Metal Kill: The Underworld featuring suffocation, fear factory, cattle decapitation, threat signal

Tristitia Background Story

My operation into the underworld has uncovered limited intel about the commander of these forces. Its name is Tristitia, and it is a nine-foot-tall humanoid that wears torture gear on its head. Its name means “Sadness” in Latin – I should have expected something like that, since its henchmen seem to be identified as some kind of embodiments of the seven deadly sins. Sadness, sending a horde of insane, tortured souls to slay all the living. How poetic.

Tristitia apparently gained immense power here in the past century, finally learning to embody the sins and the souls of the damned in bodies which grow more natural-looking, and more bloodthirsty, with every kill. This explains why the most human-looking among them tend to be the most skilled and dogged warriors. Tristitia must have some further agenda than simple slaughter, according to our researchers back on Earth; with all of the world slain, who will be left to worship the sadness?

As I rest, I imagine the sadness of the underworld armies, their own bodies reminding them that life has rejected them, and that yet the living form is superior to the final, non-negotiable damnation of their souls. I think this must cause a vital madness in them, forcing them to embrace becoming things which they are not, in order to improve their prowess for slaughter. Caught between a rock and a hard place, a catch 22 engineered by the embodiment of sadness itself...

The apparent advantage of such a flaw is too obvious. There must be more to Tristitia's plan that this...

Game Overall Story

The year is 2084. The world has long forgotten any hope of living peacefully with itself. All nations have polarized themselves with hatred against each other, and war has erased all but the memory of the millennial dawn's hopes of peaceful utopia. Bloodlust and madness are cherished attributes in a society of constant readiness for aggression.

War had become a well-understood custom of all cultures, with most people seeing their first combat no later than age eight or nine, and their first fallen comrade even younger than that. But the events of the new year are not familiar, and defy apprehension by even the most widely-traveled and prudently-insane of our time. In recent months, the changing face of the war has shocked and horrified us in ways mankind believed itself too tough to ever feel again.

Warriors today remember decades ago, when special platoons carried technologies of utter destruction, roamed in traveling flanks, and obliterated tens of thousands with each precious and well-placed strike. These weapons of the 2050s enraged nature, and famine began to spread without apparent rhyme or reason as their use continued. In a brief change of the shape of the war, allies turned against allies to outfox the movements of these coveted prototypes, resorting to brief, small-scale nuclear exchanges to ensure the end of the megaplatoon's reign of obliteration. Advanced weapons factories and theoretical laboratories became the primary target of all sides, and black ops teams agreed to turn their focuses to their own factions, ensuring that all sides were safe from the threat of such munitions. Only the technologies built to detect such arms have been spared, and were soon fitted to spy satellites, forming a constant vigil against the buildup of such terror.

We kept intense watch on the wastelands created by the battles of the 50s and 60s. Last year, the satellites reported that the residual superweapon energies were beginning... to move. In pictures and in horror, we watched as they coalesced into subtle bubbles of energy, which then formed into distinct rank and file, and finally began to travel, marching, toward all the nearest cities. Within weeks, nothing lived in those places. The world had a new enemy. Satellite imaging showed a reality that none of us could believe until the first engagement that bore human survivors. The new enemy was an army of the dead.

They knew no fear, and held no ground. They poured through cities, slaughtering all where they stood, and continued on their way. They met human forces with shrieking and laughter, bearing upon their targets with the strength and determination of absolute zealots. The only successful encounters with this force have been reconnaissance missions of the most brief and avoidant kind.

Most of the world's armies are absolutely certain that their human enemies have built these monsters and let them loose upon the world. They continue to issue hateful messages to each other after each loss, increasing the global despair while the death tolls rise by some hundred thousand souls each day. Recon shows that the hellish creatures take on more advanced forms as they kill, as if their bodies were designed to reward them for battlefield success. At least 60 types of mutation and evolution have been documented, and theories suggest there are more that have yet to be witnessed by any survivor...

Meanwhile, the few divisions who've been forced back to their senses by the unexpected appearance of skeletons and zombies ambling over the world's cities, have come to believe that some other force is responsible for the new face of the war. You, a U.S. Marine Captain from Iowa, have slowly built an alliance of these units, spanning borders and politics unlike any body in the past hundred years. Your alliance has worked for the past months to produce a hopeful response to this otherworldly invasion. Your scientists have discovered and, via air-dropped probes, penetrated, the source of the incursion. As the probes crossed through the portals, they entered a vast indoor environment teeming with the armies of the dead, which the united force has dubbed “the underworld.”

Through trial and error, you have discovered 82 types of armaments that are effective against the underworld hordes. Little is known about the underworld menace, but it seems that the evolving skeletons that have overwhelmed the world are the weakest type of these creatures. It also seems that the underworld is now poorly defended, with almost all forces engaged on Earth. Against the protests of my men, I have prayed to our exiled Gods for guidance – and have become committed that I must be the first, solo wave of assault against the underworld. My mission is to find the commanders and creators of this army, and put a stop to the assault. The scientists believe they can learn more about the portals as I travel through the landscape, and hope to provide strategic supplies as I make progress in my war against hell itself.

I launch via air-drop at 2100 hours.