Metal Slug Tactics Is a Great Strategy Game Trapped in a So-So Roguelike

If you’ve spent any significant amount of time in arcades, there’s a good chance you’ve sunk at least a few quarters into Metal Slug’s Neo Geo MVSX cabinets. Defined by its fluidly animated pixel art and frantic gunslinging, SNK cranked out a bunch of these bad boys right around when the home console market started to supersede arcades, and despite being one of the most iconic shoot ‘em ups out there, it eventually fell out of fashion like the rest of its ilk.

Now the series is back, but not in the form you would expect: as the name implies, Metal Slug Tactics is, in fact, a tactics game. While, as per usual, you command the Peregrine Falcons as they battle Donald Morden and his cartoonish ambitions for world domination, this time around, things are presented via an isometric perspective on a grid-based map, and everything is turn-based. It’s about as big a genre switch-up as you could imagine, as we’ve gone from blasting everything in sight like a trigger-happy meathead to cerebrally monitoring the battlefield from above. But despite this change, this spin-off pays homage to what came before while also taking things in a well-realized new direction defined by strategic nuances.

For starters, there’s the “Run and Gun” system, where the further you move a unit in a turn, the more defense they accrue—much like how the Metal Slug shoot ‘em ups encourage constant movement because a single stray bullet meant curtains, here it’s also dangerous to stay in one place for too long. There’s still cover like in XCOM, but you’re incentivized to remain on the move, which avoids the problem that many tactics games run into where your over-leveled sniper camps in Overwatch mode while icing everything in a mile radius, allowing you to avoid tough decisions or meaningful risks.

Beyond stacking up a defensive bonus from moving around, your troops also generate more Adrenaline the further you go, which is an important resource because it lets you activate abilities that can turn the tide. The result is that your trio of commandos will spend their time sprinting around the map, much like Marco and company did in the side-scrolling days. This need to stay mobile is a clever innovation that keeps you in the thick of it, forcing you to stay on offense so you’re constantly fielding weighty choices.

Adding to the complexity is the Synchronization ability, a technique that lets you blast through bad guys in unison. Basically, if you start an attack while any other friendly unit is within range, they’ll also contribute to the beatdown. In a given turn, each unit can move once and perform one action, but by taking advantage of Syncs, you can pump out unreasonable amounts of lead.

Of course, the catch is that your teammates need to be positioned correctly for this to work, which can be tricky because most of them can only fire in a straight line, and some have to be in melee distance. When combined with the fact you’ll be sprinting around every turn to shore up defense and build Adrenaline, it takes careful consideration to position these troops in a way that maximizes all these factors. If done correctly, though, the payoff is immense and deeply gratifying.

And if all that wasn’t enough, setting up Syncs is important because it can fuel many of these characters’ particular powers, which, when activated, let you establish virtuous cycles of fragging. For instance, every time Marco participates in a Sync, it decreases the cost of his special abilities by one, and when you activate a skill that’s been reduced to 0 Adrenaline, he gets a bonus action. Basically, while each character can only move and attack once per turn by default, by activating their abilities, which are often tied to Syncs, you can maneuver and perform multiple actions a turn, which is a massive game changer. Characters each have unique quirks, Adrenaline-fueled skills, and a primary and secondary weapon, so there’s almost always a ton of options at your disposal.

But despite all this complexity, the game very much draws from the Into the Breach school of simplifying in certain places, too, and both you and your enemies mostly deal damage in the single digits, making things easy to calculate on the fly. All these particulars sound overwhelming, but it feels largely intuitive once you start to get the hang of it.

However, while I’ve had a great time painstakingly maneuvering my soldiers to carry out long, complicated turns, I’m much less enamored with the overarching roguelike structure at work here. Related to that previously mentioned Into the Breach inspiration, Metal Slug Tactics is a run-based experience where you work through two to four islands before capping things off in a final boss fight. If you succeed or fail, it’s back to the beginning.

All things considered, my main gripe with this implementation of the roguelike format is that these runs are just way too long. Even when playing on the standard difficulty and only tackling two islands, it took north of two hours to get my first victory, and when attempting all four islands, it took closer to three or four hours. On the one hand, I’ve certainly been accused of being a little too meticulous when it comes to considering all possibilities in Magic: The Gathering and other turn-based games, so part of this is likely a “me problem,” and my runs have gone much quicker as I’ve internalized all the keywords and abilities. But at the same time, it feels like all the previously mentioned complexity that makes decision-making so compelling naturally leads to long turns if you’re being deliberate. And considering that defeat means starting all over again, you’re incentivized to carefully combo together sequences that require a lot of time and thought.

Here, the comparisons to Into the Breach are much less favorable. While that game hits you with constant compelling decisions, everything is so streamlined and simplified that turns go by in a breeze. By contrast, in Metal Slug Tactics, every character has multiple weapons, abilities, and passives that need to be mixed and matched for optimal play, which slows things down to a crawl.

This glacial pace also bleeds into the meta-progression. There’s a long list of weapon mods, character abilities, and more that are gated behind coins and achievements, but I haven’t been able to use the vast majority of them yet, mostly because it takes so long to clear a run and earn this currency. Unfortunately, the fastest way to earn upgrades is by being frugal during runs, as any unspent coins go directly into your bank account after a victory. This means that if you care about the long-term progression, you’re tacitly encouraged to avoid spending while in the field, which limits your possibilities, and it always feels bad to give up the upgrade that would have tied your build together so you can introduce new items to keep the experience fresh down the line. Unlocking characters is comparatively quicker, and you can do it in a few runs if you’re proficient, but this still means a lot of hours.

It also doesn’t help that I’ve already started to get somewhat fatigued with the relatively limited mission types, as they don’t feel that distinct: in some, you just have to kill all the enemies on the screen, while in others, you have to take out specific targets, but your general approach is relatively similar regardless. Each region has different foes who are meant to provide variety but instead mostly just supply a nasty reminder of how the original games skewed far too close to caricature when it comes to most of the “bad guy” factions, as you play as a bunch of bandana-wearing white guys mowing down minorities like Sylvester Stallone in the bad sequels to First Blood. These different backdrops are supposed to provide unique challenges, but aside from these uncomfortable moments, these scenarios don’t stand out much.

Admittedly, it does feel satisfying to slowly beef up your crew over the course of a run, picking new abilities and weapons that allow you to carry out even more hard-hitting cycles of pain. In one case, after adding several upgrades to my team, I realized that I could create a practically infinite combo where I generated enough Adrenaline with each action to keep the fun times rolling indefinitely, allowing me to clear half the screen in a single turn with a cyberknife-wielding tech bro.

But even still, each loop is so stretched out that compared to many other roguelikes where you’re constantly making choices that impact your build, these elements don’t feel quite as integral, and the builds really only come together when you do longer, multi-island attempts. There’s also a strange thing going on here where it feels like these battles are relatively easy on the standard difficulty, but because it takes so long to unlock everything if you’re not getting wins, I felt incentivized to stay at this lower level, stomping through guys with little resistance. I still played out my turns thoughtfully and meticulously because that’s what makes the game fun, but I felt torn between grinding through encounters to get characters and items more quickly or sacrificing potential variation to have more of a challenge.

All things considered, though, between the drawn-out runs, slow overarching progression, and maybe worst of all, increasingly humdrum missions, I longed for a more tailored campaign, like what’s found in Fire Emblem or even in XCOM’s more varied procedurally generated challenges. When I think of my favorite moments in this genre, I remember deliberately crafted sequences like that evil level in Final Fantasy Tactics, where smug archers snipe at you from the high ground, turning your terrible under-leveled grunts into pincushions. More of that, please!

It all leads me to wonder, why exactly is this game a roguelike? The cynical answer is that those are hot right now. They can keep people playing for a long time, sometimes getting hundreds of hours out of players in a way that wouldn’t be possible if everything was custom-made. While the game industry outside of AAA has a huge range of possibilities, it feels like certain sub-genres are sucking up the oxygen even in smaller-budget spaces. And I have a hard time thinking of a better example than how so many games have adopted a run-based structure, even if this doesn’t feel like a natural fit.

The less cynical explanation for why Metal Slug Tactics is a roguelike is because, as the developers themselves have said, they were inspired by Into the Breach, which is another tactics experience in this style. But again, while this game borrows some of its ideas, it doesn’t quite have its elegance, simplicity, or quick pace that makes it tempting to dive back in after victory or defeat.

This year alone, there have been a ton of excellent roguelikes, like the blissful chaos of Balatro or Shogun Showdown and its thought-provoking duels. Based on what I’ve played so far, Hades II will probably be one of my favorite games next year when it presumably gets its 1.0 release. But as I enter loop after loop, I’m starting to feel fatigued with this format, in large part because this run-based structure is being applied to everything in sight. In many ways, this trend is nothing new; the videogame industry has always chased where the money is because making games is a huge financial risk that’s only gotten riskier. Copycats are inevitable until things hit a saturation point, everything collapses, and then people settle into a new mode of fondly remembering that particular long-lost vintage flavor instead of complaining about its ubiquity. Metal Slug Tactics mirrors the original series in more ways than one in this regard, as it’s another title entering an already oversaturated market, in this case, roguelikes instead of run-and-guns. Despite its excellent core gameplay, this game has made me realize I’m increasingly ready for the next fad.

Elijah Gonzalez is an assistant Games and TV Editor for Paste Magazine. In addition to playing and watching the latest on the small screen, he also loves film, creating large lists of media he’ll probably never actually get to, and dreaming of the day he finally gets through all the Like a Dragon games. You can follow him on Twitter @eli_gonzalez11 and on Bluesky @elijahgonzalez.bsky.social.