ReichCon Games follows up Ruiner with Metal Eden, launching September 2nd on Xbox Series X|S, PS5, and PC after a short delay for polish. Built on Unreal Engine 5, the game trades cyberpunk style for a brutalist future. The player steps into the role of Aska, a hyper unit designed to recover humanity’s trapped consciousness cores while questioning her own existence.
The story begins in Moebius, a massive orbital city suspended above the planet’s surface. Controlled by engineers and overseen by the enigmatic Overseer, Moebius represents both humanity’s greatest achievement and its downfall. The city has been corrupted by erosion, leaving billions of trapped cores inside a secure sector known as Hive. Guided by Nexus, an equally mysterious voice, Aska faces the relentless Internal Defence Corps (IDC), tasked with stopping her at all costs.
Propaganda from the Overseer brands Aska as a threat to humanity, creating uncertainty around her mission. Is she humanity’s savior or the weapon that destroys it? The narrative leans into psychological tension, blurring the line between hero and antagonist as Aska searches for answers about her identity, purpose, and mortality.
Core Mechanics and Combat Options
The free demo showcases Metal Eden’s intense first-person combat, combining fluid mobility with layered resource management. Aska can extract cores from unarmored enemies, consuming them to recover health and unlock a devastating super punch. Alternatively, she can weaponize cores as explosive projectiles, wiping out clustered threats.
Cores degrade quickly after extraction, forcing real-time decision-making between immediate recovery, aggressive offense, or strategic throws. This balance deepens as cooldowns and upgrades come into play. Players can enhance core usage by extending explosion radius, triggering chain blasts on extraction, or regenerating armor on consumption. These upgrades allow each build to feel distinct, rewarding both precision and experimentation.
Weapons can be enhanced using dust, a separate in-game currency that unlocks alternate firing modes and improves damage scaling. For example, the pistol gains a laser-charged shot mode, consuming additional ammo but significantly boosting output. Combining weapon upgrades with core-powered abilities creates a flexible toolkit suited for varied playstyles.
Weapons, Abilities, and Upgrades
Aska’s arsenal includes a regenerating SMG, hard-hitting shotgun, Tesla gun, and an alternate-fire assault rifle capable of freezing enemies. Each weapon feels distinct: the shotgun delivers heavy stopping power, the Tesla gun chains electricity between nearby targets, and the rifle’s freeze shots create crowd-control opportunities.
Advanced movement is central to combat flow. Grappling hooks, zipline transitions, jetpack wall runs, and double jumps make verticality a critical part of level design. Abilities like the armored ram ball add devastating melee options, enabling charged collisions that electrify multiple enemies. Progression feels rewarding, as upgrades can increase extraction distances, reduce cooldowns, and amplify ability synergy.
These systems come together to make Metal Eden highly adaptable. Whether leaning into explosive offense, mobility-heavy speed runs, or tank-like durability, the customization options ensure each player shapes their own approach.
Comparisons and Release Outlook
Metal Eden’s pacing evokes similarities to Ghostrunner thanks to its stylish traversal and moment-to-moment flow, but it diverges with more deliberate, tactical combat. While the roguelike mechanics hint at influences from Returnal, this is a linear single-player campaign without randomized progression loops.
September’s release window is stacked, with Hell is Us, Kronos: The New Dawn, Demon X Machina, and Titan Scion arriving around the same time. Despite the crowded schedule, Metal Eden’s core-ripping mechanics, layered upgrades, and brutalist aesthetic set it apart. If ReichCon Games delivers on the demo’s promise, Metal Eden could become one of the most talked-about shooters of the year.
