Metal Slug Review (OptimalButthole)
I liked the game for what it is but as a whole, I don’t think that it was that great. I wouldn’t recommended anyone to buy it unless it’s on a deep sale and you are a metal slug fan.
The Good
It was a very action-packed game.
It was an easy game that you could beat in like an hour.
There were character profiles where you could read about each character’s history. I thought that was pretty cool. But I’m not sure if that backstory was made by the original developers who created the original metal slug games and characters.
I like that the enemies, characters, items, vehicles, and bosses were still pixelated.
The music was okay.
The game ran good. I think it’s the best running metal slug port that I’ve tried yet.
There’s an auto shoot option.
There are separate missions in “Combat School” that you can do separately a part from the main game. These missions are basically like doing hard objectives. I never did them but I thought that it was a nice inclusion to the game.
The Bad
The game has a mix of different art styles within the game. In the main menu of the game, the characters weren’t drawn in the original style. It was clearly done by someone who’s not good at replicating the style. Which to me, says that the original team has long been gone and had no part in this port.
Another problem that I had with the game, is that when you play the game, the art styles are very different. In the original games, the entire tileset for the game was pixelated work. In this game, it was like someone else did the background work and the team that made this game, just took the pixelated characters from the past metal slug games and threw them into this game. It’s ugly and repulsive. Some of the art is even blurry to look at. I do however find some of the art to be good and detailed. If it was just done in a pixelated form, I would have been happy with it.
In the combat school menu, you can talk to the instructor. When you do, she keeps saying stuff like, how she is not interested in the advances of the person who is talking to her, but the person keeps asking for her information, and takes her phone, and looks through it and stuff. I thought it was very creepy and gross. I can see how maybe a game designer might find it funny but I didn’t like it. People like that in real life, who make jokes like that, are never funny.
The options menu cannot be used when in the game. So, imagine you wanted to change the audio settings or anything really, you can’t. You’d have to leave the game and then change the settings then go back into the game see the difference. The only thing that you can change in game is by making it 4 by 3 resolution or by making it wide screen. It’s such a bad job that I have nothing else to say.
There’s no story, yet again for the game. Just a typical metal slug experience but not as good as 3. At least in metal slug three, there was some kind driven story where the characters work together to try and stop something that appears out of nowhere. Here in metal slug XX, nothing makes sense and I’m left dissatisfied.
I don’t like the game is called metal slug XX. Why can’t it be numbers? Can you imagine if they were to make metal slug xxx someday and what a typical search on google for the game would be like? Having it be letter just confuses me and I don’t like it.
When I tried to play the game on steam, it wanted to install some apk thing? I didn’t let it install and then a window popped up for me to choose what size of the game that I’d like to play in. It then let me play the game. I’m just not sure why that first thing needed to be installed if the game works without it?
Conclusion
I like the ideas that the game had. Like the boss battles and that red ball chasing you, but the game looked like a different type of metal slug game that I was not used to. It was still an action-packed game that was fun to play but I wish it was better.
Only buy on a deep sale. It is not worth $22.79.