Metal Slug 7 Review
In with the Neo.
Version tested: DS
For over thirteen years now, SNK has been releasing much the same videogame over and over again. In mechanical, visual and thematic terms, Metal Slug's developments are measured in minutiae: tweaks to format indiscernible by all but the aficionado. What other series continues to use the same sprites, sound effects and ideas found in its debut more than a decade ago?
Perhaps the secret of Metal Slug's success lies in its predictability then. There's an assurance that these firecracker shooters will always offer the same precise run-and-gunplay, presented on a backdrop of a slapstick war waged by coward Nazis, dripping zombies and mecha-camels. Indeed, Metal Slug's expressive hand-drawn sprites, birthed on that Bentley of 16-bit consoles, the Neo-Geo AES, are kept alive through choice, not necessity. Metal Slug's disastrous foray into 3D in 2006 ensured that for this, the seventh sequel to the series, SNK Playmore has retreated to a Tom and Jerry cartoon approach to the crimson horrors of war. It's a wise decision to stick to tradition, and one taken despite the fact that, for the first time ever, the console version has no arcade release to which to adhere.
Metal Slug 7's fundamentals remain immovable despite the platform change. As ever, you control a single soldier (one of six men and women), and must work your way through 2D environments shooting enemies before they shoot you. You've no health bar: it's one shot one kill and your default pistol (or machine gun if you're playing on 'Beginner' difficulty) is holstered next to a clutch of grenades. Scattered throughout each level are a number of ageing POWs, naked save for a linen cloth that cups their modesty, who supply you with new weapons. Finally, should you find any vacant vehicles along the way, you can ride them into the glorious cannon fire.

In the cave levels you must watch out for quicksand spots, difficult to make out on the DS screen. These hold you fast till you either wiggle your way out of them or take a missile to the head.
But beneath these top-line consistencies are a number of design changes that in some ways alter the way the game is played. These tweaks aren't quite as visual as those in previous games, where eating too much food would explode your character into a grotesque fatty or where puke from a zombie would turn you into one of the undead (while allowing you to play in this new guise). Rather the developer's focused on mechanical changes such as the ability to hold two weapons at once and cycle between them, and introducing new weapons such as the super blade and Tesla gun which affect on-the-ground tactics.
While the series has always been in part about high scores, here that focus is sharpened by way of the coins that spew from fallen enemies and masonry, their value increasing exponentially as you collect them, Mario-style. A score multiplier system, which is kept up by chaining enemies at a steady rate, adds another layer of complexity. When the gauge is maxed out, all destroyed enemies and objects release coins for a short period, ramping up the spread of possible scores for each level. Considering this new focus, it's a shame that the game's leaderboards are cart-specific. While you do get to compete across leaderboards for each of the game's three difficulties, the option to connect to an online scoreboard would have been a meaningful addition.
In technical terms, the game performs well on the DS, although it's clear that some graphical concessions have been made to the hardware. Some background textures aren't hand-drawn and the scaling effects as the levels scroll are incongruous to the pixel-perfect heritage of the series. There is some slowdown when the screen fills with blood and bullets but this has always been the case with Metal Slug, and what's normally a technological shortcoming acts as a useful mechanism for helping you through the most tortuous bullet mazes. Less easy to forgive is the lacklustre level design, which provides only glimpses of the flair and creativity that defines the earlier games in the series. Caves and mountainsides form the stock locations, their drab, samey colour schemes leaving you longing for the vibrant diversity of Metal Slug 2 and 3's rich vistas.

The game keeps a record of which POWs you saved in each level, by name and rank. The compulsion to collect 'em all is strong but, as many are well-hidden, this will take time and effort.
Almost no use is made of the DS' hardware capabilities. The top screen houses all of the action while the touch-screen displays a heavily pixellated version of the level, which can be scrolled around to show the locations of weapons and POWs. Outside of the main game, the Combat School - first encountered in the PlayStation and Saturn ports of the first Metal Slug - makes a welcome return. Here you can flirt with a brusque, blonde Drill Instructor who challenges you to complete levels against the clock, collect specific items in a level or simply to destroy objects within a time limit. This section adds significant value, particularly as, for the first time in the series, there is no multiplayer mode to improve longevity.
However, where it matters most, Metal Slug 7 delivers. The shrink from arcade to DS screen in no way cramps the experience, offering the same amount of exacting control as it ever did. The new weapons and vehicles add little to the formula, but the strength of the foundations upon which the game builds is self-evident. If SNK Playmore can match its mechanical creativity with the kind of level design ingenuity displayed by the SNK of old, then Metal Slug 8 could well be the series' high point. One thing's for sure: as with Metal Slug 7, it will no doubt be a game we've, one way or another, already played many times before. And we won't even mind.
7 / 10
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Comments (57) Latest comment 3 years ago
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Read "The Definitive Metal Slug" in next month's Retro Gamer!
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MS7 is much less so than the others, because of the way it's been designed and structured. A good review would have told you that.
"How does the metastructure of the game differ from the ones that came before?"
In too many ways to list here - it took me over 2,100 words, talking mostly about the metastructure, to do it justice when I reviewed it.
[link url=http://worldofstuart.excellentcontent.com/p reviews/slugreview/ms7.htm
]http://worldofstuart.excellentcontent.co...[/link]
But next month's RG offers a detailed look at just how the series has changed over its history in order to arrive at MS7.
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What do you mean by the metastructure being different? You get a level select and you have to clear rooms before being allowed to move on (which happened in previous games but less so). The Combat School has been present in console versions since the very first game so this certainly isn't new. It's less featured that the one SNK laid down in the very first game.
In mechanical, visual and thematic terms the game has changed very little over its history. I argue that the team has improved the systems that underpin the game here, but that it falls short on the visuals and the level design - which I'm sure would be the common conlcusion.
What exactly are you saying?
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No. Just...no.
If you want a radical overhaul of the MS series that's perfectly suited to handhelds, you need look no further than Metal Slug 2nd Mission on the NGPC. By comparison this is a rehash of an increasingly average arcade-led series bizzarely shoehorned in to hardware that's not only inadequate for the job, but also offers features that are criminally underused.
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What? But it said earlier that this ISN'T an arcade game?
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Less?
It takes about 40 minutes to play through all seven levels on Beginner difficulty. (Beginner is for girls and homosexuals, but forgiveable for a reviewer with limited time who needs to see as much of the game as possible.) The review says:
"Finally, should you find any vacant vehicles or willing animals along the way, you can ride them into the glorious cannon fire."
On which level(s) of MS7 will you find animals to ride? You'll find plenty in other Metal Slug games, but where are they in 7?
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Indeed the two NGP Slugs are radical overhauls, but they don't resemble the main series bloodline any more than Metal Slug 3D does, and are therefore not "Metal Slug games" in the traditionally-understood sense of the term. And in any case they're nowhere near as good as MS7. Having just spent a solid week doing nothing but play Metal Slugs, I'm quite confident in that statement.
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The line about animals was a mistake - fair cop. I actually rewrote that overview of the mechanics para from my Metal Slug Anthology review for EG, which is why it slipped in there.
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I thought all you did these days was to pontificate about Scottish Nationalism on the BBC Scotland blogs...
A true old timer of the scene....
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Fine, but if you reviewed Anthology then you've got even less excuse for saying that the twin-weapon system and the coin-collecting combo thing are new to MS7, because both of those appeared in Metal Slug 6.
(Oh, and just for the sake of accuracy, Combat School first appeared in the Neo Geo CD conversions of MS1, not the later Saturn and Playstation ports.)
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Yes, but that's my point. Trying to shoehorn the Metal Slug experience in to the DS hardware was pretty much a non-starter. Metal Slug 1st/2nd Mission worked so well because SNK understood the NGPC hardware wasn't up to the job and built the game from the ground-up to suit.
They've done a good job with MS7 considering the circumstances, but even disregarding any technology issues it's still a poor relation to the first three games in the series and suffers from the dull, unimaginative level design that begun with MS4.
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brain hurts....
actually all i want to know is, if i liked MS 1 to X, but didn't like the more recent ones includidng the GBA version, should i buy MS7?
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Except it wasn't, as it's been done brilliantly. All of the tedium (zombie sections, fat mode) has been stripped out, and the game has been redesigned and restructured to be suitable for five-minute bursts with meaningful goals, ie perfect for a handheld. Prisoner-collecting offers considerable replay value for the main mode. Combat School is several times bigger than it's ever been. All difficulty settings now offer all stages and have separate high-score tables. All of these are empirical improvements on any previous home Metal Slug, yet the core gameplay hasn't been changed.
The one thing to suffer as a result of porting to the DS is that the backgrounds aren't as pretty. Boo hoo.
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World of Stuart
Stuart, do you really hate Metal Slug 3? I always thought of it as the best of the bunch: branching paths, zombie Marco, ridiculous final boss... the list goes on!
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Yes. 3 and 6 are total shit, 4 and 5 only slightly less bad. Metal Slug Advance was a different kind of thing altogether. MS7 is much more in line with 1, 2 and X.
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Yes. It's absolutely fucking awful.
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You seem to misunderstand. My complaint is that little to no thought has been put in to designing MS7 with the DS in mind. That not only includes the scaled sprites and backgrounds which lose much of the series' charm, but also the almost insulting underuse of DS specific dual screen and touch features. This is a complaint you can level at a lot of DS games, but even you must admit that MS7's map is a joke.
Why not release this game on PSP? I know the answer, and it's a sad state of affairs.
"Yes. 3 and 6 are total shit"
In what world is 3 total shit? Even if you prefer the first two games, 3 is not awful by a long stretch. And as someone who owns an MVS, I find your insinuation that the game is mostly adored by emulator whores amusing.
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i always liked getting fat though, because not only do the sprites then closer represent my actual proportions, but your weapons are also powered up.
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No it isn't. If I'd had to lurch away from the buttons to poke the touchscreen at vital moments, or shout into the mic to throw a grenade, I'd personally have gone round and burnt SNK Playmore's offices to the fucking ground.
"In what world is 3 total shit?"
The world where people aren't completely clueless, tasteless morons. MS3 is a miserable, gruelling, unfair, slow, joyless chore from the very first level to the godawful, nine-hours-long last one.
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That's the best use of the DS features you can imagine? Think harder.
"The world where people aren't completely clueless, tasteless morons."
Well, this conversation has hit rock-bottom. Clearly in the World of Stuart only Stuart and people who agree with Stuart are allowed.
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Metal Slug didn't have or need a touchscreen and microphone before, and it doesn't need them now. Gratuitous use of the DS' hardware features is the single most irritating thing about the console - it almost destroyed the otherwise superb Magnetica/Actionloop, for example, and pretty much entirely ruined Nanostray. Complaining that Metal Slug 7 doesn't use the hardware features is in essence complaining that it's a Metal Slug game. And if you didn't want to play a Metal Slug game, you've made a terrible error in reading about Metal Slug 7.
"Well, this conversation has hit rock-bottom. Clearly in the World of Stuart only Stuart and people who agree with Stuart are allowed."
Oh, grow the fuck up. I have no respect for anyone who thinks Metal Slug 3 is a good game, and even less interest in pretending otherwise. If you don't want anyone to ever call you names, you might want to think about avoiding the internet entirely.
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Oh and I think you fellas should calm down a little.
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As for using the DS's unique features, I have to say that doing it for the sake of it is pointless. Just cause it has conventional controls, a mic and a touch screen doesn't mean that every game should try and use all of them. Plenty room for traditional games on the system with the amount they have sold.
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Umm...I didn't ask for terrible touch controls. You assumed that's what I meant. I just want something better than the god-awful map they have currently that's a waste of my battery power. I mean, it doesn't even take up the whole screen. Why? Laziness.
"Chipping in here out of nowhere I'd say Contra 4 is a good example of an old-school shooter making use of the DS. No touchscreen or mic nonsense, just a grappling hook to zip up to the top. I really liked that element."
Yes, something like this. Just because you can't think of a good use for the DS features, doesn't mean there isn't one.
"Oh, grow the fuck up. I have no respect for anyone who thinks Metal Slug 3 is a good game, and even less interest in pretending otherwise."
Wow...you are an angry little man. Does it really matter that much to you that I like MS3? It's only a game.
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So there.
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You act as if posting on a comments thread cost money or something. But no, I'm just bored of idiots complaining about MS7 being just another Metal Slug without bothering to credit the extremely clever and effective way it's been adopted for the DS, or notice that it's actually a dramatic improvement on the last four which has taken careful notice of which bits of those games work and which don't. Especially if they then cite the abysmally shit MS3 as being some kind of standard to uphold.
So are we to assume that when you berate the game for not utilising the DS's hardware features, all you're actually saying is that you wanted a better map? Because (a) that's nothing to do with the DS hardware features, that's a game design decision - the second screen IS used for a map, you just don't think it's a good enough map, and (b) what on Earth do you need a map for anyway? It's a linear-path game.
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and as others have said, how would DS specific things improve an MS game? (although an excursion to the other screen could be interesting)
i agree a psp version of this can be drop dead gorges, and as the psp would need games "perfectly suited for the handheld" instead of ps2 style full games. it would be a good idea, even though i don't have psp
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My point exactly. And if you insist on using the second screen for a map, at least make it look half-decent.
"Especially if they then cite the abysmally shit MS3 as being some kind of standard to uphold."
Again, I never said MS3 was the pinnacle of the series. Personally I'd hold MS1-3 in equal regard for different reasons. I just can't believe anyone would think that 3 was 'abysmally shit' and try to claim that the majority of people who like it are emulation whores.
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I don't think any of us know what your point is. Several people have now asked what it is you want with regard to using the DS's features in a Metal Slug game, and we're still waiting to hear the answer. It seems that all you want is for the totally pointless map screen to be prettier, but that can't be it.
And why is it so hard to grasp that some people recognise that MS3 is totally shit? It is. It doesn't belong on the same planet as MS1, 2, X or 7, far less to be regarded as their equal. It's hardly the first time that a long-running series has had stinkers in it.
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Of course I wouldn't want them to use the touchscreen or the mic just for the sake of it, and I never actually said anything of the sort. As I mentioned before, SNK designed 2nd Mission from the ground-up with the NGPC in mind. Here they seem to have tried to shoehorn the arcade experience in to the DS, and IMO met with varying levels of success. It's technically impressive, but it would have made more sense on the PSP. If there was some obvious reason for using the DS (such as amazingly intuitive touchscreen controls or whatever) then I wouldn't have a problem. That is all.
And if you must drag up the feature debate, as several people have suggested Contra 4 makes good use of the second screen.
"And why is it so hard to grasp that some people recognise that MS3 is totally shit"
I have to say that you're the first person I've come across that thinks MS3 is totally shit. Some people don't like it, sure, and it's not unusual to think that MS1/X is the better game...but totally shit? Personally I'd say MS4 is the realy stinker of the series. Horrible, cut & paste level design.
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+
as good as Contra 4 was, there was a gap between the screens acting as a blind spot, which occasionally made things difficult...
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Good point. Quick, close down the internet!
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Made more sense to whom? Not the publishers or developers, who'd be targetting an audience half the size that buys a fraction as many games. Not gamers in general, because DS owners outnumber PSP owners by 2:1. Not buyers of the game, who'd be getting fewer features - the map's pretty pointless, but it's still a feature - in return for what? Possibly better backdrops? Big whoop. And if Metal Slug Anthology is anything to go by, the price of that would be massive loading delays, making the PSP version again worse that the DS one.
"And if you must drag up the feature debate, as several people have suggested Contra 4 makes good use of the second screen."
Indeed it does, and Contra 4 is a splendid game, but arcade Contra has always been a vertical-screen game and designed as such. Metal Slug has always been a horizontal-orientation game, and has therefore never had any need for a taller display. If you redesigned it to be more like Contra, it wouldn't be Metal Slug any more.
"I have to say that you're the first person I've come across that thinks MS3 is totally shit."
So? Everyone used to think the world was flat.
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"It's technically impressive"
Earlier on you said:
"this is a rehash of an increasingly average arcade-led series bizzarely shoehorned in to hardware that's not only inadequate for the job, but also offers features that are criminally underused."
Is it adequate for the job or not? What features are "criminally underused"? You've acknowledged it doesn't need the touchscreen or the mic, and since Metal Slug has always been a horizontal-screen game it doesn't need a double-height display, so what other features of the DS are being "criminally underused"? The slidey power-button? Sleep mode?
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I'm sorry, are we accepting this sort of talk now? I know this isn't the sort of place where people get banned left right and centre, but this is a pretty wrong thing to say.
I can only hope it was intended as a "joke", shame it wasn't the least bit funny.
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I'm sorry, are we accepting this sort of talk now? I know this isn't the sort of place where people get banned left right and centre, but this is a pretty wrong thing to say.
I can only hope it was intended as a "joke", shame it wasn't the least bit funny.
How wrong are "Gaylo", "GayStation" and "Queers of War" jokes then?
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It's technically impressive within the constraints of the hardware. Yes. Actually, to be honest I was being a bit kind on them there. It's not impressive, it's passable.
"Not gamers in general, because DS owners outnumber PSP owners by 2:1."
Personally I think this game would have been better on PSP, and I don't even own a PSP. It would have looked nicer, played the same and as far as I can tell there's no reason for it to be a DS exclusive.
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