I am not familiar with the Metal Slug games; I only know them for their reputation as being one of the best in the genre of run and gun, along with Contra. But I never fully took the time to play them. However, I do remember playing one of them in a bowling arcade; I only know it was one of the Metal Slug games for the number of pixel explosions happening on the screen. So, I didn’t know what to expect from this game when I came across it on the PlayStation Store, and I gave it a go, gave it five hours of my time, and put my controller down when I realized that I had been doing the same tactics the entire time.
Metal Slug Attack is not a Metal Slug game in the traditional sense; it is a horizontal line-based tower defense game where you wait for your power bar to charge up, select a unit, and send them on their way to defeat the opposing side. The first thing I noticed was the way the UI was set up; then, a quick Google search made sense of this choice because this used to be a free-to-play mobile game before SNK shut down the servers and released the game fully unlocked as a form of keeping the game alive. On the one hand, I applauded SNK for not burying this game when it came time to shut it down, but on the other, the marketing speak on the store page didn’t mention a single time that this was previously a mobile game.
But after playing the game, I can see where the mobile economy could come into play because I assumed it was based on the gacha mechanic style; there is some form of strategy here, on either spamming the cheapest number of troops or waiting to save up for the more pricey and powerful troops. I didn’t seem to have an issue with the game at first; it was a mindless clickfest that gave my hands something to do while watching the first weekend of College Football; thank goodness Remote Play is a thing. But it was when I was nearing the halfway point of the primary missions that everything came to a halt like a massive train derailing. They removed all the pay-to-win methods from the game but didn’t change the difficulty that “encouraged” players to play, so it got to a point where the game became unbeatable. I went online to see if this was a common issue, and sure enough, I found people complaining about the same thing, around the same point that I was at currently. So, my only choices were going back to previous levels and grinding up to power up my troops so that when I called them, I would be able to get more power out of them, or quit the game there; I ended up going with the latter.
In the end, I didn’t know what to expect going into this game, but the more I pushed on and then I did a little research. I began to realize why I hadn’t heard of this game in particular as much as the publisher wished I did. I’m guessing, given the mobile market, the original version was far worse because it was a time and money sacrifice instead of just a time one. But there is something here that works in terms of tactics. I mean, Plants vs. Zombie perfected this format nearly fifteen years ago, so I can see what went wrong here, but at the end of the day, this is still a bare minimal mobile port onto consoles that was made to put the final nail in the coffin for this side project to a legendary retro series.
Score: 3 out of 10
Reviewed on PlayStation 5