Metal Slug XX (Xbox 360)

The Metal Slug series is best known as a fixture of the arcade, the first six games in the series all based around drawing in players with gorgeous pixel art and then claiming quarter after quarter with a sidescrolling run and gun game that was exciting but at the same time very difficult due your characters going down to a single shot. However, releasing a game for a home console would be new territory, and Metal Slug XX, originally released as Metal Slug 7 on the DS, had the chance to take advantage of different hardware and console play styles to shift the Metal Slug formula into something new. However, this wasn’t the route they would take, but even more Metal Slug goodness still wouldn’t be a bad thing. It seems the developers might not have been as inspired this go round though, developing almost as if they were still working on an arcade game but not quite hitting the levels of bombastic energy other Metal Slug games used to rope in players.

Perhaps one reason this feels so strange is that a home console should technically allow for the game to explore more levels and have a more expansive story than the usual fare, but Metal Slug XX goes for something surprisingly basic. Long time series antagonist General Morden has reemerged with his same plans of using his mighty military power to take over and the Regular Army aims to stop him once again, tracking him down to an island of junk and scrap to defeat him before he can make anything too powerful or get his plans off the ground. Funnily enough, this all seems to be essentially resolved in the first level of the game, the player defeating Morden in a giant drilling machine and moving on, but a portal opens up to reveal Morden’s troops from the future stepping through with technologically advanced suits and weapons. Had things picked up from here and continued moving on, Metal Slug XX would definitely have a unique identity in the series and could continue to throw interesting new boss concepts and weapons at you along your run and gun adventure, but for some reason, the sci-fi elements are shelved until the game is almost over, and even then they’re more like a single level’s gimmick than a large focus. Instead, you spend most the game up against Morden’s regular soldiers, vehicles, and mechanical bosses.

Despite mostly ignoring the sci-fi setup seen early on, Metal Slug XX still makes its basic military theme work well and stretches what can fit inside it. Most of what you’ll face will be the footsoldiers packing different weapons or approaching you in different ways like parachuting in from above or trying to ambush you from the left of the screen. Since every attack is deadly, they’re still legitimate threats, but most any gun you’re packing can deal with them as well. Enemies also can come in tanks or helicopters, but even the vehicle variety here is different enough that you can expect to be shot at with machine gun fire, artillery, or bombs depending on the type of vehicle, and every now and then the game will toss in a more robotic enemy or some hostile wildlife to make your enemies a bit less of constant tide of men in dull green driving brown vehicles. Areas can quickly get filled with enemies so the challenge if quite often about dealing with the dangerous enemies while making sure to sweep up the weaker ones before they can slip through, but everything is so fat-paced that its more about reflex than planning out who to shoot. It keeps the action quick and mostly enjoyable, but the game trotting out the same soldiers even when it changes the area you’re in doesn’t help. There are different environment like a snow level, waterfall stage, and an underground area, and while these can throw a few new hazards or enemies at you, it’s mostly just going to be a new place to face the same soldiers from before.

The bosses are a bit more interesting, as they are often huge mechanical beasts or vehicles. Still sort of slipping into the general color palette of the enemy forces and thus making them a bit less visually exciting than their designs could have otherwise been, these big baddies certainly put up the more interesting fights in the game, often being brutally punishing if you don’t know what to expect. This is probably the best time to mention though that Metal Slug XX uses the same continue system some of the previous entries in the series received when they were ported to consoles. You do die easily in Metal Slug XX and will no doubt die often on a first playthrough, but you can always hop right into the action and continue if you so wish. You can always continue and get to the end of the game easily enough just with dogged persistence, but every revive will take away any special weapon you have equipped, with a revive after the Continue countdown heavily damaging your score and also taking away the Prisoner of War bonuses you earned for freeing any you found during the course of the stage. This definitely prevents the difficulty from being bothersome and makes it much easier to swallow that many bosses will likely teach you how to fight them by first killing you with their new moves before you know how to dodge them. Metal Slug XX is less interested in making beating the game hard than it is making point accumulation and going for optional stuff like the POWs a main focus on repeat playthroughs, although a bit more work could have been done to make its core content interesting enough to encourage such devotion to perfecting your skills to avoid death and earn a high score.

The way you fight Mordren’s troops is just as important as how they fight you though towards making this a decent run and gun game. The player is able to pick between six playable characters, even able to swap them at the Continue countdown later if they aren’t liking the feel of someone they’ve died as a bit too much. Each of them has a few minor differences from the others, nothing to really make any one worse but some characters having a few very useful perks. Fio, for example, gets more ammo for special weapons she picks up and starts with a stronger weapon than the others, and Ralf is able to take two hits before dying instead of the typical one. This can make a character like Eri who just gets more grenades seem a little tame by comparison, but even those will have their moments, especially since reviving can restock your grenades and thus long boss fights can mean Eri’s going to be a force to be reckoned with due to her explosive edge.

The weapon variety much more meaningfully impacts play, and no character is locked out from any of the special weapons. Defeating certain enemies or finding letter symbols in the level will give you a new weapon, the player able to hold two at a time and swap between them as they wish. The basic pistol is serviceable, but everything else makes for more energetic battles as you pack the power necessary to hold back the enemy. The Heavy Machine Gun spits out a tightly packed and consistent spray of bullets, the shotgun has a huge short range blast, and the rocket launcher fires fairly quickly considering its explosive strength. The weapons are definitely designed to feel strong and hit hard, but they’re limited in ammo and lost on death, so spray-and-pray tactics aren’t as useful as some actual aiming. There are some more unique weapons to pick up as well like a missle car that will race across the ground to blow up on an enemy and a thunder gun that arcs between multiple foes, plus your grenades and a melee attack that is surprisingly useful due to how crowded you might get. You can pop into vehicles now and again as well, the series staple Metal Slug tank having a freely rotating cannon and able to take much more damage than your regular character, but there are some quirkier choices as well like a giant mech suit as well as a battle ostrich you can ride into the fray. Weapon-wise, Metal Slug XX has what it needs, it just doesn’t feel like the opposition is always up to giving your weapons, characters, and vehicles the kind of challenge that would make them shine.

Metal Slug XX did embrace the fact it’s on consoles in one way though. Outside of the main playthrough, there’s a mission mode on the side in the form of the Combat School. While Metal Slug XX wants you to embrace multiple playthroughs of the game with points as your goal, in the Combat School, it outright makes that the requirement for beating its missions. Unfortunately, many of the missions here are just the same levels and bosses again but the game asks you to do it without dying too much or while collecting items. There are a few special missions though that actually introduce new challenges that change how you play such as destroying junk as it rains down from the sky or shooting a ball to keep it in the air as you fulfill other objectives like fighting off enemies or progressing through a level. It’s a bit more to do after the short campaign, but naturally, more attention into making the main game more diverse and compelling would be preferred over a mission mode that only has a few new ideas to bring to the table.

THE VERDICT: Metal Slug XX and by extension Metal Slug 7 had the chance to use its nature as being built from the ground up for console to really expand the scope of the series’s run and gun action, but instead, it seems to have retreated even further into the formulaic than the arcade entries. It’s still got the difficulty of dying in one hit balanced out by the enjoyment of incredibly strong weapons, wonderful sprite art, and some bombastic boss battles, but outside of some thing like riding an ostrich into battle and a brief flirtation with time travel, most of what you’ll face does feel like the same basic soldiers and vehicles even as the levels try to shift things around to hide it. The Combat School’s missions don’t really expand the play much further, so Metal Slug XX mostly coasts along on the work of the previous games, ensuring it will have some decent and energetic play but not many standout moments or concepts.

And so, I give Metal Slug XX for Xbox 360…

An OKAY rating. Metal Slug XX feels like the base of a game that somehow forgot to include its big central gimmick. Even when the brief time-traveling element pops in as this Metal Slug game’s unique idea, it’s pretty much the same men and machines you’ve seen before but with a new design for their armor and weapons. Even looking beyond that though, much of the game just hits on the things that make Metal Slug enjoyable without trying to take them anywhere. The shooting is strong and up to its task of chewing through enemies, but those enemies aren’t really challenging you with anything that will really shift the gameplay away from a basic running and gunning style that almost universally works here. You might pop into a vehicle briefly or face a boss that asks for something new, but it’s not such a large shift that it really feels like the gameplay is changing for the better. Even in a Metal Slug, you’re basically just your character but can take more hits.

Coming after six games that felt out the formula ensures that it’s mechanically sound, but its not very stimulating because even in the context of the game, it feels like we’ve seen all Metal Slug XX is offering before. Older Metal Slugs had to draw in players with new twists and incredible sprite work since they were arcade machines looking to claim every quarter they can, but Metal Slug XX just seems happy to let the Metal Slug name draw you in, not really trying to be much more than another game in the series.