Metal Slug Tactics review: Run and gun energy refreshes the slower-paced genre

Seriously? A Metal Slug tactics game? The only "tactic" I remember from these classic side-scrolling shoot-em-ups is "kill everything that isn't you". They were pure cartoony chaos, a delightfully silly and supernatural take on warfare where you died so often that you pressed "Continue?" almost as often as you pulled the trigger. Not the most obvious candidate for the slower-paced gameplay of turn-based tactics, then.

But Gears Tactics was surprisingly great (as our Gears Tactics review attests), so I went into this cautiously optimistic. You're given three soldiers which you take on missions like "kill all the enemies" or "protect this unarmed fool as they run across the map". Action is played out on an isometric grid that'll look familiar to veterans of the excellent Into the Breach. Each of your units has a poxy main weapon, a far more effective secondary weapon that has finite ammo, and several passive and active skills. A character's turn ends after they fire, so naturally you'll want to move them into the optimum position first before pulling the trigger.

In fact, moving these soldiers properly is critical for seeing them at their best. The more tiles you move across on a turn, the more "dodge" and "adrenaline" you gain. Adrenaline can be spent on triggering special skills, whereas dodge is, well, exactly what it sounds like. The more dodge points you have, the less damage you'll take from attacks, possibly even no damage at all (because after a long tiring run we're supposed to be better at dodging hits?)

Dubious logic aside, it stops battles from descending into slow, tedious crawls through enemy territory. Instead, they've successfully encouraged the always-keep-moving approach of Metal Slug proper. Cover has also been pleasingly simplified. If you're standing next to cover, you're shielded, regardless of what side of it the enemy shoots you from. That makes about as much sense as a washing machine made out of mud, but it works well with the game's desire to keep you constantly on the move. 

If you shoot an enemy who's also within combat range of one of your allies, they'll also fire upon them with a "sync attack", essentially a free extra shot. Naturally, you want to try and sync up all three of your units as much as possible. The game becomes a fun juggling act of trying to cover as much ground with your units as you can to get dodge/adrenaline up, while also getting next to some defensive cover, and also in a position where all their attacks sync together. Gradually mastering spinning those three plates simultaneously is marvelous when it eventually clicks.

Power up

As you level up your soldiers, their special abilities go from being nice bonuses to absolutely essential. Eri's core grenade is powerful, but her Grenade Juggler ability, wherein a second grenade can be tossed a few tiles away from wherever you threw the first, is absurdly lethal in the right hands. Fio's Nudge can teleport friends and foes around the map. I never got tired of plucking an enemy soldier into the sky and dropping them into harm's way. A few level ups later, Fio's nudge had far more range and it restored 2HP to whoever I nudged and it restored some of Fio's HP too. Once you start syncing up your trios attacks and their powers, you'll start enjoying lots of air-punchingly satisfying victories.

But good lord does the game make you work for them. Metal Slug Tactics has a barebones tutorial, then ships you off to war with plenty unexplained. Hover over some terminology while out in the field and the World's Smallest Text Box will pop-up to give you more info. It feels like an inelegant solution, and a few more tutorials or somewhere to practice with the powers without committing to a run would have helped a lot.

I'll concede a Metal Slug game that constantly kills you is faithful to the main series, but dying because crucial info was tucked away in a three-text-box-deep explainer infuriates. Tactics borrows a lot from the aforementioned Into the Breach. I wish it had also helped itself to its crystal clear UI.

I'd be more willing to meet this game halfway and blame personal stupidity here if it didn't feel like Tactics is missing a crucial round of polish. I spent one frustrating boss battle squinting at text boxes, trying to figure out why I could no longer shoot at the boss, before finally realizing it was a glitch when the game crashed. Again.

Enemies that turn you into cursed mummies made me laugh. That laughter was replaced with cursing on my part when my soldier perished in mummy form, but when the curse wore off, they appeared to be alive again. Hooray! Except, no, they were actually still dead, and by the time I realized the game had given me false information and simply loaded the wrong sprite, the strategy I'd already committed to was doomed. So I'd definitely advise waiting for a patch or two before buying. Once it is hopefully fixed up and ready for active deployment, there's a good little tactics game to enjoy here. 

Looking to keep thinking tactically? Our list of the best RTS games is worth pondering.