Metal Head puts the player into the cockpit of a combat robot and sends it to clear city streets of enemy machines. It's a first-person action game in a fully polygonal environment, where you walk between building blocks, search out targets according to command instructions, and progress through missions of increasing difficulty. The robot has a main weapon, secondary armament, and limited durability, so playing isn't just about pulling the trigger: you need to use buildings for cover, retreat to safety, and keep track of how much more the machine can take. Between missions there are short sequences that give the story a military-campaign framework. The machine's turning is deliberately sluggish, so the player learns to anticipate where the enemy will come from instead of relying on quickly spinning in place.
Technically, the game is one of the showcases of what the 32X could do beyond the base console: the environment is assembled from textured surfaces, which wasn't common on home consoles of the time, and movement is smooth enough to aim properly. The sprawl of the streets, however, is bought at the cost of detail — the city is rather schematic, and fog in the distance hides how far you can actually see. Sound underscores the machine's heaviness with booming footsteps and weapon blasts, while the music stays in the background and lets the noise of battle stand out. The overall feeling is slower and heavier than the brisk shooters of the era, and that's exactly the point.
At the time, Metal Head was rated as a solid demonstration of the add-on's capabilities, with reviewers valuing the technology more than the variety of missions. It contributed to the genre of mech action mainly by delivering the feeling of piloting a heavy machine on a console at a time when such games were scarce. Today it's a game for the patient — anyone who accepts its deliberate pace gets an atmospheric stroll through a concrete battlefield, while anyone expecting fast action will be disappointed. It's also interesting as evidence of where Sega's ambitions with the add-on were aimed: not toward another arcade port, but toward an original game built around what the new hardware allowed.
Game 8 of 15 for SEGA 32X
