SHOCK TROOPERS 2nd Squad Reviews

Unfortunately, after playing Shock Troopers: 2nd Squad, I now know why there are only two Shock Trooper games – but, it feels less like it's the game's fault and more the fault of the game's title. See, despite this being billed as a sequel, this game honestly feels as though it was made by an entirely different team for an entirely different franchise. But there is one thing that stayed the same – and that's the core gameplay. You're still mowing foes down in a top-down shooter fashion, but everything surrounding this has changed. The first thing I noticed was the complete lack of a story. Granted, the original wasn't exactly an award winning novella, but the cutscenes were a nice change of pace and showed off the game's awesome pixel art. Here, the most you get is a poorly translated one-liner when finishing a level (my favourite being "I hate to jam with ham dancers.") On the topic of pixel art, the next noticeable thing is the step down in artwork. The game almost feels like a GBA game at times with how washed out the colour palette is. It also uses 3D artwork for the backgrounds, which is the exact same critique I levied at the later Metal Slug games for looking ugly and jarring. On the gameplay front, there's one big problem I have – the amount of characters. The original game had 8 characters, 3 of which you could switch between at once. Thanks to their different special weapons it gave the game a nice variety. Here though, there are only four total – to make up for the lack of variety there are vehicles you now get in and shoot on occasion, but I honestly don't feel that was worth the trade-off. At the end of the day, this game is still fun. But it's biggest sin is being a follow up to the original – making a more repetitive game with less content and pitching it as a follow up is just disappointing no matter how you look at it, which is a shame.