Metal Slug Import Hands-On

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.

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.

There are boss battles in the game as well. The boss that we faced was a giant mechanical spider that started off hanging from the ceiling in a large room. You have to shoot some large cables to get the spider to detach and fall to the floor, where it spins around firing missiles and bullets at you as you pick away at it with your weapon of choice. As with most of the larger enemies in the game, the boss took a lot of firepower to take down. By contrast, you can take only a maximum of four hits before you die, so it's especially important to keep moving constantly to avoid enemy fire.

Of course, it wouldn't be a Metal Slug game without metal slugs, so you'll have plenty of opportunities to jump behind the controls of a variety of hulking vehicles in this game. The first slug you get is the metal slug, a smallish tank designed for land-based combat. The controls of the metal slug are awkward at first, requiring you to move and aim independently. You can still use the target-lock in the tank, though, which makes the controls slightly more usable. Despite that, we still found it easier and more effective to simply go about the mission on foot rather than fuss with the metal slug. There's also a slug flyer for air combat and a slug mariner for underwater missions, but we didn't get a chance to try them out.

Between missions you can visit the garage to purchase new weapons or upgrades for your characters. You can increase the lock range, maximum life, luck, and firing rate of each of your characters using points that you earn by completing missions in the single-player game. There are also a dozen different weapons you can purchase, as well as five different subweapons, such as grenades. The upgrade system doesn't seem especially deep or involved, but it's an interesting addition nonetheless.

As mentioned, the difficulty in Metal Slug is somewhat lessened by the freedom to move in any direction. However, the game can still be respectably tough at times. There are always a lot of enemies to face, and because you can get hit only four times it's easy to die very quickly. When you do kick the bucket, you can simply continue from the last checkpoint. It appears that you have infinite continues as well, so instead of repeating the same level over and over again, you only have to repeat the same section of the same level over and over again. The greatest difficulty in the game comes from the amount of damage some of the larger enemies can absorb. The enemies each have unique firing patterns, too, and when those patterns mix in a flurry of projectiles and explosives, it's easy to get in the way of a stray shot.

The cartoony look of Metal Slug translates fairly well into 3D in this game. The characters are all short and have huge heads and large eyes. There are prerendered cutscenes before each level that are vaguely reminiscent of Team America, both in style and content. The extremely corny cutscenes are all fully voiced in English with Japanese subtitles, and the voices aren't all that bad if you don't mind the ridiculous dialogue. The in-game graphics do look a bit dated by today's standards, with a lot of very blurry, washed-out textures throughout each environment. The frame rate also takes a hit when there's too much going on at once, which, as you might expect, happens quite often.

Based on our short time spent with Metal Slug, it looks like the first 3D game in the series is a decent effort. It maintains the focus on firepower and over-the-top action, and the tone of the game is entirely Metal Slug. There are no announced plans as of yet to release Metal Slug in the US, but if you're a diehard fan and are curious to see what the game is like, this would make a decent import. All the dialogue and menus are in English, so even if you don't know Japanese you can easily jump right in and figure out what's going on. We'll bring you new information as it surfaces, but in the meantime, check out our recently posted screenshots and videos from the game.