Mech Shooter 'MetalCore' Is 'Titanfall' Meets 'Destiny' With an NFT Twist

MetalCore is an online shooter that combines Destiny's open world with the intense mech combat of Titanfall—but with an NFT twist that allows you to own your vehicles and infantry characters.

The aim in MetalCore is to complete missions, collect resources, and level up to craft vehicles, infantry characters, or mechs—a robot suit that helps you traverse the map and deal more damage. You can later mint these as NFTs via Immutable zkEVM, an upcoming Ethereum scaling network.

MetalCore makes an immediate impression with its impressive graphics and appealing mech play, although there’s still room for improvement—and given its current alpha testing state, there’s time for developer Studio 369 to smooth out the rough edges. I recently tried out the game’s prologue demo and Alpha 3 playtest to get a sense of how MetalCore is shaping up.

Watch our video preview below to see the game in action:

A polished prologue

MetalCore’s prologue is a 10-minute tutorial that nicely introduces you to the basics of the game. This is clearly the most polished part of the game that I played, and it showed promising signs as one of a growing crop of upcoming NFT games that look and feel like truly premium experiences.

The incredible graphics quickly grabbed my attention. MetalCore’s dystopian future world is beautifully presented despite the terrain having a naturally dull color palette. It's not only the world that stands out, though, and the range of weapons and mechs that I got a hold of all had equally impressive design and detail.

I played the game on max settings with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 Ti GPU and never encountered any noticeable performance issues. Even the music stands out—the theme song charged me up while I stomped around the world, mowing down enemies in my mech. 

When inside the mech, the gameplay is a lot of fun. I felt powerful, while some mechanical kinks make effective mech play feel skillful. It’s a satisfying experience.

But once I was on-foot outside of the ‘bot, that buzz wore off a bit. Immediately, the game felt less fun and I just wanted to get back inside a mech. The infantry gunplay isn't bad, but it’s a little one-dimensional and underwhelming when compared to manning a powerful machine.

Alpha annoyances

The Alpha 3 playtest unfortunately wasn't as sharp of an experience as the prologue, but early playable builds like this are bound to have some issues to work out.

You drop into the open world with missions to complete. I knocked out a couple objectives in the first 10 minutes of the event, but then the skill curve spiked so sharply that I couldn't complete another one despite a further 90 minutes of play.

What happened? Tasked with a mission to "Destroy the enemy mech,” I headed over to the area marked on the map and started unloading into the robotic foe. Quickly, its shields were depleted and only its health bar remained. I figured it would be an easy road forward from there, but I sunk six mags into the mech… and it still had a quarter of its health left before I was ultimately killed instead.

After dying countless times, I headed to the game’s Discord server in search of answers. Someone informed me that you need to be using your own mech to kill another mech—but the game never told me this. All I was told was that I had to reach level three to unlock what I needed. 

But after an hour-and-a-half of dying constantly with no clear direction, I couldn't bring myself to keep fruitlessly grinding and closed the game instead. I fear this will be the experience for a lot of players at this stage of development, as it was a sentiment echoed in the Discord.

Graphically, MetalCore is superb. The mechs feel great, and the weapons are also compelling in use. But in its current state, the game is extremely hard to get into as a newbie.

Still, this feels like the kind of issue that can be addressed through balance tweaks and clearer in-game directions. I’m still curious to see how NFTs and the concept of player ownership really impact the game, but with a bit more polish and refinement, MetalCore is shaping up to be a great game that could help lead the charge for Web3 gaming.