This Is How Democracy Dies
It’s a strange objective that Dumbbell Games have set for themselves with Metal Thunder, creating a roguelike where you can’t be harmed in any way. But such is life when you’re the gunner on an AC-130 gunship, and your enemies are all little white blobs on the thermal image in front of you. It’s a difficult game to measure my feelings about: It feels fun to play, for one. Yet in the back of my mind, it’s hard to shake the feeling that what you’re doing is, in a word, icky.
This may have something to do with the fact that Donald Trump recently posted a thermal imaged video of “Houthi rebels” being bombed, which many are speculating was actually just an Eid gathering. It may be the fact that I saw Collateral Murder when I was too young to do so. It may simply be the fact that, as I noted in the introduction, you are insulated from any harm. It makes me wonder whether there’s a drone-strike roguelike on the horizon.
Survival of the Flyest
Metal Thunder itself takes evident inspiration from the “Death From Above” mission in Call of Duty 4. There’s no campaign (as of yet); instead, you have a Survival mode, which places you and your armaments against waves of enemies attempting to take over an objective. In the first mission, it’s a base; in the second, it’s a radar dish, and so on. As you kill enemies, you level up, getting access to new weapons and the ability to spawn allies to help you. The weapons include everything from the 102mm howitzer to white phosphorous, because what’s a game about an AC-130 without the ability to commit unspeakable violence. Your allies range from infantry, who, in my experience, have a survival time measured in seconds, to tanks and APCs.
Each time you level up, the game gives you three rewards to choose from, and I have to believe that they are truly random. Sometimes, you’ll get a great reward, a decent one, and an okay one. Other times, you’ll just get three okay ones. As the rolls can essentially gate your progress through the game, it’s easy to feel very whelmed by your upgrades. If you get bad rolls several times in a row, then your mission may as well be called off.
Big Booms, Low Impact
It’s frustrating, because when the game works, it really works. The AC-130 simulator (in the loosest sense of the word) is something of a microgenre on Steam at the moment. Just from a casual search, you have: Angel of Death, Project Gunship, AC-130 Gunship Operator, and Ghost: AC-130 Close Air Support. Metal Thunder is a lot less concerned with seeming at all realistic, and that’s to its credit. There’s no interactive cabin, for example—you just have a view through the cameras and an array of big booms to play with.
It’s a spartan experience at the moment, but that’s fine—it’s in early access after all, and I feel that there’s definitely fun to be had. Taking out multiple tanks with a JDAM is always going to be a thrill, no matter how you slice it. But there’s a certain piddliness to the weapons that I have a real problem with.
The 102mm howitzer shouldn’t hit a nearby building like a pleasant breeze on a warm day. It should level buildings within a certain distance, but here, buildings are indestructible. This is the case with your men as well—friendly fire is resolutely turned off, so despite the AI chatter sometimes saying “danger close!” it’s all a bit meaningless. The chunkiest problem of all combines this with AI behavior and game design: Enemies sometimes run behind a building that you’re defending. You can’t shoot through the building, and you also can’t tell your pilot to move to another location, so they’re effectively invulnerable until you slooooowly rotate your way around, by which time you’ll probably have lost the mission anyway.
Punishingly Tough
Metal Thunder is an incredibly punitive game at times. Enemies don’t come in waves, just in constant streams, rivers of men and materiel that would put most military superpowers to shame. If they get inside the radius of your objective, a countdown starts, and it’s incredibly fast. If you happen to be reloading your heavy weapons and there’s a tank inside your base, you’re done. I don’t expect the game to be easy—that wouldn’t be a roguelike experience in any way, but I do expect some fairness. Fundamentally, roguelikes should be fair, with the same rules applying to you and your opponents, but here, it feels incredibly unfair to get bumrushed to defeat because your JDAMs need two calendar months to reload.
You can ameliorate this with the game’s persistent upgrade system. All missions, whether successes or failures, grant you points that you can spend on permanent upgrades. These include faster reload times, increased damage, and the ability to launch multiple rounds per shot. This can get entertainingly silly at times, seeing you launch five 45mm shells at once, hammering down like God’s just spotted something annoying and now he’s really got a nark on. Yet, once again, it feels a bit too punitive. Prices are high, and the points that you get, even from completing a mission, don’t allow for more than a handful of upgrades.
Final Thoughts
I did have a lot of fun with Metal Thunder, at least when the RNG gods smiled upon me and I wasn’t left choosing between three mediocre upgrades, none of which would save my airborne ass. Unfortunately, the game is all too inconsistent to wholeheartedly recommend.
I hope that Dumbbell Games is able to hone the current experience into something more balanced and invariably entertaining, as there are moments where it all clicks together—the spark of genius shining through, igniting the shell’s cordite, and propelling the game forward. I’d also like to see it potentially explore avenues outside of a modern warfare setting, as this would significantly cut down on the ick factor that inevitably comes with playing a reflection of something we see on TV every day. As of now, I can’t recommend Metal Thunder, but I would suggest keeping track of it to see where it goes from here.
Score: N/A
Metal Thunder, developed and published by Dumbbell Games, is out now in early access for PC and Mac (Steam). MSRP: $10.99. Version reviewed: PC.
Disclaimer: A review code was provided by the developer. Given the game’s early access status, we have elected not to provide a score.
Joe is a games critic and English literature graduate who knows far too much about video games and critical theory. He once wrote a Derridean reading of the animal masks in Hotline Miami. You can find him on Twitter @jchiverswriter.
