gain more rewards, but you also stack the deck against yourself, salting the final encounter with archer towers and extra elite enemies. It turns the usual roguelike question of how far do I push into a concrete, legible dial: speed versus power, with the boss getting meaner the greedier you are.

Builds come from pledging yourself to clans, which hand you randomized skill options as you go: smiting strikes, beams of light, poison, orbiting orbs of damage that do the fighting for you. When a run clicks, the power curve is enormously satisfying, the kind of snowball where you go from carefully spacing dodges to simply walking through a battlefield while your accumulated nonsense clears it for you. Battles are short, often only a few minutes, so a hot run has a lovely, brisk rhythm to it.

Co-op is where the game is clearly happiest. With friends, the pacing debate baked into that penalty bar becomes an actual argument, one player itching to rush the boss while another wants one more level for another upgrade, and the bloody-minded chaos of four people carving through a horde together papers over a lot of the repetition. It is loud, silly, and a good hang. This is the mode Paper Cult has tuned around, and it shows.

Solo is a harder sell, and this is the honest caveat. Alone, the early game is brutal in ways that read more as friction than challenge. Healing is scarce and fiddly, bosses hit like the game forgot you do not have three friends soaking damage, and the meta-progression that is supposed to smooth this out unlocks at a crawl. You can feel the shape of a good solo balance pass in the future, but it is not here yet, and grinding toward slow permanent upgrades on your own is the least flattering way to spend time with this game.

The deeper structural problem, the one experienced roguelike players will notice fastest, is variety. The clan skills and characters give you levers to pull, but runs start to rhyme sooner than they should. There simply are not yet enough distinct enemies, encounter types, events, or build-defining items to make the twentieth run feel meaningfully different from the fifth. The bones of replayability are here, the risk-reward pacing especially, but the content that would give those bones weight is still on the roadmap rather than in the build.

Where Tears of Metal never falters is presentation. The art direction is a bold, cartoony comic-book style, all thick shapes and high contrast, and it reads beautifully even when the screen is a churning mass of bodies. Blood is deployed with gleeful excess, spraying in stylized sheets that turn a chaotic melee into something closer to a moving woodcut than a realistic battlefield. It is a game that looks good in motion and, crucially, stays readable in motion, which is not a given for a genre built on drowning you in enemies.

The soundtrack is the standout, and it is not close. The music leans into a driving, heavy register that matches the violence swing for swing, and it does a huge amount of the emotional lifting, turning a routine skirmish into something that feels like a set piece. When a run is going well and the score is hammering along underneath you, Tears of Metal achieves a kind of gorgeous, brainless momentum that is genuinely hard to put down.

The whole package has a coherent identity, a specific vision of mythic, blood-soaked Scotland rendered as a stylish comic rather than a grimdark simulation. That confidence of voice is the strongest argument for taking the game seriously through Early Access. The craft on the surface suggests a team that knows exactly what it is making, which makes the thinness underneath feel less like a lack of talent and more like a matter of time.