Slugfest
From the start menu of Metal Slug 7, players can do one of several things. You can hop right into the fray and engage in the brief, although difficult story mode. You can also go to Combat School and partake in some pointless conversation with the school’s leader, or take on one of a couple dozen or so challenges. These challenges include various things like defeating a boss within a certain time limit, doing part of a mission with no grenades, etc. — different challenges are marked by the mission number they’re derived from and by a letter that indicates how hard they will be. Completed challenges earn you points, but as far as I can tell they don’t earn you anything in the story mode or otherwise. Players can also view high scores for story mode completion time and mission statistics, as well as check out the prisoners saved during story mode. Lastly, players can also edit options including re-arranging the control scheme.
As you may already be able to tell, Metal Slug 7 is a fairly bare bones offering with not even a wireless co-operative mode to speak of. This lack of depth is ultimately the release’s biggest flaw, because everything from a technical point of view and a gameplay point of view are fine. That said, gamers will take to the Story Mode fairly quickly. You can choose between three levels of difficulty, with one major difference between them being the number of credits or continues you’re allowed. Each credit gives players three lives, and you’ll burn through these rather quickly as a single hit or fall during one of the very few jump puzzles spells instant death.
The difficulty of Metal Slug 7 isn’t something new to the series, especially given its quarter-munching arcade roots. Twitch reflexes are required, and a good memory of where enemies are going to pop up is helpful. The variety of powerups and different weapons you pick up by freeing prisoners helps quite a bit, not to mention those trusty grenades. And while the game never approaches Contra-level difficulty, it’s a real challenge, but a short one.
Each mission tends to only last around ten to fifteen minutes and always culminates in a boss fight against a massive mech of some kind or another. My favorite boss fight was against a large spider like mech that you face in mission four I believe. The missions are similar to one another and to those in other games in the series in that you play as one of a few selectable characters, each with a different appearance and slightly different weapons abilities. You will face dozens of foe coming from all sides. Enemies attack in all of the familiar ways and look the same as in other games in the series too, standard green fatigues with a variety of weapons, mortars, tanks, and helicopters for you to blow to smithereens. You’ll have the assistance of flamethrowers, tesla guns, automatic rifles, shotguns, and slugs (vehicles you can hop in to and control), however, and the balance is fairly reasonable.
Overall, Metal Slug 7 stays true to its roots and provides an extremely comparable experience to other Metal Slug games, right down to the funny animations and difficulty.
On the DS
Metal Slug 7 being an exclusive to the Nintendo DS is a bit curious to me still, and I wouldn’t doubt that at some point it will be released for another platform. In the meantime though, the DS does a good job of bringing us this title although no use of specific DS hardware was used. The game plays on the top screen, while on the lower screen players can view a bland looking map of the area they’re currently in. Given how fast paced the action is in Metal Slug 7, and how linear it is, there isn’t much point in a map at all. Wi-Fi, Game Sharing, the microphone – none of these features are used at all, the most unfortunate of which is the inability to play cooperatively with friends, my favorite way to play Metal Slug.
With that, let’s get to the scoring…