METAL THUNDER STEAM DECK PERFORMANCE TEST

Written by: Daniel Ainsworth

Metal Thunder is an early access title from Dumbbell Games released in November 2024, in which you get to live out the power fantasy of being the gunner of an AC-130 gunship. Those who remember playing the “Death From Above” mission in Call Of Duty Modern Warfare will likely recall raining fire and unleashing hell on their enemies from the skies. Metal Thunder aims to capture that same essence, but with a twist! This is a rougelite with randomisation and modifiers brought into play as you level up throughout your runs.

You can choose a starter weapon in the armory and begin a mission tasked with defending an objective on the ground whilst you circle from way up above. New weapons, upgrades and ground support options become available the longer you can survive. The waves of enemies keep coming and you as the gunner have to make on the fly decisions as to which perks you’ll opt into. You may select to unlock an increase to reload speed, splash damage, fire rate. You may decide to add an additional cannon to your arsenal with alternative shells being fired providing different levels of destruction. You could decide to deploy tanks or infantry units outside the base you’re defending. Whatever it takes to complete the mission. Currently the campaign is under development and so players opt into the survival mode and choose one of the unlockable missions to test your skills, holding the objective for as long as possible.

Current compatibility for the game is marked as unknown, but I’m happy to report that Metal Thunder runs really well without any tinkering. The frame rate was consistently above 80 which is great to see, although the game isn’t too graphically intense so it’s hardly one you’d expect to put too much strain on the system. Battery performance was also strong with my OLED Steam Deck giving me estimated play times of around 5 hours. There are some early access title / optimisation quirks for example needing to use mouse input from time to time (usually to back out of a mission fail into the main menu and begin another run) or in my opinion a difficult to read UI when browsing around the in game menus, but this is a game I feel will easily get updated to be fully verified on Deck in time and the game is perfectly playable on it’s current state.

Metal Thunder is currently available for £9.29 which will increase in price as it leaves early access with more content and polish to come.