Metal Slug 7 (DS)

Where is the power-up that makes you fat?
12/4/2008 7:06 PM | 3 Comments | Page 1 of 2

SNK's Metal Slug series touts itself as the pinnacle of 2-D run-and-gun shooting, and the title is well deserved. Across beautifully drawn, diverse levels -- beaches, snowy mountaintops, haunted graveyards, underwater chasms -- hosts of soldiers, zombies, robots, aliens, giant crabs and Yetis wage frantic war with you, a fearless special ops soldier with a smirk and a gun. Whereas most of the games originated in the arcades and were later ported to home consoles, Metal Slug 7 starts its life on the rather arcade-unworthy Nintendo DS and ought to end it there. (It won't; it's coming to Xbox Live.)

Metal Slug games blossom into a hyper-violent ballet as your enemies, whose exaggerated features and cartoonish personalities suggest toy soldiers and critters that have come to squishy life with belligerent minds of their own, try to lay waste to you from above and below, in front and behind. From all directions, bullets languidly crisscross the screen, and one brush with them sends you hurtling to the ground, dead. In Metal Slug 7 on the DS, the sense of imminent doom is even more pronounced because your character seems to move more sluggishly and occasionally doesn't turn when you want him/her to, and it can be harder to dodge all the projectiles due to the smaller screen. It's not unlike having Bullet Time constantly in effect, except that the bullets slowly closing in on you seem much more threatening for taking their time.

In the past, confronting and dodging the threat -- over and over again -- has been worth it not just for the thrill and challenge, but also for the considerable pleasure of seeing what new environment and deranged coterie of creeps would star in the next level. In Metal Slug 7, you spend most of the game burrowing deeper, ever deeper, into cookie-cutter caves, caverns and cavernous mine shafts whose backdrops have been flattened dry of atmosphere like dead pressed leaves. The disappointment is severe.

Meanwhile, your opponents are almost overwhelmingly the same green-outfitted soldiers that you bowl over in Level 1. Even the end boss appears to be a recycled (or "remixed," to give it marginally more credit) version of the first boss. But the other bosses have negligible differences, being entirely of the clanking steampunk non-variety. There is a disappointing lack of UFOs and pulsating alien brains.

One welcome visual shift in the game is a sudden appearance of toothy, red-mouthed plants midway through the game, but they may as well be coming out of shiny green pipes stuck in the ground. Even the very first Metal Slug was more inspired, and had more visual invention and surprise, not to mention the bordering-on-absurd Metal Slug 3.

Without any branching paths in the seven levels (as far as I could see), you're funneled somewhat mindlessly from the unremarkable beginning to the anticlimactic end like a slab of pork through the various rooms of a meat processing facility. Harking back to pure arcade gameplay -- in a bad way -- the game progresses because the numbers of the levels need to go up, and your time commitment needs to be extended, and for no other apparent reason. It isn't especially fun, either. Perhaps using the touch-screen on the DS for some purpose other than to display a virtually extraneous map that reveals less than your actual gameplay screen would have helped. A shifty-eyed, Wolfenstein 3D-esque mugshot of your character, for example, could have reminded you that this series has a sense of humor. Then you could have used the DS stylus to poke it in the eye for a much-needed laugh.