The demo sells it well but it is a top down hack and slash action game. You have a chain combo, a special move, and a dodge roll or block depending on your weapon. The fundamentals are classic but strong. Enemy glows, you dodge or parry or jump, and most everything can cancel into that. There are three weapon types, and each weapon within that type has a unique active skill, but they are all terrible so you stick with the same stick and move combo. You have a throw which is the game's most interesting move, a slow attack that leaves you open but allows you to throw a small enemy into another, intercepting enemy bullets or otherwise interrupting other enemies' attacks.
The roguelite stuff is mostly in service of a linear campaign. You have to fight a bunch of robot bosses and each boss is at the end of a roguelite dungeon; so the game is a series of 40 minute long roguelite dungeons, but these dungeons have absolutely NOTHING interesting about them. They are mere excuses to pit you across dozens of combat rooms of the exact same enemies for each world. Your moveset is far too simple to carry the amount of mindless, context-free combat the game asks of you, and the level up perks and the rotating buff system called cores simply do not give you anything useful to play with. There is almost no growth during your runs. Roguelites exist because we accept a trade of awful random level design extending a middling amount of content in exchange for some variety in builds and situations and Metallic Child has almost nothing of the sort. Get a weapon that does more DPS than the starter, level up to max to collect your useless randomly assigned level perks, and maybe buy a revive chip and there is absolutely nothing else interesting except for fishing through random chests for health.
This is all bearable until you're about 8 runs in doing the same crap and suddenly this world's enemy set has a fat slow elite tier minion with too much health and too short windows between attacks who appears in EVERY ROOM and then out of simple boredom you start noticing that, yes, your robololi can cancel just about anything but a throw into dodge, but she is not especially quick nor smooth about it. And it's a shame because the bosses at the end of each world are, on average, genuinely good or at least fun. But you have to trudge through so much crap to get there that you're exhausted when you arrive and if they do beat you, you are looking at a 40 minute runback.
I must add that there is a 10 minute long minibike level that has about 3 minutes of worthwhile content so that is a mark against the game but anyone who has clocked multiple clears of any Platinum game can handle a weak minigame or two. There is a second minigame in hiding in there that I am not even going to touch.
Metallic Child knows what a good action game is like and has tried to get there and has a good core system with some decent fundamentals and a couple interesting ideas that could really shine with a bit of tweaking. But at the same time it is obvious this game is, at best, deciding to use the roguelite framework to pad out game length to stretch one tileset, and three or four enemies into several 45 minute worlds to make this game take several hours. ACTUAL Mega Man had more enemies than that and had the decency to end a level and throw a boss at you in about 4 minutes on a really long one. I just cannot go back to this game to finish it through all that padding.
As a postscript, note the devs have even put out some bizarrely game-changing patches in the post-release patch rush: They reduced the levels per world down from 4 to 3 (You were usually max level by the last chunk of level 3) and changed the core jackpot system to give you the buffs of a core jackpot even if one of them is a bad core. This feels like tweaks you would see in an Early Access game but they are making these serious changes in a game after release. I do not know where they are going with these updates, but clearly they believe in the game and are thinking about how to tweak its gameplay mechanics while they are thinking about the bugs, so no matter what I think about Metallic Child, you cannot accuse the devs of not caring about the gameplay.
