Metal Slug Tactics Review (Switch eShop)

Tactically at odds with itself

Metal Slug Tactics has felt like it has taken way too long to finally release. More than three years after its initial reveal, the game is finally here and it’s a bold but confused take on the tactics genre that has some big strengths. But, those are counterbalanced with a number of roadblocks and obstacles that often get in the way of the enjoyment you can have with it.

To start things off, this reviewer is coming at this as a turn-based tactics fan with no personal history with the Metal Slug series. When it comes to offering something for genre fans, Metal Slug Tactics succeeds, mostly. The game is actually structured as a roguelike, so you and up to two other characters you select from the Peregrine Falcons will head out and take on various, small missions in isometric grids one by one until you gain full control of an area of the map.

Within these missions there is a great amount of enemy variety, solid bosses, and creative environment design. Leikir Studio has implemented some interesting twists on the tactics genre too within the moment-to-moment gameplay.

Upon each turn, you are able to move and perform an action. These can be standard shots with a gun, using your special weapon (which has limited ammo per run), or using one of the many Adrenaline Abilities that you will pick up in between missions and upon levelling up characters. These are often support abilities or situational damage abilities that you won’t need to use all the time but can have devastating effects when used at the right moment.

Using your weapons works as you would expect, allowing you to fire and shoot anyone you have direct line of sight with on the grid. Adrenaline Abilities are earned upon gaining Adrenaline Points within a mission. These are accumulated as you move. The further you move, the more Adrenaline Points you have to spend during your turn, encouraging a bullish, vanguard-like playstyle that nudges you out of cover and forces you to take the initiative.

Moving also gives you armour, which can allow you to tank shots further pushing you towards an aggressive playstyle. This injection of the series' run-and-gun spirit is rather refreshing for the strategy genre and separates this from other tactics games that can often feel very stagnant as you sit in one spot during fights.

Additionally, Metal Slug Tactics includes a mechanic called Sync Shots, which means that if two characters have direct line of sight on a target when one attacks it, the other will follow up with another attack, effectively giving you a free hit. Sync Shots are another fantastic shakeup to the tactics formula that forced us to rethink how we looked at a grid of enemies and try to plan for future moves or place characters in specific positions to make the most of these special two-for-one attacks.

However, stapled onto these mechanics are strange features and gameplay design choices that feel like they are actively blocking you from getting to the enjoyable parts. One key sticking point for us is that if you decide to use an action before moving, you completely lose access to any ability to move. It's run and gun - in that order, and that order only.

Not only is this incredibly frustrating and restrictive, but for the most part it feels unnecessary. In a game built around movement and creating opportunities for yourself, being locked into having to move before attacking makes some fights and situations hard to win. Enemies can often block off paths, or you can be cornered with no real escape. So if you want to try and give yourself some breathing room or line up a Sync Shot, you need to attack and kill an enemy, wait a turn, hope you don’t die, and then move. This happened a fair bit, especially in the first 10 or so hours.

Speaking of those initial hours, they are oppressive, brutal, and at times fatiguing and tedious. Because you won’t have a wide array of characters, upgrades, and Adrenaline Abilities due to the roguelike structure, a lot of the fights in the early game you just can’t win. So, you need to die and then get back to that point, hopefully with stronger weapons and more flexible Adrenaline Abilities, to be able to actually progress.

While this is the point of roguelikes, with Metal Slug Tactics being a strategy game, everything moves slowly. Missions can take up to 5-10 minutes each, and with up to a dozen or so in each area (depending on the path you take), having to go through each one again to collect resources to spend back at your base in between runs is a slog, especially when you are underpowered while doing it. This isn’t Dead Cells or an action roguelike where you can just sprint back through an area and get back to where you were in a few minutes.

Plus, the game gets off to a terrible start with a horrifically unfriendly and wordy tutorial that chucks everything at you in a 20-minute blitz and then lets you loose. The mechanics in Metal Slug Tactics are complex, and we actually had to watch the gameplay overview trailer after finishing the tutorial because it does a better job at breaking down them in a digestible way.

Also, the text and UI size on the game’s menus and throughout the experience is ridiculously small. This is a huge problem in handheld mode, where we often had to squint or put our head closer to the screen to read what was being displayed.

On the plus side, as you are going through the game again and again, you are greeted with flawless animations, an excellent soundtrack from Tee Lopes, and some really nice sound effects and visuals when using Sync Shots or fighting bosses. Leikir Studio didn’t drop the ball with the presentation at all here, although we did suffer from some frame rate issues in handheld mode during particularly busy missions with a lot of enemies or attacks being used at once. Nothing egregious, but noticeable.

Conclusion

There is a good game here, sometimes a great one. Excellent art and animation, smart gameplay twists, and a genuinely refreshing pace really add some exciting new depth to the tactics genre and are huge positives. But it takes a while for the experience to smooth out and actually become enjoyable, and restrictive gameplay design choices don’t do it any favours, either. Metal Slug Tactics is one for the tactics fans looking for a fresh take, but just know you’ll have to put in some work to see the best parts of it.