Metal Mayhem

How does the Metal Slug franchise translate into 3D? Check out this gameplay footage for a look.

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It's been 10 years since the intensely difficult, gloriously grisly, nonstop carnage of Metal Slug lit up arcades, and to mark that anniversary, SNK Playmore is taking the franchise into the third dimension. The new game, which is simply titled Metal Slug 3D, recently hit stores in Japan. We nabbed an import copy and played through the first several missions to see if the game stands as a fresh new direction for the series, or an abhorrent defiling of the Metal Slug name.

If the thought of taking this classic side-scroller into 3D is enough to raise your blood pressure a few points, you'll be glad to know that the game does at least retain the same attitude and focus on frenetic shooting, knifing, and exploding that the series is known for. That said, it does suffer from some of the same pitfalls that so many games have stumbled into before when trying to make the leap to 3D. The game is your basic behind-the-back 3D shooter, in which you run about and essentially blow up anything and everything in your path. You're given plenty of firepower with which to do this, so you'd better limber up your thumb, because you'll need to constantly mash the fire button if you want to have any hope of survival. There are a few platforming sections, and of course you'll get to pilot a variety of slugs, but for the most part, the game sticks very closely to the run-and-gun formula.

The story of Metal Slug is standard for the series. There's an evil empire headed up by an even more evil man with an eye patch, known as "Devil Rebirth" Morden. It's your job as defenders of freedom and the common good to shoot, blow up, and stab every last one of these evildoers while simultaneously rescuing hostages and collecting multicolored gold bars. There are four playable characters in Metal Slug: There's the tough-guy hero Marco Rossi; the cool and enigmatic Tarma Roving; technology expert Eri Kasamoto; and the demure but tough Fio Germi. At the beginning of the game the only character available is Marco, but he's more than capable of handling his own on the battlefield.

There's a fairly in-depth tutorial in the game that teaches you how to move around, adjust the camera, attack, and pilot vehicles. All of the traditional Metal Slug moves are available to you in this game. You can fire your primary weapon by pressing the square button, slash with your knife by pressing the triangle button, toss grenades with the circle button, and jump with the X button. You can also change weapons by pressing the L1 and square buttons simultaneously, which can be slightly awkward when you have half a dozen weapons to cycle through. As you move around you can use the right analog stick to rotate the camera around your character. We didn't have much of a problem with the camera, although we found it slightly difficult to focus on characters that weren't on even ground, such as enemies on ledges or hanging from the ceiling.

Whether in 2D or 3D, Metal Slug is all about the firepower.

Metal Slug addresses the camera issue by allowing you to lock on to enemies by holding the R1 button. When locked on to an enemy, you can circle strafe to avoid fire while attacking. Using the target lock makes the game much more forgiving than the side-scrolling Metal Slug games, because you'll quickly find that it's much, much easier to dodge enemy fire when you have plenty of room to move around. It helps that the enemy fire is relatively subdued, with lots of creeping rockets and slow-moving lasers that are easy to avoid as long as you aren't facing more than half a dozen enemies at a time.

The enemies in the game are familiar generic soldiers that you can easily take out with a single shot or slash of your knife. There are also a lot of vehicles, such as tanks and helicopters, that you'll need to take out of commission. In the first few levels of the game you'll face the soldiers, but eventually you have to head to some mysterious ancient ruins full of zombies who like to throw themselves at you and explode, or spew lethal vomit at you from afar. The zombies take quite a bit more firepower to take down--literally. The flamethrower weapon can make short work of the zombies, while the standard pistol barely does any damage at all. Aside from the flamethrower and infinite pistol, you'll also have access to grenades, a shotgun, a missile launcher, a heavy machine gun, and more. Each weapon has unique characteristics based on range, rate of fire, and power. We found the heavy machine gun to be the best all-around weapon, but when using anything other than the pistol we ran out of ammo in a hurry.