Once again, the world is on the brink of conquest by the evil General Donald Morden and his rebel army. Only the Peregrine Falcon Squad, led by hero Marco Rossi, stands in the way of the rebels establishing the New World Order. This could be the plot of almost any entry in the Metal Slug series, which is best when you don’t take it too seriously. Metal Slug Attack Reloaded, a remake of a microtransaction-laden gacha tower-defense mobile game, does its best to keep the silly tone of the series while removing the worst parts of the 2016 version.
At least it does its best to remove the frustrating parts. The Switch version doesn’t have any microtransactions, thankfully – but it still feels a lot like a gacha game waiting for you to log in every day and work your way to victory. The result is an uneven but still enjoyable game, limited by its origins.
Like most of the series that spawned it, Metal Slug Attack Reloaded’s story is paper-thin at the best of times. Marco Rossi and the Peregrine Falcon Squad lead the charge to stop the Rebel Army from taking over the world. It’s unclear whether this is intended to be done through expert strategy or brute force, as the gameplay that follows each cutscene is an exercise in sending wave after wave of units at the enemy until you manage to destroy their base. It’s the kind of simple, no-nonsense fun that works well as a mobile game, but feels weak when ported to a console. Even the addition of a ‘sequel’ story, cleverly titled Another Story, doesn’t change the fact that there really isn’t enough plot to see you through the dozen or so hours it can take to complete.
Each fight sees you buying units with AP (Action Points) and sending them across the battlefield where they will either destroy the enemy base or die trying. More powerful units cost more AP, but you can upgrade your base to allow you to regenerate AP faster, allowing you to buy stronger units faster. This fairly simple gameplay is marked when you activate a unit or special move of your base, but you’ll spend a lot more of your time buying units to send them on a slow death march to the right side of the arena.
The little strategy that comes into play is actually which unit you choose to take on each level. Choosing a unit that can attack flying enemies isn’t usually necessary until the game throws you a stage that contains almost exclusively flying enemies. Each unit can be leveled up, evolved into a more powerful form, and given equipment to increase their stats. This is ostensibly done in the name of customizing your deck to suit your playstyle, but it’s actually a holdover from Metal Slug Attack Reloaded’s origins as a gacha game.
Every time you complete a mission, you will earn medals and tickets. Tickets are used to upgrade your units or base stats, giving you an advantage in the next mission. Medals fuel the game’s gacha mechanic and allow you to draw for a handful of units, allowing you to unlock one of the game’s over 300 characters from across the Metal Slug series to fight in battles for you. Metal Slug Attack Reloaded is significantly less predatory than most mobile gacha games tend to be, but that also highlights how superficial and unfair the system can be.
This system is the reason for one of the biggest problems with Metal Slug Attack Reloaded – the brutal and often unfair difficulty increases that appear throughout the campaign. Every once in a while, you’ll come across a level that’s suddenly much more challenging than the previous one. No amount of strategy in how you place your units will help. Often, it’s a case of swapping out units in your deck for different ones better suited to the enemy in question. However, it can mean trying to pull for a better, more powerful unit, a long and sometimes frustrating process that was originally intended to encourage players to pony up money to secure a rarer or more rare unit. good. However, without the microtransactions, it feels unnecessarily harsh to the point of almost breaking the game.
Fans of the Metal Slug series will enjoy seeing some of the silliest armies and units represented in the game. There are the usual Rebels and Regular Army characters, but you’ll quickly encounter Martian aliens, zombie dogs and samurai mechs along the way. It kind of breaks up the game’s already weak plot to create an army made up of all these factions, but you’ll barely notice it as you call down a giant strike to gobble up your enemies. The only drawback is that the list is a mere fraction of the original game’s hundreds of units.
If the story mode isn’t enough for you, there’s the option to play against local or online players using your deck of choice, though be warned – just like any other gacha game, there will be people brawling for hours and will simply wipe the floor with you and your team. That’s just the nature of the game, but luckily online battles can be avoided altogether if you prefer to play more casually.
When Metal Slug Attack’s servers shut down in 2023, fans probably thought their favorite tower defense gacha game was gone forever. Unfortunately, they were half right. As it stands, we’re not convinced that the hours of grinding required to advance the plot is really worth it.
CONCLUSION
Metal Slug Attack Reloaded removes some of the worst parts of the original mobile game’s mechanics, but the reduced roster and brutal difficulty points emphasize the excessive grinding required to make these types of games profitable, and probably won’t satisfy anyone. except for the strongest ones. fans of the original. For better or worse, this feels exactly like a mobile game that’s been ported to the Switch, warts and all.