Metal Slug Tactics Review (Azran)
Metal Slug Tactics has been great so far. The game is a roguelike TBS title very much in the vein of Into The Breach, a resemblance it bears to an uncanny degree at times. The gist of the game is pretty simple: choose 3 operatives from a roster of 9 different ones (the 4 OGs, the two newcomers from 4 and the three weirdos from King of Fighters the Ikari Team) and then go defeat the forces of General Morden throughout many missions on the four different regions the game has to offer. The missions range from very straightforward stuff like "kill all enemies" to convoy interception, miner defense or straight up boss battles that show some of the best spritework the game has to offer. And good lord does the game look pretty if you at all like the Metal Slug artstyle.
In terms of its structure, the game sticks close to the standard set by ItB: you pick a region (island), do four missions with both a primary and a secondary objective that determine the rewards and then you face off against a boss at the end. Once you win, you get access to a shop to buy either new mods for your weapons or skills for your characters. During your run, your characters will accrue EXP, allowing you to pick new skills and gun upgrades for them from a random assortment on offer. It's not entirely random, each soldier has their own pool of upgrades and their own individual weapons, which helps to give them unique roles on the battlefield. Eri throws grenades, Tarma has AoE attacks, Marco is very action-efficient, etc. You can't change a character's weapons, they are fixed for a run, but you can mod them so that they do stuff like heal you on kill, slow enemies hit, ignore cover, change their AOE pattern, increase their damage or range, etc. All characters have a basic weapon with infinite ammo, and a much stronger special weapon with limited ammo that can be replenished from mission rewards and in-between chapters. It's the only resource that persists across missions; you are healed to full after every missions, which makes the game feel a lot more lenient than most games of its ilk
Mechanics-wise, it's pretty neat. There's a lot of emphasis on moving around and taking cover, since both reduce by a fixed amount how much damage you take (damage is entirely deterministic but you aren't shown your enemies' intentions, unlike ItB; you can however check their attack range and movement, like in Fire Emblem). Cover can be destroyed and your enemy benefits from it, while dodge sticks around only for a single turn but can reach much higher values and can only be gotten by moving around long distances. Moving around also gives you Adrenaline, a banked resource used to activate special abilities. The other standout feature is the synchronized attacks: if one of your character attacks a target inside the range of another character, that character will contribute to that attack with their basic weapon. This can happen as many times as a character attacks, except against bosses, so you can deal a lot of damage to multiple enemies this way. This will also lead to interesting scenarios where the followup attack goes past a enemy the original attack killed, just to hit another enemy (or player character!) behind them. Finding ways to synchro-attack as many enemies as possible is the main puzzle you're dealing with each turn.
When you finish a run, whether you win or lose, you go back to your headquarters and spend credits (you get them naturally from just playing missions and they're a separate pool from the coins you use to buy stuff in-game, though unspent coins gets turned into credits after your run ends) to unlock new passives and loadouts for your soldiers, with each character having access to four different ones: they determine what weapons they'll use throughout a run and which passives they'll start with. The additional passives you unlock go into the pool you can get at random during your run.
Seems very light on the story; there's codec-style conversations at the start of each region and each character has a bunch of story dialogues with other characters that unlock as you complete certain personal objectives (think of them as the team achievements/medals from ItB) but that's about it. Overall, it's a gameplay-first title and it's a lot of fun! Well worth the wait.
Forgot to mention: instead of the energy that has a random chance to protect buildings in ItB, you get limited respawn points for your run in this game. Also you get to restart any given turn twice per mission, but you can redo individual movements (not actions)
If this appeals to you, go buy it! It's a great game. That said, there are some minor bugs here and there (mostly text strings so far) but the game seems to have some visibility issues on the Steam Deck so buyer beware.