Among the custom mech gameplay, and low price, Metal Bringer's art style caught my attention. I was impressed when what looked like a pixel art game had a 3D perspective - as the camera in the trailer rotated to show a 3D Perspective. A simple N64-esque 3D anime style, but with an excellent pixel shader effect that made me think it was hand drawn pixels until I saw the perspective change. Metal Bringer also uses Raytracing, meaning some light realistically changes despite being a pixel art game.

The player starts with a few options to customize your Labor for Head, Body, Weapons and color. This customization (along with the ones for Arms) reminds me of games like CladunX2 and 3D Dot Game Heroes, which all use simple, blocky art styles along with a multitude of parts and color selection. You start with some basic weapons, that have limited destructive power. Enemy Labor are relatively easy to kill, but come in large numbers and have a variety of weapons. Soon you find scripted fight between 4 Arms piloting Labor that kill each other leaving Arms parts behind. This is where the game teaches you how to pilot mechs and reassemble them on the fly using the Ride (Bottom Half), Head (Top Half), and Left and Right Weapons. Some Heads behave differently, such as allowing a secondary set of weapons, having an extra weapon the head, or just being a "tank head" with a cannon, but the majority of Arms seen in the game handle much like the Gundam style mechs you see in most mech fiction.

Combat gameplay is easy. Your Labor can dash, jump, auto aim attack with left or right weapons. Depending on your weapons and build, you "akimbo style" both weapons if they are the same type of ranged weapon, but generally you can only use one of them at a time. Melee weapons have simple combos and can be charged up to some sort of spinning or lunging attack. Some weapons have weird attack arcs that are inaccurate, so you have to attack at unconventional angles or timing. All actions uses Energy and can also cause you to overheat. Overheating will damage your labor and make it enter a "dizzy" state where you can still move, but can't attack while your energy recovers. The same can happen while you're piloting Arms, but weapons can also be damaged and destroyed in combat, along with any part of the mech. Enemies occasionally drop disks called Apps, which are effectively upgrades of all kinds, such as enhancing various defenses and attacks, granting extra jumps, improving health or energy restoration and modifying overheat/overcool mechanics, applying damage effects and loads more.

Apps are almost certainly the most important part of your build, and there are hundreds if not thousands of them. You have a limit of apps you can install, governed by the level of the attributes of your OS Tuning. Your Labor's Operating System is improved by levelling of skill usage and directly tuning it at base or after boss battles with Gigant Arms, unique large mechs, resembling creatures like nagas, gorillas, or giant heads. OS Tuning, repairing mechs, and analyzing Apps and Arms components for future runs cost D. Chips. D. Chips are prismatic white "coins" that come from enemies, achievements, and chests from Puzzles. Puzzles are an interesting anomaly - many of them were easy, some are challenging, and a couple seem literally impossible since you only have the ability to push or pull blocks, or punch colored orbs to change their color. Rice balls are the healing items that can drop from chests and some enemies, which also boosts your max HP and can be picked up by your assistant Labor bot named Bud. Bud can recover app disks and carry up to about 8 or so rice balls. Bud can be knocked around, but has infinite HP and is surely more help than harm.

Combat abilities is fairly basic - besides your carried or mounted weapons, you don't have any grenades, combat allies, or Ultimate abilities - just a standard/combo attack and a charged attack if the weapon has it. The excitement comes in the form of mass crowds of enemies, lots of bullets, explosions, damage numbers, and the ability to jump as the Labor or fly as the Arms. The difficulty balance is both the best and worst part of Metal Breaker. My first few runs ended in failure, but as I got better, the game felt manageable up until the third floor, where suddenly you encounter rooms chock full of a dozen or so mechs, all slashing and shooting bullets explosions, black holes, and deadly beams that combo you into oblivion. Worse off, some "doors" seem to infinitely spawn an additional enemy Arms or two after a few moments. This area feels insurmountable and at the time, reinforced that I needed to grind more failed runs until I have the Apps and Tuning to better handle the damage. That was true until after my 3rd or 4th time dying on said floor, the next run where I became overpowered The combo of my loot from past runs allowed me to install powerful apps and along with my Max leveled up "gun skills" and destructive mech that I modeled after the Doomslayer. The game near immediately turned from impossible to beat to impossible to lose - attacks that could freeze, burn, critical hit on first attack and cause explosions that could trigger other explosions. While my "Doomslayer" died, I built an even more powerful mech on the fly, making no any enemy being able to reach me before dying and wiping out EVERY enemy in the game including the final boss in 8 seconds or less. Speedruns in the Steam Community show players beating the game in 4-6 minutes thanks to overpowered builds. While fun, it was alarming to shift from "I'm not sure I can beat this!" to "I guess I won and done with the game now!"

Arms customization is arguably the best part of the game, allowing you to gradually customize up to 6 mechs based on parts analyzed from your previous runs. Customization of your Labor is fairly simple, but the depth is found in Arms customization allowing you to change the colors of individual groups of parts. Said colors dictates iis defense against similarly colored attacks and clever use of greyscale colors allows you to hide defense values in black, grey, or white. Presets and other apps can reduce, elimnate, or enhance the effect of color on your defense.