Run, Wash, and Gun- Metal Slug XX Review

Metal Slug XX is ostensibly a re-release of Metal Slug 7, which saw a release for the Nintendo DS over a year ago.  In the series’ seventh outing, the Peregrine Falcon Strike Force team up with the SPARROWS, from previous Metal Slug titles, and the Ikari Warriors (yes, those Ikari Warriors) to once again stop General Morden from taking over the world with his army of would-be Nazis and creating his New World Order.  At the end of the first stage, you defeat the mad general and give yourself a nice hardy pat on the back, but General Morden’s future army travels backwards in time, to the present, which is set 20 years into our future, to help Morden conquer Planet Earth.  Kojima himself would have difficulty coming up with such a convoluted story, but it doesn’t really matter, because the all you need to know is this: you have a gun; there are hundreds of fragile Nazis that bleed when you shoot them; walk to the right until they are all dead.

It’s the same formula that SNK has been using for 1996, and to be perfectly honest, the charm hasn’t lost its luster, even after 14 years of running and gunning.  The environments are beautifully hand-crafted and colorful.  Each and every character, from the 6 playable soldiers to the most insignificant Morden infantryman, is meticulously animated.  Each enemy sports dozens of fluidly drawn animations for a variety of scenarios: they taunt you when you die, they jump when you pick up a rocket launcher, they cringe before getting crushed by an elevator – there are tons of clever emotes to each enemy that go practically unnoticed, but go a long way toward keeping he game fresh throughout.

The main quest is seven stages long, but each stage forks into multiple paths, promoting multiple play-throughs.  Even so, the game feels deceptively easy, thanks to the advent of unlimited continues.  Without a limited supply of quarters as motivation, the urge to scream “I am invincible” and muscle through each stage is often too strong.  In fact, some characters respawn with a powerful secondary weapon, which turns player-death into a power-up rather than a punishment.  Players will lose any POWs they have collected when they continue, just as they did in the arcade, but after the last boss fell to the ground, I didn’t feel terribly motivated to go back to try rescuing any of them.  When the dust settles, and the main quest has lost its sheen, Metal Slug XX offers a Combat School mode that tasks you to clear 50 balls-to-the-wall difficult missions; some are fun, others are irritating, but all of them seem arbitrary without an achievement system.