Metal Slug originally hit the scene on the Neo-Geo in 1996. From there is has spawned versions of every major platform since. It’s never really had a breakout hit but the franchise has always been a reliably good one. Across so many years and so many different devices, this type of reliability is rare in this industry. But here the greatest challenge for SNK awaits, Metal Slug Touch is the first one to not have some sort of traditional input. All it has is the power of touch. Can SNK cross the barrier and make Metal Slug work on this nontraditional device?
Metal Slug is a side-scrolling shooter and here that has not changed but since the iPhone does not have a traditional control input, certain changes were made. First of all, you’re always shooting. There is no shoot button; it’s just a matter of controlling your turret. Yes, I said turret, there are no traditional on foot sections in this game, it’s purely vehicle based. As for the controls, there are three options. The native has you tilting to move which means you’re not going to be very precise in movement. Then moving the turret is holding one side for up and the other side for down. You can crouch and avoid fire as well as jump. The alternative styles gives you a d-pad with left and right for movement but up and down are for moving the turret. To put it simply, the controls in this game are atrocious, the native style being the worst one of them all. In the tank you just have to move along a single plane, then in the next level you’re in the air so you have to hold your phone flat since you’re moving across the entire screen. When you’re fed up with a control style, there are no options in the pause menu. It’s either start completely over or truck on with what you got. There is no way to turn down the music. To compensate for the horrible controls which will frequently get you killed, you have unlimited continues. It’s pretty much an instant win feature popular amongst ports for older arcade games but this just kills the original vision of the titles immediately. There is no difficulty. The only difficulty in this title is making it through the title without it crashing on you since there is no save feature. Fortunately for those who want to beat the title, it only has 4 missions and those only take about five minutes apiece. Unfortunately for those who purchase it, it means you have about 20 minutes of gameplay with little replayability.
Typically on set hardware like the iPhone, technical issues don’t crop up often because the developers know what they are coding for and don’t have to worry about oddball configurations. Therefore here, we shouldn’t have to worry about such problems but unfortunately we do. When you start it up the game (at least 2nd generation iPod touch) you get hit with low memory errors and the ipod status bar stays up over the application. The only way to get rid of these is to completely shut off your device and start it up again. When you pause the game, the pause screen doesn’t even take up the entire screen leaving a small but noticeable area of the play area visible at the bottom. The game crashes randomly. The game looks just like the original games, which isn’t half that bad looking for an iPhone game but it feels like a port due to the aspect ratio cutting off the sides of the screen. The sound is decent but ripped from the other games in the franchise. This is not necessarily a bad thing though. Since the music is the same, it elicits the same feelings as it did then. The announcer elicits the same feeling that you’re playing a game in an arcade. But it’s nothing particularly new.
When you have to code a low memory error into your game for a device that is a known quantity (i.e. all have identical hardware) then something is wrong, terribly wrong. Sure there are several different generations of iPhones and iPod Touches but if you’re going to support one, then it should work well. The controls are atrocious, even when you use the alternative pads provided. They just cause more frustration than joy. You never feel like you’re in complete control of the vehicle and in the tense moments, you’re struggling to get your gun or vehicle in the right position. This causes you to die and eventually tap into the unlimited continues. Basically you’re punished for bad controls but given an instant win feature so basically this is not Metal Slug. The original vision has been destroyed if it has no semblance of difficulty attached to it. The idea of a portable Metal Slug is nice and has worked on other platforms like the PSP but here the developers didn’t even try to make something competent. Not worth your time even if it was free.
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