This surprising new Metal Slug game is $10 well spent

digitaltrends.com:

The latest Nintendo Direct didn’t have many surprise releases, but the one game that did come out immediately after the presentation caught my eye. Metal Slug Attack Reloaded from SNK recontextualizes the classic side-scrolling shooter series with gameplay more reminiscent of tower defense auto-battle games. Its roots go back to a 2016 mobile game called Metal Slug Attack; while that revelation might make you want to click off the page, you shouldn’t because this game is surprisingly entertaining. Metal Slug Attack Reloaded is a textbook case of how you can take the core ideas and aesthetic of a classic, reinterpret it with a new style of gameplay, and still feel faithful to the franchise at large.

Metal Slug games are typically side-scrollers where players control soldiers blasting their way through stages with a variety of bombastic weapons. It’s explosive, fairly fast-paced, and still quite fun today. I still have the Xbox 360 re-release of Metal Slug 3 downloaded on my Xbox Series X and boot it up whenever I’m in the mood for it. In comparison, Metal Slug Attack Reloaded is a slower-paced game that plays quite differently. The core conceit of every level is that players want to protect their own base while destroying their opponent’s base. These bases are both attacked and defended by Units, which players customize decks of before a battle in order to determine what will be at their disposal.

Once players accrue enough AP to spawn a unit, they can press a button to summon one, which will march from one player’s base to another and attack any units encountered on the way. Every level in Metal Slug Attack Reloaded follows that core gameplay loop, though each has its own spin on the kinds and frequency of enemy units encountered and the length between the bases. The AP system and constant need to refresh units mean that Metal Slug Attack Reloaded is far from being an idle game, even if its minimalist presentation, pixel-art