I picked Marco and jumped straight into the third mission. Stone towers with mounted guns shot flashing orbs from above and green soldiers marched on the ground. The turrets took a few shots to destroy, but the standard Metal Slug fodder was easy to pass through. Later in the level I grabbed a heavy machine gun and a shotgun by rescuing two captives. Like the previous installment, Metal Slug 7 has the weapon stock system. You can press one of the shoulder buttons to switch between the holstered weapon and active one. As I progressed through the level an automatic conveyor belt pushed me up the level while I was comfortably in a mech slug.
I skipped forward all the way to mission seven, which grants players a plane slug to fly in. The level also has a furious amount of missiles anti-air missiles to evade and a screen of enemies to shoot. I mentioned before in my TGS impressions of Metal Slug 7 has a score chaining system. If you can take down enemies quickly a meter on the bottom of the screen fills up and eventually each exploding tank is worth 16x its original value. Something new is when the meter reached 16x enemies dropped coins, which were worth additional points if you can pick them up. Another neat feature that I don’t recall was in TGS build is a map with touch screen zooming on the bottom screen. It doesn’t seem like it serves any other purpose than being cool, but hey it’s cool.
Besides the long missions there are shorter combat missions. I briefly played one where I was fighting a giant drill. The key to taking it down was throwing grenades and lots of ducking. Occasionally, a buzz saw would pop in from the top left corner of the screen to prevent players from hanging comfortably in the back.
If you’re wondering about what characters are in Metal Slug 7 the following characters are part of the rebellion: Marco, Eri, Fio, Ralf, Tarma and Clark. In case it wasn’t obvious SNK had a build of Metal Slug 7 at their GDC showing for a reason, it’s coming to North America.
Published: Feb 22, 2008 08:43 am