This is one of those games that I really wanted to like since it looked 100% up my alley, but it's unfortunately just not that great. This game is about a high school rock band, and you're the drummer. And there are octopus aliens invading? And only the power of METAL can stop them. The sheer ridiculousness of it all feels right at home for a lighthearted rhythm game, and I love the art style and the game's presentation in general. Between concerts (ie battles against the aliens) you even get to do a very light life sim sort of thing where you hang out with the different members of your band and enjoy cute little skits. No drama at all for these scenes, just good vibes.

All of this sounds great, and the music itself is solid stuff too. But sadly Gal Metal falls apart completely in the gameplay department. There are a couple ways to attempt playing the drums. First, you can try waggling the joycon controllers, and relive the waggle-to-win glory days of the Wii era. Timing anything is a crap shoot though because the Switch only registers like 1 in every 3 waggles, and takes a couple too many seconds to register every second, seventh, and ninth waggles (or whatever). I could never get a reliable rhythm down, and it's not long before the game starts asking you to do fast-paced ones! Good. Luck.

You can also play with the touch screen in handheld mode, which is better since it gives you access to all the different parts of the drum set. But for whatever reason, even here it feels like many of my screen-taps don't register, and a third of my screen-taps register a half-second later than all the others -- so again, the rhythm is thrown off way too easily. Fortunately the game is extraordinarily lenient when it comes to scoring, so even if you mess up the beats many times in a single song you'll still defeat the aliens. But it feels like a very hollow victory, especially when the replay of your song starts and your little drummer girl struggles the whole way through.

Maybe some of you can manage to get some semblance of a rhythm down, but I found it too frustrating. Which is a shame, because this definitely had the potential to be a fun and quirky hidden gem. I hope the artist at least goes on to get another video game project some day.