There's always been something endearing about Metal Slug. While its contemporaries like Contra ramped up the aliens and body horror, Metal Slug leaned more toward comedy, mixing its signature running action with comically overbuilt machines, cartoonish villains, and silly cliché casting. action hero.
While there have been a few spinoffs over the years, Metal Slug Tactics is the series' first foray into turn-based strategy, and it comes with a roguelike twist. It's a generally successful mission thanks to clever gameplay and maintaining the silly charm the series is known for, although some outdated tropes and too much of your success beyond your tactical control prevent this from being a total victory.
Tactics moves the long-running side-scroller onto an isometric grid, and the pixel art-inspired models do a great job capturing the look and feel the series is known for. Everything from the iconic POWs to the titular Metal Slug tanks themselves look exactly like the original series translated into 3D. The isometric battlefields are littered with terrain, buildings, foliage, and other varied scenic elements that feel right at home, and the bosses are exactly the kind of over-engineered machines you'd expect.
An individual mission drops your squad of three soldiers onto a small battlefield, as you take turns moving, attacking, and unleashing special abilities. An additional problem is the possibility of performing timing attacks. If a member of your team hits an enemy and another teammate has them lined up and in range, they will also execute an attack. A single shot usually isn't enough to take someone down, so learning how to set them up makes a big difference. It's also extremely satisfying when you set up a cascade of synchronized attacks for each character over the course of a turn, clearing enemies off the board or dealing massive damage to one of the massive end-of-region bosses.
Your heroes aren't as disposable as the soldiers and vehicles in Advance Wars, nor is it as disastrous if one of them falls in battle like the classic Fire Emblem. Downed units can be brought back mid-mission using a limited amount of revives. Alternatively, everyone is raised to full health at the end of a level, making the risk/reward calculation of trying to meet your goals while understaffed exciting.
The cast of main characters is very entertaining. You start with three of the nine potential heroes available, including longtime Sluggers Marco and Eri. More characters usually unlock as you complete races, and it's great to see how Tactics even calls upon characters like Clark and Rolf from sister series Ikari Warriors. Each hero has a unique mix of weapons, abilities, and passive bonuses, making it exciting to experiment with different team compositions. Marco's gun may not do as much damage as Rolf's knife, for example, but sometimes it's better to hit distant targets from behind cover.
Abilities are tied to adrenaline, which builds up primarily based on how many spaces you move through in a given turn. This also increases your defense, allowing you to avoid taking damage. These combine to encourage playing aggressively rather than slowly advancing one tile at a time. At first, the abilities are quite modest, such as Fio moving a single unit across a small number of spaces. However, as you progress through a run, you frequently gain access to additional abilities as post-level rewards. Taking a few extra steps in a turn becomes much more appealing when you can deliver a powerful area-clearing airstrike at the end of the turn.
Each level has a primary objective and a secondary objective. You must complete the first to advance, while the second, often consisting of challenges like winning in a certain number of rounds or avoiding taking damage, grants an additional reward. If you fail to complete the main task or your entire team is wiped out, your run ends in failure and you are sent back to base camp to regroup and start again. It's a tried and tested formula that generally works well here, although not all missions are created equal. Eliminating four specific targets in a limited number of turns is fun. However, escorting a slow NPC to an exit on the other side of the battlefield is not.
When you visit a region, you're taken to a Mario World-style world map connecting levels with paths. You can see what rewards are available in each of them, although only three tiers will be immediately accessible. If you have your eyes on a specific prize, such as strategic assets that allow you to bring in ultra-powerful single-use consumables like Metal Slugs, you may need to chart a deliberate path, which encourages a little thought before diving in. in action.
Completing three levels summons the region's boss, and these fights are by far the most interesting and intense challenges in Tactics. Each combines a massive health pool with unique mechanics and endless waves of cannon fodder to keep the pressure on. Nothing in the standard missions really prepares you for hiding to avoid explosions from a giant level-wide robot snake, or jumping from barge to barge as you fight a massive warship. They set just the right tone, tough but exciting, and are a great palette cleanser between standard missions.
The missions are difficult enough that completing each level for the first time feels like an accomplishment. Similar to other roguelikes, the first full wipe (which took me about 10 hours) is not the end. On the contrary, it opens a new phase which focuses more on What you do it in an individual race, nicely adding an extra element of strategy as you master the basics, with additional optional bosses mixed in.
It would be nice if the regions themselves were more varied. Technically there are four zones, but two are deserts. Each has unique enemies and quirks that set them apart, like the sewers in the urban area that allow you to move quickly, but given that you'll be going through the levels multiple times, it starts to get a little stale after a few cycles.
Each area mixes a unique assortment of enemies with different attacks and behaviors, which does a good job of making each one distinct. However, it seems high time to remove some of the recurring racial tropes. There's really no need to put a turban on an enemy and make him brandish a saber if you're in a desert, nor do you need to hand out spears and masks and call the people you're fighting in the jungle “Natives.” ”, even if they introduced themselves. in previous Metal Slug entries.
There's a lot of randomization in each game, so much so that it often feels like the chances of success are determined more by luck than by tactical decisions. You can select which region to make your foray into, but from there the levels, objectives, and rewards are reshuffled with each attempt. If luck is on your side, you will have powerful upgrades and abilities readily available in easy levels. However, if fate is against you, tasks can seem impossible. It's frustrating when a promising race ends early because you need to take out a heavily armored truck before it escapes and you don't have the firepower to do so. It's especially terrible going into a boss fight knowing, given the equipment you have, that you're almost certainly doomed.
This would be less of a problem if the incremental improvements you could get were more significant. Metal Slug Tactics focuses on earning money to add more loadouts and abilities. Equipment determines your starting weapons and abilities, adding more but not necessarily better options. Purchasing abilities adds them directly to the pool of potential upgrades after leveling, meaning that taking advantage of these again depends largely on luck, and there are only a few abilities to add per character, so after a few rounds it's hard to feel like anything you do makes a difference. It's a tough pill to swallow when other roguelikes like Hades make every run, successful or not, count by progressing you toward persistent weapon upgrades.
Metal Slug Tactics does a great job of capturing the look and feel of Metal Slug and reimagining it as a turn-based strategy roguelite. The way its strategic elements combine adrenaline-fueled abilities and synchronized attacks makes for exciting and intelligent combat. It's a shame that a successful run depends so much on luck, whether it's a favorable mix of missions or good rewards and upgrades. This, along with uncomfortably outdated enemy designs, are unforced errors that limit the advancement of this otherwise successful army.