Metal Slug is a niche action side-scroller with a reputation for its art style and tough-as-nails gameplay. Truly a quarter-eater, Metal Slug takes the edge off wartime horrors with its approachability until you get a few levels in. Eager to experience the same in a strategy RPG format with Metal Slug Tactics, I quickly suited up and thrust myself into the foray.
Not exactly known for its storytelling, players won’t find much motivation beyond “see enemy, fight enemy.” Long-time series villain Donald Morden is at it again, and he’s after the nefarious World Government (that’s who you fight for, by the way). With some cheeky commentary, players interact over comms with one of the game’s several “bombshells” and eventually have opportunities to engage in sidequests to add some context and flavor. Surprisingly, I found some character building between runs as companions banter briefly for a serious moment. The writing’s not bad here, but so short-lived and infrequent that it’s hard to get attached.
What makes the storytelling even harder to get attached to is the misleading context in the sidequests. For example, I had the opportunity to intercept a convoy that was headed to the jungle early on. My comms specialist informed me that I should go to the jungle to seize the materials. When I went back to the world map, a seemingly unrelated territory had a flashing beacon over it, while the jungle had no icon over it. I went with the writing and invaded the jungle, but the sidequest disappeared with no progression. Guess I was supposed to follow the map icon and invade the desert. Oopsy.
Setting aside small grievances, Metal Slug Tactics is a standard strategy RPG. Runs play out in roguelike fashion with random level-ups including traits and skills, and with hour- to two-hour runs. Isometric with a square-based grid, gameplay is intuitive and simple for anyone who’s played an SRPG before. Then again, the gameplay is intuitive and simple. Don’t expect any gloss or complex inner workings. If that’s your speed, you’ll love it, but veterans of the genre may be left wanting.
That said, expect several status effects and abilities that may contribute to the strategy. Metal Slug Tactics is by no means easy. Though, even with all of the abilities and buffs, gameplay feels fairly samey across runs with little to separate the cast of characters besides affinity toward a gameplay style. For example, some characters favor moving allies or enemies, while others specialize in melee, explosive area-of-effect, or powering up after participating in synchronized attacks.
Although nothing new to the SRPG landscape, Metal Slug Tactics emphasizes combos. If an attacking character hits an enemy in an ally’s view, that ally will contribute with their primary weapon. This frequently means the difference between a kill and an enemy who’s going to get a turn to chunk down your team. On the other hand, you may not care because your team has accumulated a bunch of dodge by being reckless and running head-first into the enemy hive.
This might be the most thrilling aspect of Metal Slug Tactics: movement means dodge, which is essentially defense. By running in a straight line or jumping over chasms, characters gain flat damage reduction (dodge). In most SRPGs, cautious gameplay wins the day, but in Metal Slug Tactics, holding back for too long could jeopardize your team’s defense and ability to efficiently close the mission out before things get too wild. In several cases, a big attack can be mitigated down to nothing or almost nothing by doing the exact opposite of what your instincts tell you. This can keep missions feeling breezy and active.
Every mission has a different objective, but they all feel slightly similar. Escort an ally to an exit tile, kill all the enemies, destroy an enemy convoy before it reaches its destination, kill specific enemies, and eventually take out a boss after completing three missions in a region. Fighting the final boss is always an option after beating the first area, but players can build up skills and abilities by going to another location with its own theme of enemies (that don’t feel too different from the others). Choosing a mission within a location can grant different rewards, such as a mod for a weapon, currency to shop after completing an area, bonus experience points, extra ammo for characters’ specialty weapons, and resurrection consumables.
Between runs, players may unlock new characters depending on what they’ve accomplished. Over time, players get access to new loadouts, new mods, passive abilities to unlock, and so on. To do this, players need to spend currency earned after a run, and the amount earned depends on how they did. Higher difficulty runs yield more currency and spice up the gameplay, as the basic difficulty required at the start can feel easy once you understand the systems.
While we received materials along with the review code explaining some bugs that may occur—presumably with the intent of correcting them before the game’s release—I feel like I have to inform you about some of the quirks. Chiefly, I don’t think enough in the game is explained, and the UI can feel clunky or difficult to navigate. The tutorial encourages us to highlight over colored text to learn more about different statuses and mechanics, but sometimes these pop-ups disappear in the process of trying to hover the cursor over them. The topography emphasizes elevation, which is easy to understand by hovering the cursor over the tile, but where the x- and y-axis fall isn’t always clear. Fortunately, the game lets players undo movement with ease, because I frequently, even after fourteen hours of gameplay, couldn’t line up my shots correctly. Or even tell the altitude, for that matter.
Now, you might think “fourteen hours of gameplay” is oddly specific, and the reason I mention “fourteen” is because my frames dropped considerably when I was engaged in a sidequest boss fight. I couldn’t play the game. Navigating around the map was slow, often resulting in me ping-ponging from one end of the map to the other with little input. Keeping in mind the game is likely to be patched, I imagine a problem like this will be remedied, though I tried a number of things on my end to resolve the issue, like restarting the game and my computer. Every time I loaded the save, I couldn’t navigate in the middle of the boss fight. A shame, because while I certainly have my grievances with Metal Slug Tactics, I was enjoying myself.
Metal Slug Tactics tends to play it safe while simultaneously encouraging players to not play it safe. With few bells and whistles, everything just feels slightly different, rather than a mind-blowing change in gameplay. Even in an old-school SRPG like Shining Force, characters feel starkly different from each other—except the centaurs—though in this title, everything just kinda runs together. It feels like Metal Slug because it looks like Metal Slug, and the sound effects help in that respect, but in no way does this game evoke frenetic joy like its forebears.
