Straight into the action with only a small amount “WE NEED TO KILL THESE GUYS NOW” storytelling before Mission Zero begins.

We haven’t got time for your exposition, just let us fucking shoot some stuff and go from there.Īnd here it is. We’re standing up, wrestling with the controls and wanting to get knee-deep into the action. We don’t have time to waste on plentiful cut-scenes. Being an arcade-style title, it lends itself to this type of vague storytelling that these games generally do. It’s pretty much a straightforward HERE ARE THE ENEMIES, GO KILL THEM type of game in much the same way the others are. Story-wise, I’m not going to beat around the bush here. In your hands.Īlbeit stripped down to be pretty much a bare bones copy of it. Let’s get this straight before anyone thinks I don’t like this game: it is only the lack of silliness that basically makes this disappointing. We’re talking the aforementioned camels with guns, turning into zombies and mummies and getting quite fat if you eat too many food items.Īnd with First Mission, we have it in the palm of our hands. Most of the time, the games sit squarely in the amazing fun circle but it does tend to drift into amazingly silly with alarming regularity. Think of the whole series of games as sitting in a Venn diagram with all three. You see, Metal Slug teeters on this weird precipice of being amazing fun, amazingly silly and oddly serious. Actually, it might have been camels but were there elephants too at one point? It’s a bizarre history. Sometimes you do it in tanks and planes and on top of elephants. It is the epitome of coin-guzzling arcade-style shooting where you press right, shoot everything and die more times than you’re truly capable of dying. It is a ferociously hard series of games for the single reason that it is an arcade game.

The Metal Slug franchise is one of those games that both irritates the life out of me and makes me feel as though I’m actually quite good at gaming sometimes.

Metal slug 2 mission 1