Day Six: Metal Slug Tactics
I don't have a Christmas pun for this one.
Run and Gun Meets Stop and Think
Remember Metal Slug? He’s back! In Roguelite form. It’s not a run and gun action roguelite, either. It’s a… turn-based tactics game? And it’s really good somehow?
Today I’ll be telling you why Metal Slug Tactics is a short game and all that other stuff yeah YOU should play it.
What is it?
Metal Slug Tactics, as the name suggests, is a tactics game based off the Metal Slug franchise. You assemble a team of three soldiers, place them on a map, and complete missions. These include things like killing every enemy on the map, surviving for a set number of turns, escorting a friendly unit to another part of the map and other things. After each mission you get money and experience. Money can be used to buy upgrades, and experience lets you get new skills for your soldiers. You do this until you’re strong enough to go fight the final boss.
The game does a great job at translating the run and gun aspect of Metal Slug into a turn-based game. You’re rewarded for moving far in one turn. The more spaces you cover in one move, the more adrenaline and dodge you get. Adrenaline is what you use for your special abilities. It’s like mana for your spells. If you move five spaces, you get three points of adrenaline, which you can use to cast a powerful attack. Dodge is a defensive attribute. It blocks damage. If you run five spaces, you get two points of Dodge, which means you completely negate any attack that deals two damage or less.
It’s a lot to take in, without the game’s context, but it’s an intuitive system. It’s heavy on risk and reward. Dodge and Adrenaline are powerful resources, but to get them, you have to make big moves, which means ending up in possibly dangerous situations. Knowing how far you can push it, and getting the most resources while also ending up in a safe spot is a great puzzle. Whenever I got a huge move with a ton of points that landed me behind cover in a perfect spot, I felt like a genius.
Positioning is extremely important in the game. The are walls you can use for cover, which reduce the damage you take. If you combine the Dodge with cover, you can survive getting hit with a nuke.
Where you stand relative to your teammates is also a key factor. Whenever you attack, you can do a Sync, which means that if any of your units can shoot that target, they do so. This adds another layer of strategy to the mix, since you have to balance running around for adrenaline, with ending up in safe spots, while also setting up syncs with your team.
Trying to calculate all these things is already tough, but this is a Metal Slug game, so the enemies have to be tough, too. There’s a huge variety of things to shoot at, and get shot by. There are guys who attack up close, others that throw grenades that deal damage in an area, shielded enemies, snipers that shoot from afar, and even tanks. It mixes these units in really interesting ways, so you always have to be on your A-game to figure out who to prioritize and how it affects your positioning.
The roguelite elements are well done, too. You start by picking from one of the three available worlds: the jungle ruins, the desert and… the other desert. I have to admit, the choice to have two desert maps is strange, but at least they’re different in how they play. When in the area, you pick a mission. Missions will reward you with money, experience or ammo. There are also extra objectives to complete for more resources. Once you finish a level, you get to pick one of three. There are skills for your characters and weapon upgrades. Each of these adds a new dimension to your playstyle, and changes things up in a cool way.
The skills available aren’t very flashy at first, but they allow for a lot of creativity. Fio, for example, has an ability where she can move an allied unit. This can be used to give an ally a head start so they can reach a position far away, or to move them into safety once they used their movement for that turn. Simple, but what if you combine it with Marco’s skill that lets him move after being affected by a friendly skill? And combine that with his ability to give others a free turn, which can be looped into itself multiple times? They’re very basic, simple abilities that start to interact with each other and form complex webs of loops and other cool stuff. Real big brain smart people nonsense.
All the systems come together beautifully to make a really complex, but easy to understand, web of decisions that doesn’t hold your hand. It’s tough, but very rewarding.
Short
It’s a roguelite, and like the arcade Metal Slug games, it can be cleared in around 40 minutes to an hour. That’s not to say there’s a lack of content. There are six characters to unlock, each with their own set of skills and unique playstyles. Playstiles, plural. They each have a number of unlockable skills that change how they play, and alternate loadouts, too. You can take a character and change them into a close-quarter powerhouse, or a support. Six characters in name, but with each having different ways to play them, you end up with almost three times the number, in practice.
There’s also the alternate difficulties. These not only make the enemies tougher, but they introduce new enemies with different tactics, so each difficulty is like unlocking a new expansion for the game.
There’s tons to do in the game, so even if you can clear a run relatively quickly, you’ll want to come back again and again.
Worse Graphics
This is the only game on the list where I can say that the graphics are in fact worse. If you compare Metal Slug Tactics’ graphics to those of the arcade Metal Slug games, they’re technically worse. They have fewer frames of animation and a lot less detail. The graphics in the old Metal Slug games still hold up to this day. They’re masterpieces of sprite work that haven’t been replicated since. The ones in Tactics aren’t as impressive.
That doesn’t mean they’re bad. Far from it. The game looks fantastic. The graphics may be a lot simpler, but that makes it even more impressive. They managed to take the ultra-detailed art from the arcade games, and simplified it so it looks recognizeable, and it’s also good. They took the most important aspects of each design, and highlighted them. The animations are still fluid and detailed, with more of an emphasis on good poses and clear, exaggerated actions. The art style is a lot brighter, too, with more saturated and varied colors compared to the more natural/militaristic greens, browns and beige of the originals. It’s a fresh take on Metal Slug’s iconic visuals, with a really great art style of its own.
There you have it, actually worse graphics for once… and the worse graphics still look fantastic.
The soundtrack is great, too. It remixes some of the tunes from the arcade games, with recognizeable motifs and melodies, while also giving them a new spin.
Made by People Paid More to Work Less
This game was made by Leikir Studios, a French indie development studio. The French are doing great work in videogames. America needs to step it up, not gonna lie. They are a small studio, not much information on them, but they’ve been making games since 2012. Metal Slug Tactics is their biggest game, in the sense that it’s a licensed title working with a publisher. They announced the game back in 2021, and it released in 2024. When it was revealed, it already looked far into development, which makes me think it was being worked on for maybe two years before being announced.
It’s a small studio, they put out the kind of games they want to, and it looks like their partnership with SNK and Dotemu to make Metal Slug Tactics was a good one. They approached SNK to work with them, and they let them make the game they wanted. Sounds like it’s better than working at Blizzard.
In one interview, one of the lead developers says he’s a huge fan of Metal Slug, specifically Metal Slug 2. That explains the multiple desert levels, and why Tactics has a lot of material from Metal Slug 2.
Conclusion
You should play Metal Slug Tactics. It’s complicated, and dense, but it’s very rewarding. The basic system is strong, and the skills build onto it, adding a new layer of challenge. The missions are well paced and ask the player to play in interesting ways. It’s a creative take on Metal Slug. If you’re in the small overlapping section between “fans of run and gun arcade games” and “thoughtful turn-based games”, you will find a lot to love in Metal Slug Tactics.
You can get Metal Slug Tactics for $25 (which would be 100 quarters at an arcade).