Harley Benton ST-20HH Active SBK

Old review will still be available, but here are my thoughts after spending a good amount of time with this beast:
To begin with, it has active pickups, you either gonna hate them or absolutely love them, for me, I fell in love with them!
The guitar is capable of some really good clean sounds if you adjust your amp and lower the volume of the guitar, the neck pickup (with my amp and setup) gave me a warm sound, bridge pickup is brighter and punchier, but the middle position got some magic to it.
Now for the metal part:
This guitar is made for metal, I don’t even know what to say about it. Its a killer guitar and the sustain onit is reaaaally good.
It’s perfect for any metal genre or rock and roll or any other genre for that matter (imo)
But, truth be told, you need to upgrade the tuners, maybe not straight away when you receive it, but you gonna have to upgrade them, as for the pickups, nope no need.
I received this guitar in a very poor condition, I think they sent me a B-stock. But by the looks of it. It may have been a F-stock?
The guitar was SUPER dirty
Fretboard dry as a bone, no polishing whatsoever
Frets were rough.
The volume knob was somehow floating above the body.
Bridge Humbuckers cover was melted? Weird marks on it like it was burned or something.
The cut for the nut was too wide and not straight.
Other than that. It worked.
I ordered a new one and sent this one back. So I’ll have to see how the new one will arrive.
Update:
This guitar is worth every penny! It sounds just amazing, plays super comfortably. It will need a simple set up out of the box to lower the action but that is normal for any guitar in this price range and even higher.
I absolutely recommend this guitar!

Bought this after not playing guitar for around 7 to 8 years, previously owned a number of guitars, but never anything you'd call "expensive". Bought this because the reason I started playing were the signature guitars of a certain man from Slipknot, and the price was very good - why not? Arrived in Croatia in 3 business days.

It amazed me that the overall quality of the guitar is much, much higher than the cheap strat copies of just a few years back. Everything is well set up, there are no build quality issues at all and the guitar looks very great to the eye. Frets are well-polished and the guitar needs just a bit of setting up right from the box. I feel like I got a very well-made instrument, especially considering the cost.

The neck is a bit thicker than I'd like, and the action came a bit high from the factory so I needed to adjust it, but other than that the neck is as strat-like as I remembered. Very easy to play, and looks very nice as well. The strings on it are interesting as well - they're .010-.046 which gives you the opportunity to tune a bit deeper right out of the box. I'd recommend buying a set of thicker strings if you plan on tuning to very low tunings of course.

The pickups are possibly the weakest part of the guitar, but they sound good if you don't go crazy on the gain and volume - probably the first thing that many people will replace, but for the price, I feel like they are much more than you could wish for. They can definitely sound very evil if that's what you're looking for - paired with the Neural DSP Gojira plugin it does sound surprisingly close to the real thing.

The fact that the battery compartment is routed already is a big plus, I feel like this makes me want to work on the guitar and modify it in the future.

In conclusion, it's not on the same level as the guitar it pays tribute to, and of course, it's not a perfect instrument. It is a very capable metal guitar, though, and a great platform for improvement. I also bought a replacement Graphtech Nut and some locking tuners for it - but will wait for these improvements when I change the strings.

All in all - amazing value not just for this price, I'd be happy to even pay 100€ more for it if it had a bit better pickups.