Metal Slug Tactics Reviews

A no for me. While the attempt at innovation is commendable and can be interesting at times, the general over-reliance on the same tropes gets tedious in the first 3 missions. Overall, it never felt satisfying to me. If I want to play a run and gun, I'll play that. Again, I see the attempt to try to make a run and gun fit into a turn based RPG, but it never quit feels right. Add to that a bunch of things that jumped out at me like bad tooltips, windows getting stuck in the tutorial lvl, bad texts, etc. I wanted to refund this actually, but then had too much to do and forgot it. What does that say about the game? I usually love these kind of games and I played into the breach to bits, but this? This isn't it.

I loved the arcade games growing up, so seeing the formula spun into a tactics RPG certainly got my attention, and I think they delivered. They were able to make the concept of run & gun work well enough to keep you on your toes, and pulling off a successful turn of dealing damage while minimizing your own feels good. The visuals are very reminiscent of the arcade games, and the music isn't bad, although it doesn't particularly stand out. The two fields where they went above and beyond are the variety and replayability. Make a team of 3 from 9 available character (6 of which must be unlocked) where every character has potentially 4 different loadouts in addition to unlockable abilities and weapon mods than you have a chance of coming across in your run rogue-like style as you try to unlock the true ending which will take a least a minimum of 5 runs, although you're like to spend more trying to get access to it all. Sound like a mouthful? It is. The game is packed with plenty of ways to play, and I didn't even bother bumping up the difficulty beyond recruit mode. On the downside, the UI is not amazing, the text from characters is pretty dry and barebones, and while there's a handy hint system for what abilities do, the descriptions often are confusing until you try them to understand. To some, discovery is half the fun, but that may frustrate others. Thankfully, these aren't deal breakers, and the gameplay takes precedence over everything else. Overall, the game is great with a massive amount of replayability, and it ended up being one of my favorite games of 2024. I loved it enough to bother writing a poorly-written review, as I'm usually too thoughtless to do it. There's little things to nitpick, but it's been well worth the time and price.

Game play is good, there's enough variation with bosses and different objectives to keep things interesting for me. Art design is great and lives up to the originals. Some missions can be difficult and require some careful thought of where you place each team member. Plenty to unlock in terms of new characters and loadouts. I go back and play the original metal slug games once in awhile and I think most metal slug fans will enjoy it in this strategy/turn-based format, as tactics has more of a story element that wasn't really there in the other games.

Solid tactics game with a fun loop that plays like Into The Breach but has it's own unique mechanics.

Metal Slug Tactics is a really underrated game that mixes the world of metal slug with a Tactical Rogue Lite RPG. This game is amazing, there are some bugs and the interface is a bit weird, but the gameplay is really fun and addicting. Here are the good points: - Amazing pixelart and animations, just like the original games - All the playable characters are unique and fun to play - Since this is a rogue lite you can't overlevel, so every run is challenging - There are different types or missions, so It is not always about killing the enemy army - Great difficult level, at first It looks really hard, even on easy, but when you learn the game It is a nice challenge Now the bad part: - The interface is a bit complicated, there is a lot of info, so It is overwhelming in the begginin - The controls are weird, for a tactics game It uses a lot of buttons, sometimes you select an option pressing A, other times you hold Y, or just press R2 - Bugs, there are some minor bugs, like saving a POW and It not counting for the side objective - Losing save file, due to a power outage I lost 30 hours of progress tl;dr: get this game if you like Tactical RPGs and is up to a challenge

Love the game and it's incorporation of trademark 'run and gun' into roguelite mechanic. The game art is the most excellent part of the game, with the UI can be a bit better. Have some rough edges on launch, but become more polished as more updates delivered by the Leikir Studio <3

Review after watching the end credits. TLDR, this is a fun and fast turn based tactics roguelite game. Which is an odd sentence to say. The maps play quick, and there is enough randomness to keep me coming back. My only real gripe is that I wish there was more level variety. If you don't know what Metal Slug is you should be ashamed! Or you are just not as old as I am. Metal Slug is a fast paced 2D action side-scroller series that was popular in arcades in the 90's. It has a really cool art style and was meant to test your reflexes. So they took that, and made it a turn based tactics game. I was pretty skeptical about that myself, but I like the end result. So what makes this different from other turn based tactics games? Well for starters its a roguelite. Each run will start from the beginning. There are different teams you can assemble for your runs, and you can change their loadouts to play differently. Each zone in a run has branching paths that you can choose from. Each of the paths has a normal reward and a "challenge" reward for doing a bit extra during that mission. Secondly, the game really pushes you to play fast and loose. "Reckless" and "Turn based tactics" are terms that don't really go together, but this game pulled it off. Moving your characters gives them "Dodge" which functions a lot like cover in other games. So the further you move them, the higher their dodge is. In addition to that, you gain Adrenaline to trigger their special abilities with by doing the same movement. So you are motivated to push your team all over the map. Finally at the end of each mission all of your team is healed up to full, even the ones that were KO'd. All of this comes together to make a lot of fun and gives it a good "Metal Slug" feel. What are the cons? Bugs. I have not encountered anything truly game-breaking yet, but as of March 2025 I am getting familiar with some of the bugs. Off the top of my head I have seen: passive abilities that sometimes don't trigger, Music and sounds that just stop during a run, bonus objectives not registering as complete, achievements that seem to just pop up, and all of the characters on the map being sucked to one tile during a turn reset. As mentioned, not one of those is game breaking but they are annoying. As I mentioned before there are only 4 actual zones. While each zone is randomized inside that zone it does start to feel a little stale after you have played it a lot. They could easily fix this with DLC later. So yeah in conclusion, its a game that I 'finished' and will keep playing. There's 4 normal bosses, 3 secret bosses, 8 characters with 4 loadouts each. That's plenty to keep me interested, I definitely got my money's worth.

METAL SLUG STRATEGY GAME?!?!?! It's awesome, well worth the like 24 dollars I paid for it. It was a little difficult to pick up at first, but if top down strategy games are your thing here it is just with a metal slug art style.

I was kinda expecting a tactics military game a-la Front Mission meets Final Fantasy Tactics, or XCOM. The rogue like twist took a while to settle in and didn't really won me over. Extremely well made game and great fun for a while though! The animated sprites took me on a nostalgia trip to my arcade days, when I was wasting the weekly allowance to finish Metal Slug 2.

Pretty inspired by Into the Breach, this takes the formula and adds its own twists by having elevations and your characters sync attacks if they're in range. Each map is like an interesting little puzzle on how to maximize your syncs because most of the time you're outnumbered. Really like the graphics, they took the sprite style from the original Metal Slug games and implemented them almost as if the old SNK sprite artists did it themselves. The characters you use are pretty different and there's also different sub-builds (or sub-classes?) that you can also unlock. The story is a little weak, but technically Metal Slug never really had much of a story. Though the character interactions add a very nice touch because prior to this game, there's very little interaction between characters. Music is unfortunately a little flat and repetitive after long listens, in comparison to the arcade games. If there's a music DLC that adds in music from the original, I'd buy that. The game does feel a little bit long in the tooth after maybe 8-9 runs to get to the true ending, unless you're really going for all the interactions and the epilogues for each character. But still, I'd recommend this game regardless.