Metal Dead

The Good
Metal Dead is a traditional comedy/horror point & click, with a great sense of humour and decent puzzles. If you don't mind a bit of cartoonish gore and some crude jokes in your adventure games, it should provide you with around 3 hours of solid fun. It first came out in 2011, as the very low budget brain child of the two australian developers behind Walk Thru Walls Studios and, despite said budget limitations, it completely embraces its crazy humour and oddball set of characters and ends up managing to both charm and entertain.

Immediately after your unlikely duo of metalhead heroes manage to crash their car right in front of what appears to be Zombie Central, everything turns from weird to weirder; including your protagonist Malcolm ending up with one of the funniest hint delivery systems in gaming history stuffed right into his pocket.

Any more story details will, I feel, take away from your enjoyment, but suffice to say that the writing is quite polished. The dialogues are successful in delivering both jokes and a sense of character, and the insane plot ends up holding your interest despite (or because of) its absurdity. There are some unexpected twists and turns to enjoy, plus a kooky cast of engaging folks to save - or escort to their inevitable comedic demise. And while much of the humour could qualify as crude or gross, it somehow still manages to hit the mark more often than not.

The puzzles are all inventory based and, to their credit, mostly logical (within the game's insane world, that is). I was actually impressed to see that almost all of them tended to be backed up by dialogue and built nicely into the story instead of distracting from it, a neat little immersion trick that many highly acclaimed adventure games still can't seem to pull off. The difficulty of the puzzles isn't very high, but some of them are quite clever nonetheless.

The Bad
There is something to be said about developers that succeed in making something this fun out of such a low budget, but you should still come to Metal Dead understanding that corners were (mostly gracefully) cut.

A couple of small bugs pop up here and there, though thankfully non of them are game-breaking. The low-fi metal music has some nice moments, but it sadly isn't anything to write home about. Which I have to admit is a bit unfortunate in a game that harkens back to a music genre – unless you want to tell me that metal is a lifestyle, in which case, hey, it's your life and I don't judge (and you're also probably right, now stop twisting my arm). At least the sound design had a bit more love, with some smart sound effects here and there. Finally, I'm sorry to be blunt here, but while the cartoonish art style may have character it is nonetheless very very basic – and on a technical sidenote, it expectably doesn't scale well in larger monitors. The animation feels cleverly fluid however, improving the overall effect.

The Bottom Line
Metal Dead is a fun little game, provided it finds the right audience that will appreciate its wacky sense of humour. It held its own for me even after a couple of replays over the years and was entertaining every time, which is really much much more than one can expect from such a small, linear old-school adventure game. The highest praise I can give it is that it serves the genre well, and deserves a place in its history.