Metal Slug 2.5

[Ramya Bradbury]

Recyclingisn't just for environmentalists anymore. Add SNK Playmore to the list of groups trying to save the planet through salvaging, although what the developer is doing with Metal Slug XX is far from admirable. This Xbox Live Arcade addition to the venerable series of 2D side-scrolling shooters is actually a retread of Metal Slug 7, released for the Nintendo DS at the end of 2008, so be aware that you might have played this game before. And while the action is insanely intense and boasts a great co-op mode, like all good side-scrollers that trace their family trees back to the 1990s, the game is very short and the price is awfully high at 1,200 points.

If you know what you're getting, Metal Slug XX can be a hell of a ride. As in the rest of the franchise going back to its debut on the NeoGeo in 1996, the action is all about running and gunning. In both the seven-level solo/co-op campaign and the single-player-only combat training mode where you fight dozens of quickie one-off battles, you go up against the evil General Morden's regular troops plus his new cadre of future soldiers wearing helmets with antennas. Not that you need to care about any of this story stuff. All you have to understand is that you've got to kill everything in sight while jumping around and activating the odd platform.

Gameplay is identical to the previous Metal Slugs, which in turn ripped off earlier scrolling shooters, such as Contra. The only real difference between the Metal Slug series and its predecessors is a reliance on murderous tank vehicles called slugs. Whereas something like Super C forced you to mostly blast it out on terra firma, here you frequently get the chance to wreak havoc while driving tanks, mechs, and even giant mechanical ostriches. Difficulty in the campaign is just brutal when going it alone, even if you play on beginner with unlimited continues, because the levels are geared for co-op play either locally or over the smooth and lag-free Xbox Live connection. One enemy shot takes you out, so you can easily find yourself stuck in a rut of getting killed over and over again in difficult sections of levels.

Despite this level of difficulty, it can be hard to walk away, especially when buddying up with a friend to take on the campaign as a team in co-op. Everything gets a touch monotonous at times, because Metal Slug XX doesn't mix up enemy assault waves as much as it should, but the pace is always snappy even when the never-ending stream of enemy soldiers, tanks, mortars, and choppers makes you want to cry uncle. This is one of those nutso shooters that hit you with so much running and gunning that you never get the chance to think long enough to decide to stop playing. The game's brevity also keeps you going, as you can finish the seven brief levels in a single 60-minute session as long as you're playing on easy or in co-op. So you just keep going until you're done, which is long after you realize that you're doing the same thing over and over again.

Virtually nothing has been done to update Metal Slug XX for the Xbox 360. So you get an old game with a new (misleading) name. The visuals look a lot like those seen in handheld versions of the game, simply blown up to fill a TV screen. Well, almost fill a TV screen. The graphics haven't even been adapted for widescreen presentation, so the game is shown in 4:3 with buffers filling in the gaps on widescreen TVs. At any rate, the visuals are plagued by big pixels, blurry backgrounds, and many head-spinning scenes where so many jagged projectiles fill the screen that you never see the bullet with your name on it.

Yet the game manages to retain a fair amount of its cartoonish charm. Commandos still look more like Saturday-morning cartoon heroes than real soldiers, and enemies go through High School Musical theatrics in their death throes. Even the way the game dishes out power-ups is cute: you obtain rockets, lasers, and the like from rescued POWs with Rip Van Winkle beards. And announcements, such as when you acquire power-ups, are broadcast in '90s-era arcade voices--brassy shouted slogans in front of what often sounds like 16-bit sound effects and music. None of this is anything close to cutting edge, but it does establish a quirky old-time console atmosphere.

For 1,200 points, you should get more than just this rough port of a year-old DS game that can be finished in one sitting. Metal Slug XX is still a playable side-scrolling shooter with a fair number of good points, most notably the great co-op, but the disappointing nature of the port and the fact that it offers little replay value make it tough to recommend.

Based on the popular SNK run-and-gun series, Metal Slug Tactic's reveal at E3 2021 stuck out to me as the most exciting thing at the show. Intrigued by this transformation of a beloved franchise into a genre that many may not have thought of, I spoke to Cyrille Impert, Dotmeu CEO, and Aurlien Loos, CEO of developer Leikir, about the upcoming roguelike tactics game.

Metal Slug has never been a series that is big on plot, though it does feature plenty of character interactions in its levels. With the game already confirmed to be roguelike, I was curious if there would be a story mode or just randomized seeds every time you play. "The cool thing about tactical RPGs is that we have a lot of space to do narration," Loos says. "Metal Slug has a lot of stories that are not used in the games, so one part we took was to use narration to give characters background and set their paths. Another part is a little more political because we use the background of the story to expand on the war governments and the rebellion of Morden featured in previous titles."

Loos also mentions that different bits of narration will unlock across your different runs. You have one shot to reach the ending before dying, but replaying the game will give you new abilities and different battles to help spice up each run, similar in fashion to how The Binding of Isaac reveals extra bits of plot the more you play. "You will not have multiple endings," Loos confirms, "But you will get new narration tracks and more. You'll also unlock new characters, new slugs, new weapons, et cetera"

Metal Slug has always been known as a co-op run-and-gun, but for Tactics, things are going to remain single-player. "We really want to focus on a great solo game. Multiplayer is not something that really works in a tactical RPG," Loos said. "Because of that, we really wanted to focus on the solo experience."

"I don't know if 2 is the best one, but I think 2 for most people on the team is the first one we spent a lot of time on," Loos says. "This episode was really, really huge in terms of impact for story. When I was a child, I grew up in a little town in France. During one week each year, we had a fairground and at this fairground, we had an arcade with one or two cabinets. One was Jurassic Park and the other was Metal Slug 2. Over the course of 10 years in this little town, the challenge each year was to beat the high score in Metal Slug 2. We saw people from all around France come and set new scores and we wanted to become better and better. For us, it was more a choice of love to focus on Metal Slug 2 and not because we thought it was the best game in the series."

As far as which specific characters would be playable, all the team can tell me is that "many" characters will be playable. O'Neal will feature as a boss with the team looking to include many of the classic boss fights from across the series, but everything else is being kept under wraps.

"The cool thing about the bosses is that, in the main games, you never get to see them from the full length," Loos says. "You only see a part of them, usually, especially when they are big bosses. When we were negotiating the deal, it was very interesting to imagine these bosses as full length because the game is isometric. We had to reimagine how the boss would look from a new point of view and that was super interesting work."

Metal Slug is a series of games from SNK.note The first game was actually created by Nazca Corporation, a company founded by former Irem employees after the closure of Irem's arcade division in 1994 and merged into SNK a few years later, losing the Nazca name in the process. Basically, it's a Run-and-Gun Shoot 'Em Up series. Shoot everything that takes damage, rescue prisoners, collect power-ups from their underwear, and do your best to stay alive.

The series' name refers to the incredibly cool, heavily armed one-seater tankette shown to your right. It can duck, it can jump, it's got two Vulcan miniguns... and the lowest-velocity high explosive cannon the world has ever seen. If you're truly desperate you can cause it to self-destruct, ejecting you into a somersault and rushing headlong into the enemy before blowing up.

The rather threadbare (at least in the games proper) stories usually involve the general Donald Morden, who is leading a rebel army to take control of the world. Over the course of the series, he makes deals with rebels, mad scientists, demons, and even aliens in his bid to change the world.

The series began with the Peregrine Falcon squad, Marco and Tarma, then added the Sparrows team, Eri and Fio, who together all form the core of the series. The fourth game relegated Tarma and Eri to the sidelines, while newcomers Trevor and Nadia took their places for a while. The sixth game notably added Ralf and Clark, the Ikari Warriors who have spent the last decade or so hanging out in The King of Fighters series. Their KoF teammate Leona Heidern is also available in Metal Slug XX as a downloadable character.

Much of the game's appeal stems from its detailed, fluid graphics; it employs hand-drawn animation created by artists failing to understand the concepts of immovable chins or kneeless legs. Nuanced touches abound, such as multiple mele and idle animations for both enemies and the player characters. The artists also went to the trouble of making reloading animations which trigger after an appropriate number of bullets have been fired, even though you don't actually need to reload at any point. Even the enemy grunts are quite varied; they eat, talk amongst themselves, and occasionally run screaming in terror. Of course, they also have a nasty habit of jumping on your 'slug and humping the main cannon to stop you from firing. All in all, it is a great example of how to convey a huge amount of personality without any dialog or cutscenes.

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