Metal Slug review: the war game drawn like a cartoon

A soldier is roasting food over a fire. He looks up, sees you, and screams. Then the screen fills with bullets. Metal Slug is a punishing arcade shooter, and it is also one of the funniest games ever put in a cabinet.

Why does it feel so different from other shooters?

Mechanically it is a classic run and gun: move right, shoot everything, face a huge boss. The difference is in the details of contact. The player does not die by coming into contact with enemies, and many enemies have melee attacks of their own. You have a knife too, which makes closing the distance a real choice rather than a mistake. It changes the rhythm. You are not only dodging; you are deciding when to get close.

Then there is the tank. The SV-001 adds firepower and a lot of protection, and finding one feels like being handed a gift. Losing it feels like a small tragedy.

A hard game becomes lovable when it is also willing to be funny.

Drawn by people who cared about every frame

Reviews at the time were mixed, but they lauded its sense of humor and fluid hand-drawn animation, and that praise still reads as understatement. Soldiers sunbathe, chat and panic. Much of the scenery is destructible. Freed prisoners of war hand you bonuses. Marco Rossi and Tarma Roving move with a bounce that makes every jump look deliberate.

The same reviews criticized its short length, and that is fair. But in an arcade, short and intense was the right shape. One reviewer complained that playing through the arcade version took an inordinate amount of quarters, which, if you were there, is not news.

What it meant back then

In American arcades of the mid-nineties, Metal Slug did not sit at the center of the room the way the big fighting games did. You found it at the pizza place, the bowling alley, the corner of a laundromat. It was the game that made a stranger stop behind you, laughing at the enemy animations while you died over and over. Two players side by side, sharing the last grenade, was the best version of it.

Playing it today

It has aged better than almost anything else from its era, because hand-drawn animation does not go out of date the way early polygons did. It is still hard, still short, and still funny. Play it with a friend and do not be embarrassed about continuing. Everyone did.