One of the genres I’ve really come to appreciate in more compact forms in the past generation has been strategy games. While traditionally you’d think of more grand world-building titles like Civilization or SimCity, or more on the tactical side of things with the likes of X-Com, smaller strategy has continued to make strides in becoming more refined and common. One avenue that really helps with this are roguelike strategy titles, primarily including deckbuilders, but there have been other flavors as well. 

Metal Slug Attack Reloaded is one such alternative compact strategy flavor, with a head-to-head take on a variation of tower defense that I’ve seen in other titles, though this absolutely has more for retro fans to latch onto. With characters, vehicles, weapons, and environments ripped directly from the classic Metal Slug arcade series, you can’t accuse it of lacking in personality or flavor. Indeed, the graphics, music, and sound effects quickly and easily tap into fond retro memories, it’s just where the gameplay is concerned that things aren’t quite as rosy. What’s disappointing is that for a while the game gets off to a promising start. You and your enemy are on either side of the screen, and you’ll need to accumulate currency that will then let you select which units to throw into battle, with the goal of overwhelming your enemy and destroying their base before they manage to do the same to you.

But once you get past that honeymoon phase, what may have a lot to do with the game’s original mobile free-to-play with micro-transaction roots begin to show. You’ll begin to have to dive into a rabbit hole of management screens, different resources, currencies, units, upgrades for all sorts of things, trying to get new units in something of a gacha game format, and more. Worse, while you may have felt at least mildly competent in completing some stages you’ll pretty suddenly hit a wall… and pretty hard at that. What struck me was that while I’d been successful I hadn’t really even upgraded much of anything. But once I moved to the next campaign I dove into it all, thinking I’d made some good general choices to keep me ahead of the competitiveness curve, but then promptly got curb stomped. Thinking I’d missed something I did something else for a bit, came back, tried to rearrange some things to improve my viability and still got wrecked pretty hard. 

There’s nothing wrong with games being difficult, even when they may be discouragingly so. That said, when it happens quite suddenly, seemingly pretty early in your play time, and that’s accompanied by you drowning in an avalanche of screens with things to manage, the game loses its simple charms and appeal in a hurry. What could have been a middling strategy challenge that nostalgic lovers of all things Metal Slug could simply kick back and enjoy became weirdly aggressive, and playing out in a much tougher and less enjoyable fashion than some of its more moderate contemporaries. I love my Metal Slug, but in the end this particular variation on the series just seems to be an unbalanced mess.