The recently released Metal Eden is one of the freshest and most mechanically interesting first-person shooters on the PlayStation 5. To learn more about how developer Reikon Games fine-tuned and innovated with the shooter, PlayStation LifeStyle caught up with brand director Jakub Izydorczyk. It’s now available on the PlayStation Store.

“An adrenaline-rush sci-fi FPS. A hyper unit Aska is sent on a suicide mission to rescue citizens’ Cores from Moebius, an orbital city turned into a deadly trap. Dive into cybernetic warfare, face the Engineers, and uncover the secrets of Metal Eden,” says its official description.

PlayStation LifeStyle: The Armored Ramball is one of the coolest things I’ve seen in a game this year. It’s such a fun way to add variety to the combat as well. What did the team find most interesting about that mechanic?

Jakub Izydorczyk: What excited us most was contrast. The Ramball form feels almost like a different genre — sudden, heavy, destructive — compared to the precision and fluidity of regular combat. It lets the player crash through tightly choreographed fights and just wreck things, but only in moments we’ve designed for that energy. We originally tried making it available everywhere, but it wasn’t satisfying in open spaces — it lost its punch. So we focused on sections where it could hit hard, burn bright, and leave a mark.

I adored Ruiner and its art style. Metal Eden has a cybernetic, sci-fi theme to it. What draws the team to these violent future settings?

We’re drawn to sci-fi because it allows for total creative freedom — visually, thematically, structurally. It lets you build entire worlds from scratch, then explore what happens when they start to break down. There’s something deeply compelling about contrasts: precision and decay, machine logic and human emotion, order versus entropy. Sci-fi gives us a canvas where those tensions can exist not just in the story, but in the architecture, lighting, sound, UI — everything. It’s not about the future being violent. It’s about the future being designed, and asking what happens when that design starts to fracture.

One of my favorite aspects of Metal Eden is the movement and the freedom that it gives you in combat. How was it iterating upon that gameplay aspect to get it where it currently is?

It took a long time — and a lot of rebuilding. ASKA’s movement was the heart of the game from day one, so everything had to support it: level layouts, AI behavior, visual clarity, even VFX timing. When the player wall-runs, grapples, dashes, or uses the jetpack mid-fight, it has to feel intentional — not floaty, not chaotic. That meant tuning animations to the frame, refining collision everywhere, and constantly stress-testing flow. But once it clicked, it unlocked everything. The combat doesn’t work without that sense of freedom.

This is also a much larger and more ambitious game than Ruiner. This is tricky, as sometimes developers can get overambitious. How was Reikon able to find the right amount of growth in terms of scale and scope?

We definitely overreached at times — that’s part of growing. But we also made some hard, smart decisions. The biggest one was shifting from Unreal Engine 4 to Unreal Engine 5 mid-development. That gave us access to tools that helped us scale responsibly — especially around lighting, asset streaming, and performance on consoles. We also stayed extremely focused on gameplay feel. Whenever scope threatened to pull us off-track, we’d return to the core: movement, combat, and tone. That discipline kept the ambition grounded in experience.

Early feedback has been so positive. What’s been most rewarding about finally seeing Metal Eden in players’ hands after this dev cycle?

Seeing players move through the world like we imagined — that’s been the best part. Not just the big moments or set-pieces, but how people are connecting to the atmosphere, the mechanics, the mystery. Metal Eden is layered — it doesn’t explain itself right away — so watching people engage with it on their own terms has been hugely rewarding. 

Thanks to Reikon Games’ Jakub Izydorczyk for taking the time to talk about Metal Eden.

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