Vehicles that were once special occasions now represent the entirety of gameplay.
Fans of side-scrolling run-and-gun blast-a-thons laud classics like Contra, but the connoisseurs always come back to Metal Slug. Hand-drawn cartoon soldiers perforated theatrical enemy grunts and tentacled aliens, and brought down screen-filling bosses with an arsenal of weapons and drivable vehicles. Just thinking about it makes us want to resurrect the corner arcade.
Accelerometer controls let you position your craft by tilting and turning your device.
Metal Slug Touch doesn't seem terribly interested in living up to that legacy, though. For one thing, all the satisfying hard-charging with machine guns, rocket launchers, and so forth has been completely excised. Across four abbreviated stages carved from the arcade original, the only time you venture from your tank or jet is when you tap the onscreen Avoid button to flip-jump from the cockpit for a moment.
Bosses are as big and beautiful as ever, and infinite continues mean victory is assured.
Power-up excitement begins and ends with turning your endless stream of auto-fire bullets from blue to red, but screens still crowd full with quirky enemies and ordnance, so mowing down creeps while trapped inside a metal shell could've still been a blast. Unfortunately, adjusting your aim is never less than a complete pain in the neck. Three control schemes let you choose between accelerometer-based tilt-and-touch and two onscreen D-pad variations, but not one gives you the touch-and-drag turret control you'll immediately crave.
Even if you choose to move with an onscreen gamepad, you'll still have a hard time targeting anything on purpose.
Even disregarding the borderline-broken controls, $5 seems a lot to ask for a retread that can't be bothered to hide the iOS status bar or let you enter your initials when you earn a high score. We love Metal Slug something fierce, but there's just no way we can recommend this cobbled-together cash-in.
The bottom line. Even devoted fans of the once-great series will find little but disappointment on the troubled battlefields of Metal Slug Touch.
iPhone or iPod touch running iOS 4.2 or later
Retains the classic, if somewhat grainy, hand-drawn look of the original games.
Run-and-gun action replaced entirely with inescapable vehicles. Aiming is torture. Overpriced. Complete absence of frills like leaderboards and achievements.
ilikeimac
March 22, 2011 at 1:01pm
Too bad. I discovered MetalSlug through MAME and had a lot of fun pouring virtual quarters in until stuff exploded. It would be fun to have a version of this playable on the upcoming iCade from ThinkGeek (thinkgeek.com/icade).
ChristopherRogers
March 22, 2011 at 11:59am
A shame. Who signed-off such a failure of a project? Metal Slug is an almost impossible formula to misconstrue, but clearly (the current) SNK botched this release horribly. Sad.
