Metal Slug Defense review: the Metal Slug game we all deserve

SNK Playmore has been busily porting over the old Metal Slug games for mobile devices, and while they were some of the best games in the arcade and later on home consoles, I feel that they are not suited for mobile devices because of the control system. It’s simply too hard to perform tricky maneuvers on your touch screen.

Finally, my prayers for a good Metal Slug game on the mobile have been answered, and the solution was simple—use the gorgeous sprites from the original metal slug games and turn the whole thing into Battle Cats. The result is a brilliant and beautiful game, albeit with one major flaw.

For those of you who have never played tower defense games like Battle Cats or Line Rangers, the premise is simple: both you and the enemy have bases at either end of a two-dimensional map, and you spawn minions to cut through the waves of enemies, before destroying the enemy’s base.

This new genre of game that follows the Battle Cats style is called tower defense, and in my opinion it’s all a bit too confusing when there’s an entirely different genre of game going by the same title. In the original tower defense games, you build towers to defend, but in games like Metal Slug Defense, you defend your tower, so while it’s all good English, it’s just bad naming sense.

(See: Line Rangers review: how does it compare with the almost-identical Battle Cats?)

In Metal Slug Defense, the units you use and fight against are all native to the Metal Slug world. Tanks, infantry, and the many familiar faces of the series return in their full sprite glory. You initially start out only being able to build sandbags and fodder soldiers, but as you complete stages you will unlock the four original cast members of Metal Slug.

What really blew me away about Metal Slug Defense is how much more strategy is required to succeed. I tried playing this game the same way I succeeded in Battle Cats and Line Rangers, which was simply by upgrading my rate of resource production to spawn units till I could afford mass production to overrun the enemy with sheer numbers.

That exact strategy didn’t get me past stage 5 in Metal Slug Defense. To succeed in this game, you have to use individual skills that each unit possesses. For example, the fodder soldier is cheap and dies quickly, but every few seconds you can tap on them to make them throw pretty powerful grenades. Your job is to fully utilize every unit’s skills, so you have more on your hands than just managing your resources and building of new units.

(See: Love Metal Slug? You Will Love Apocalypse Max)

Another example of good strategy in Metal Slug Defense is how useful the sandbags are. You would think that sandbags which can’t attack would be useless, but they provide a great way to buy time for producing better units, or for hiding from cannon fire while lobbing grenades. You definitely need to employ a lot more strategy for Metal Slug Defense than for other games in the genre, and I love it.

Much like other tower defense games, Metal Slug: Defense requires you to upgrade your units and defenses with the money you earn completing each mission. Similarly, it employs the same system of collecting items which are randomly given at the end of each stage to boost your stats, goading you into playing through each stage multiple times to add replayability. All in all, there’s a lot to do in this game, and perhaps for the first time I’m thankful there’s a stamina system that forces me to take breaks.