So I love Metal Slug, fonds memories and all that, and I love metroidvanias. Guns of Fury fails on both counts.

As a metroidvania, it's just poor. No, wait, it's just plain bad.
Combat is abysmal, just press down to dodge most things and shoot them full of bullets. No real aiming, no skill, no tight timing, no cleverness to it, just cheap tricks that always work.
Exploration... nothing to see. Sometimes there are dead ends, you're not yet meant to go this way, come back later. Haven't found teleport points yet, so it's even worse than it needs to be when backtracking.
Very little platforming and it's meaningless.

As a wannabee Metal Slug, it's a disappointment. Look at those graphics! None of the humor and charisma of Metal Slug, just a bland Contra-like tough guy. The enemies are bland too, where Metal Slug's were so funny and well drawn and animated.
You can make everything blow up, but somehow it's not exciting.
You can shoot a bunch of soldiers... still not exciting. No pacing, no tension, no point.

I can't pinpoint what makes it boring. The music is meh, there's just... nothing to engage with.

I must've played it for maybe an hour and I wanted to like it, I tried, but I just couldn't find the fun.

Guns of Fury is a solid search-action/metroidvania game with a Metal Slug and Contra twist. The staples of the genre are there, plenty of exploration and backtracking to access areas with new abilities, items hidden behind secret breakable walls, and so on.

The game gives you access to three types of attacks, a pistol with unlimited ammo, a secondary weapon which has limited ammo, and a melee attack which is powerful but limited range. You can find and purchase various weapons for these three slots, and there are a decent amount of them to boot. Pistols and melee weapons are fairly standard across the board, while the secondary weapons vary wildly. Shotguns, machine guns, flamethrowers, lasers, and more. I found the variety pretty impressive and it was really fun to play around with them.

Platforming feels precise enough for my taste and the combat feels nice and fluid, my only real problem being the lack of a built-in autofire/turbo function for the pistol. It wasn't a big deal but there was a whole lot of tapping that button and the option to convert it to a hold rather than tap would've been nice to have.

There are a few endings, and a new game plus unlocks after you complete the game once, so there's some incentive to go back through another time. I didn't get all of the endings but I scoured the map and unlocked all of the items to play with, which took about 12 hours.

The pixel art style is pleasing and there's a good amount of character expressed in the animations of the enemies. The art isn't exactly doing a Metal Slug style but I can definitely see the inspiration. I really liked the soundtrack, which is done in a retro style that fits the visuals. Each area has a themed track, so there's a decent amount of variety, Some areas are much larger than others, so you hear some songs more than others, but it never got to be repetitive for me.

I feel like the genre has tended towards melee combat and incorporating Souls-like in recent years, so it was kinda refreshing to play one that let me run across the map spamming bullets as I please, rather than getting bogged down in learning parry timings and such. I'd highly recommend Guns of Fury to any fans of the genre that want a short and sweet game of running and gunning.

Was fun in beginning. But not a challenge and you spend most of you time frustrated trying to find items to get more items to get more to more just to open one area.. Have explored 94% of map and unable to get to finals area or boss cause missing one item (RPG) which need night vision, which need focus jump and wings ensignia, and a decoder, and more items, and the RPG isn't even the end of it... just to possible get access to final area and maybe finally beat this game. It's just an annoying slog