Once again, the world is on the verge of being taken over by evil General Donald Morden and his rebel army. Only the Peregrine Falcon Squad, led by the heroic Marco Rossi, is stopping the rebels from establishing their new world order. This could be the plot of almost any entry in the Metal Slug series, which is best when you don't take it too seriously. Metal Slug Attack Reloaded, a remake of a microtransaction-laden gacha tower-defense mobile game, does its best to maintain the series' silly tone while removing the worst parts of the 2016 version.
At least, it does its best to remove the frustrating parts. The Switch version has no microtransactions, thankfully – but it still feels like a gacha game in which you're expected to log in every day and work your way to victory. The result is an uneven but still entertaining game that's constrained by its origins.
Metal Slug Attack Reloaded's story, like most of the series that build off of it, is paper-thin even at the best of times. Marco Rossi and the Peregrine Falcon Squad lead a force to stop the rebel army from taking over the world. It's unclear whether this is to be done through expert strategy or brute strength as the gameplay after each short cutscene is an exercise in sending wave after wave of units at enemies until you've managed to destroy their base. It's the kind of simple, mindless fun that works well as a mobile game but feels lackluster when ported to consoles. Even the addition of a 'sequel' story, cleverly titled Another Story, doesn't change the fact that there's not really enough plot to see you through the dozen hours it takes to complete it.
In each battle you buy units with AP (action points) and send them onto the battlefield, where they'll destroy the enemy base or die trying. More powerful units cost more AP, but you can upgrade your base so you can regenerate AP more quickly, allowing you to buy more powerful units faster. That basic flow of gameplay is interrupted when you activate a unit's or your base's special move, but you'll spend more of your time buying units so they can go on their way to a slow death on the right side of the arena.
The little strategy that comes into the game is actually in which unit you choose to take on each level. Choosing a unit that attacks flying enemies isn't usually necessary until the game presents you with a stage that consists almost exclusively of flying enemies. Each unit can be leveled up, evolved into a more powerful form, and given equipment to boost their stats. This is ostensibly done in the name of customizing your deck to suit your play style, but in reality it's a leftover from Metal Slug Attack Reloaded's origins as a gacha game.
Each time you complete a mission, you'll receive medals and tickets. Tickets are used to upgrade your units or base stats, giving you an edge in the next mission. Medals boost the game's gacha mechanics and allow you to pull for a handful of units, allowing you to unlock one of the game's over 300 characters from the Metal Slug series who will fight for you in battle. Metal Slug Attack Reloaded is noticeably less predatory than most mobile gacha games, but it also shows how superficial and blatantly unfair the system can be.
This system is the cause of one of the biggest problems with Metal Slug Attack Reloaded – the brutal and often unfair difficulty spikes that appear throughout the campaign. Occasionally, you'll come across a level that's suddenly far more challenging than the previous one. No amount of strategy in how you deploy your units will help. Often, it's simply a matter of replacing the units you have in your deck with different units more suited to the enemy. However, this can mean striving for a better, more powerful unit, a lengthy and sometimes frustrating process that was originally intended to encourage players to spend money to ensure a rarer or better unit. However, without microtransactions, it feels unnecessarily harsh to the point where it almost breaks the game.
Fans of the Metal Slug series will enjoy seeing some of the more silly armies and units featured in the game. There are the usual rebel and regular army characters, but you'll quickly run into aliens from Mars, mummy dogs, and samurai mechs along the way. It breaks up the game's already weak plot somewhat to have an army made up of all these factions, but you'll hardly notice when you summon a giant slug to ram into your enemies. The only downside is that the roster is a tiny fraction of the original game's hundreds of units.
If the story mode isn't enough for you, you have the option to play against local or online players using your chosen deck, although be warned – like any other gacha game, there will be people who will grind for hours and simply leave you and your team in the dust. It's the nature of the game, but, luckily, online battles can be avoided entirely if you prefer to play more casually.
When Metal Slug Attack's servers shut down in 2023, fans probably thought their favorite tower defense gacha game was gone forever. Unfortunately, they were half-right. As it is, we're not convinced the hours of hard work required to advance the plot are really worth it.
conclusion
Metal Slug Attack Reloaded removes some of the worst parts of the original mobile game's mechanics, but the scaled-back roster and brutal difficulty spikes highlight the excessive grind required to make a game like this profitable and will likely fail to satisfy anyone except the most hardcore fans of the original. Good or bad, it feels exactly like a mobile game that's been ported to the Switch, with all the flaws that entails.