The Metal Slug franchise has largely been dead in recent years except for the occasional spin-off title or remake. The last mainline entry in the Metal Slug series was in 2008 on the Nintendo DS. Need I say more? When you’ve already conquered the run-and-gun genre with little evolution since then, where else is there to go? Turns out like a lot of other recent franchises spinning off, the answer is a tactics game. Metal Slug Tactics is one of the first big forays for the IP in a while and though its genre switch-up isn’t perfect, it nails the tone and provides an explosive good time.

Metal Slug Tactics has players venturing out in parties of three across a series of biomes and overworld maps to eventually reach the end, coming head-to-toe with General Morden in a tense final battle. With nine characters to choose from, all iconic heroes from the franchise’s past, it’s a hell of a throwback. I don’t just mean in style and appearance either; Metal Slug Tactics is delightfully tough as nails, no matter how seasoned a tactics player you may be. You didn’t suddenly expect a Metal Slug game to be easy, did you?

The number one way that Metal Slug Tactics emulates the series’ trademark difficulty is through the genius decision to make it a rogue-lite. Every misstep or devastating blow against one of your heroes is felt, especially when revives and turn rewinds are extremely limited. If all of your party is dead, the run is over and you have to start right back from the start. There’s no Advance Wars-esque way of simply reloading the same mission and giving it another stab. You die, that’s it. Because of this, the game does an excellent job of constantly having players weigh up how prepared they want to be in the final fight. It dangles the carrot of valuable upgrades and currency, that if you were to survive, would come with you out of your run. I lost count of the times I cockily made a run end early because I decided to go after one too many optional objectives in a mission or go visit one extra biome when I realistically was prepped enough to go straight for Morden.

Thankfully there are just as many enticing and varied ways of play for each character that keep you going. Metal Slug Tactics begins with three playable characters in Marco, Fio and Eri. Each starts with their ‘classic’ arsenal of two weapons, a weaker firearm with unlimited ammo and a more powerful special weapon with limited ammunition that you can quickly work your way through if you’re not careful. These three are an incredibly fitting starter trio for the game, with Marco and Fio’s equipped special weapons being assault rifles while Eri is a demolitions expert with high explosive grenades and a grenade launcher. All the characters bounce off each other well, but where they’re truly distinguished is in their unique passive and active abilities. Sync attacks occur when a pair or more of your party are positioned to hit an enemy at the same time. This means that if you attack the enemy with one hero, the AI has your other teammate also pull off a free attack, letting you dole out some damage. This game and Metal Slug as a brand remain effortlessly cool. That’s where the fun begins.

Despite that initial hurdle, getting intimate with the cast’s various abilities and how you mix and match these with their attacks becomes immensely rewarding. You see, Metal Slug Tactics is a game where you get more out of it the more you put in. The challenges of deciding whether to queue up either an attack or ability becomes non-existent if you invest in the right upgrades. Each ability has an additional bonus perk with the actual feat it achieves. Say you use an ability that attacks directly in front of you for x damage. If it’s meshed with a perk that allows for an extra action if this ability kills someone, then you essentially just get a free bonus turn with that character. Suddenly the game is all that more lateral. You’re playing 4D chess as you move around and make quick and tidy work of the battlefield.

Eri’s ability to move a character on the battlefield to place someone in or out of danger. Marco’s ability to stack adrenaline throughout turns to save up for an ultra-powerful AoE. Tarma’s explosive jump launches him far across a map and adds splash damage to surrounding enemies upon landing. Play your cards right and every ability and the upgrades you’ll purchase along the way leave you with a good fighting chance. None of these are more devastating than the special rarer air support you can call in, should you unlock them via completing optional objectives in missions. These allow for the summoning of tanks and mechs that characters can hop into with added protection and punchy munitions that’ll one-hit-kill almost anything in sight. Always a handy tide-turner when the match isn’t going your way, they would be my favourite thing to indulge in if they didn’t result in bugs. Often hopping in one of these machines sees an accidental duplicate of a character model that won’t go away. If you’re playing on a controller, suddenly the option to use an attack following calling in one of these machines is gone for the rest of the match unless you reset or swap to mouse and keyboard. I learnt this the hard way, costing me my first stab at clearing a run.

At the end of the day, I can never be mad at Metal Slug Tactics’ technical shortcomings all that long, simply because it’s so satisfying to play and cool to watch a battlefield be ripped apart. It’s a game insisting on always providing you with cool setpieces and action goodness and a majority of the time it delivers on that promise. Boss fights are tense fights for your life, fleeing from and attacking a sea ship hailing artillery on you and leaving you running out of safe platforms to traverse.  In the Morden boss fight, you’re witnessing a monolithic mech emerge from a giant ocean of lava in front of your very eyes, suddenly you’re juggling soldiers on the surface with you and this giant beast in front of you. Different biomes even come with their challenges and interesting tidbits; the Egypt-themed area houses walking mummies that can inflict a curse on your party members and turn them into mummies themselves. The jungle biome may be home to questionable tribal characters but has plenty of traps such as idols that erupt in lightning should they be destroyed. A handy crowd killer.

Best yet, it is an incredibly retro throwback to those original Metal Slug games. When you load into a level the vignette falls from the sky and pops in front of you with satisfying sound effects. There’s an announcer who declares when a match begins and when it ends in victory, the latter having the battlefield erupt in a series of explosions as your party celebrates. Arcade-style font will often pop up as will satisfying animated chiptune blips and the like. Flashes of characters’ faces will cover the screen as they let off an ultimate attack, an incredible anime flourish to have. Pixel art of the cast and environments is stunning, made most evident in the hub areas in between biomes where you can see your cast hanging out as other lowly soldiers offload loot and crates in the background. All of this helps to make Metal Slug Tactics feel immensely striking and a hell of a blast from the past.

Metal Slug Tactics can run just about however long you want it to. There are always more abilities and perks to unlock to be found in future runs. You’re always chasing currency and resources to take back to your base to set yourself up for future runs. Though it’s not always the exact type of grind in a tactics adventure I’m usually after (I’m more of a Marvel’s Midnight Suns or Advance Wars girl myself), I can’t deny that they won me over entirely. Though I’m about ready to call it with the dozen or so hours I’ve got so far, I can easily see this being a certain type of tactics nut’s forever game.