The Nintendo Direct had some wonderful surprises this week, and Metal Slug fans had 2 announcements (one outside of the direct in Metal Slug Tactics) with Metal Slug Attack Reloaded, a deck-building, Plants Vs Zombies-like mobile game featuring iconic characters and locales while sticking to the amazing pixel art style fans of the series has come to love. What’s it Like? Go over the roster, shuffle your deck, and prepare to slug it out as we review Metal Slug Attack Reloaded on Nintendo Switch.
Metal Slug Attack Reloaded is a re-release of a mobile game that was taken offline a few years back, much to the chagrin of its dedicated fan base. The game has been “Reloaded” and tasks you with amassing an army via a deck-building mechanic to defeat the enemy forces of the Devil General Mordin. The objective? To destroy the enemy base before they destroy yours by gathering AP and using it to deploy soldiers and vehicles in your deck to attack. You can also unleash a special charge attack like Tarma using a Shotgun or Marco using a heavy machine gun. You can also build up a “super” attack which can be healing your units or launching a kamikaze slug across the map. You will face off and even recruit iconic enemies, defeat bosses from all 5 of the mainstream games, and hopefully build some interesting and varied decks depending on what situation arises. It’s a far cry from the bullet hell action of the mainstream series and follows a more sim management style with AFK hands-off gameplay.
The controls are fairly simple so it is easy to pick up and play, managing AP generation with the L button, and deploying units on the bottom of the screen by using the control stick and selecting them. You can also use touch screen controls in handheld which work really well. I was pleasantly surprised with how intuitive the controls were when playing in docked, thanks to the handy shortcut buttons highlighted on the screen.
There’s a lot of fan service here and during the initial hour or so of the game, I was quickly drawn in with collecting units and progressing through the overworld map stories… and then I hit my first wall. So I went back and upgraded my units, recruited some more, and equipped them with gear until I could finally beat that mission… only to hit another wall. Which then required me to manually cash in achievements for medals, recruit, upgrade, rinse, and repeat. This wasn’t down to me rushing through the game to get a review out, but I’m assuming it is a leftover relic of where you would hit a wall and be enticed to spend some actual money to get some power-ups to move the game forward, alas, there are no microtransactions in the reloaded version of the game meaning the progression grind is simply that… a grind. Despite the frustrations, I persevered to finally start getting on top of this gameplay loop, to then have the main story locked at chapter 4, pushing me into “Another Story” mode, focussing on specific armies, forcing me to build a new deck and rely on RNG to get some new heroes. There is some strategy required in your loadout, but a lot of this relies on getting certain units and items, making the game an exercise in frustration.
This is the core problem with Metal Slug Attack Reloaded, it gets in its own way instead of letting people play the game. At one stage, I spent an hour simply recruiting random soldiers, unlocking the achievements for recruiting soldiers, and unlocking some more. This is a shame really, since there’s clearly a lot of care taken with replicating the art style, music, and animations of the cult series, but results in endless menu navigation, seemingly doing everything in its power to keep you outside of the action. When you do get there, it runs well, and the action on screen is well-animated and exciting, it’s just a shame that the gameplay loop results in navigating a series of menus over and over until you complete a level, only to do it all over again. Once the initial excitement wears off because you have to auto-battle a level 10 times in a row to upgrade your troops, it becomes a chore to slog your way through roadblock after roadblock, and the diversions in place send you into walls more often than not.
At $15 AUD, There’s still some game here for diehard fans of the series but (and I can’t believe I’m saying this) I feel like Attack Reloaded would have been better as a free-to-play with microtransactions, rather than removing them. In this case, it feels like the stick is still there to make you want to progress, only for the carrot not being there to buy. For my vision-impaired generals, there are no accessibility options, although the game has a 1-pixel black stroke around units, and icons are clearly defined in the interface. As always, I recommend further research to find out if Metal Slug Attack Releaded is for you.
I am a diehard Metal Slug series fan. I spent a lot of my teens going to arcade lock-ins to play Metal Slug 1 and X, own all of the Arcade Classic Versions on Switch, and as such a fan, I’m not really sure who Metal Slug Attack Reloaded is catered for. There’s wonderful care taken in the art style and direction, but none taken to try to emulate the excitement of the series it’s based on. I think this could be a nice diversion if the difficulty spikes were evened out to compensate for the lack of microtransactions, but in its current state will most likely frustrate players to no end. Metal Slug Attack Reloaded is still a Metal Slug experience for fans and newcomers alike, albeit, just not a very good one.
So What’s It Like? Metal Slug Attack Reloaded is like Plants Vs Zombies, mixed with Raid Shadow Legends.
