One of my best friends introduced me to the Metal Slug series via an emulator on his PC when we lived together. The Metal Slug games featured a cartoon-ish (dare I say anime-esque?) graphic style. You selected one of two people in the first ones; later they added two more characters. You ran forward, carrying the default gun in this side scrolling game. You saved prisoners of war, found around the levels tied up, with thick beards and nothing on but boxer shorts, they’d whip out a heavy machine gun, flame throwers, extra grenades, all kinds of fun stuff.Occasionally you’d find a tank (if I remember correctly, the “Metal Slug”s of the game’s name) and use it – the little one man tanks could even jump!
Amazingly enough, Metal Slug Mobile Impact looks almost exactly the same as those old games. Unfortunately, at least on my Sanyo MM-8300, it’s so laggy that it doesn’t really meet up with the feel of the original.
And what’s that feel?
OVERWHELMING SLAUGHTER!
(heck yeah!)
I’ll try to put it into a bit of perspective. Last weekend I showed the game to a friend of mine – the very one who hooked me on the original series. He saw it and was disappointed with the game play as well. We went out and bought the Xbox combo pack of Metal Slug 4 & 5, sat down, and played through it with the standard infinite continues and beat both of them.
You don’t have infinite continues in Metal Slug Mobile Impact.
What you have, basically, is a slow moving side scroller. You can jump, duck, shoot, etc., but it’s all rather slow, and on a cell phone, having to rapidly hit the keys like that can often lead to accidentally pausing the game (by clicking “end”).
In addition, you have a non-intuitive interface. You have to set up a sign-on to get it to work, which means the game will not let you play as yourself without being on the network (that is also because it’s a monthly fee game, not a one-time fee). The sign-in process is vague and poorly documented – it took me repeated tries to get it to work, past “getting the user ID” and “finding a working password”.
Though I will have to admit – the game seems less laggy when you’re NOT on the network and playing as guest.
You have the standard weapons – rocket launchers, flame throwers, heavy machine guns. Unlike other Metal Slug games instead of dying in one shot you have a health bar and one “life”. You’ve got a number of continues, but that’s not documented.
So what’s wrong?
You move slow, and the game is slow. Metal Slug is about fast action.
Enemies can easily get into place where they can shoot you, but not vice versa.
Jumping is buggy – a lot of times you cannot jump forward.
The controls when you get into a Metal Slug – a small armored tank – are very buggy. It’s nearly impossible to tell which way your turret will fire without firing it, and hard to aim it with any sort of accuracy in a general direction.
Unfortunately, the game just doesn’t hold up to the originals. Maybe on a bigger, more powerful cell phone it works better than on mine, but in general, I’d rather get the game on a dedicated video game platform that can let it go full out, full speed, then try to sneak it onto my phone.
I'm a 29 year old senior network and systems engineer for a consulting firm in the DC area. I'm mostly into MMOs and FPSes (on the console), and I'm a big pro football fan. In my other spare time I like to write and tend to read copious amounts of history and military sci-fi. I'm also into cooking and bad action movies.
