Recent reviews by Amen

If you have any interest in tactics games like XCOM or Warhammer 40k: Mechanicus, I think you'll be right at home with this one, especially if you're a Metal Slug fan as well.

This game is a turn - based tactics roguelite, where you assemble a team of 3 Metal Slug characters to do a "run", conquering at least one of 3 preliminary regions (or all 3 if you want) before entering the final region to fight the final boss. Each character has unique perks and weapons, and can gain more perks and special abilities over the course of the run.

Unlike most tactics games (from what I've seen, I don't play too many of them) Metal Slug Tactics encourages fast paced, aggressive play. One of the main unique mechanics is the Adrenaline/Armor system, where your characters gain damage resistance (Armor) as well as a resource to use special moves (Adrenaline) by moving around the map, and even more if they have to hop up or down a ledge or over a gap. Some maps will drop you into a horde of enemies that makes it seem impossible when starting out, but you quickly get the hang of things and start doing some crazy maneuvers to maximize your characters' survivability and damage.

The other main mechanic is the Sync system, where your 3 units can chain attacks together by being in line of sight (and range) of an enemy that is being attacked by another character, leading to some wild combos that you can pull off.

Characters have unique playstyles that can synergize well with each other, such as Clark being able to reposition enemies (or allies, if you're scheming something fierce) into ally fire, or Eri, who specializes in grenades and explosives, able to deal massive damage in large areas (just watch out for your allies!)

Each character has a set primary and secondary weapon, the primary having limited ammo and the secondary having infinite ammo (usually a pistol or a knife, in some cases a grenade). They also have 4 unique loadouts, each of which drastically change their playstyles with different weapons and starting perks.

Bangers. Tee Lopes does a great job of making the tracks sound like Metal Slug, but styling them to fit a tactics game.

I think anyone who's especially a fan of Metal Slug will love the visuals and sound design of this game. All the sprites are very detailed and vibrant, and there are unique animations for almost every special move in the game with what feels like little reuse. I wasn't sure what to expect going into this as I'm not normally that big of a tactics game fan, but somehow Leikir Studio made everything kinda just work, and really well at that. Give it a shot!

Despite the reviews, I've gotten pretty hooked on the game so far and recommend it even in its early access state.

Aside from some performance issues like others have addressed, I find combat to be very satisfying, fluid, and (mostly) fair. I also haven't run into any game breaking bugs in the 15.9 hours I've spent at time of writing which is nice, but there are a couple smaller ones I've noticed that I'll address after I talk about the main two issues people seem to have:

The game doesn't really have a tutorial, just a couple of UI overlays that give you the basics. For me this isn't a problem for the most part as I enjoy just wandering around and trying out different things, but where there is a problem lies, in my opinion, in the lack of emphasis on using the Extraction mechanic. This leads into the second "problem," which is the lack of very many health regen options.

Players take a LOT of damage in this game and combat can be very punishing. Along with that, players don't start the game with the ability to use a medkit, they have to unlock it (which if you know how to, it can be the first upgrade after a run, but many people including myself didn't know where to go to upgrade it until I was like 5 hours in.) The only way to heal otherwise are by finding rare, small health orbs from defeated enemies or health plants scattered around the map, both of which only heal 5 hp in the beginning (they heal more later on as difficulty increases I believe) or by collecting a Prism, many of which drop from difficult Elite enemies. As a side note, players can heal back half of the damage most recently taken by parrying an attack, but this can be pretty unreliable because sometimes you'll take a 20 damage attack then get chain stunned into a 6 damage attack, so your parry only heals you for 3 damage.

For me and apparently most other players, this feels very unfair because how are you supposed to explore the world, defeat elites to unlock the bosses, then fight the bosses if one fight going wrong can gimp you so early on? The answer is in the extraction mechanic, known as the Telepad Event. The game explains it briefly in the UI tutorial and mentions it on the loading screen, but the Telepad Event is the main way you stay in the game and have a chance at completing a run. Activating the teleporter heals your character for a good chunk of their HP and forces you to defeat a couple waves of weaker enemies, but you teleport back to the hub world with everything that you've collected so far in your run and you get to shop for extra gear before going back down (with full HP!). This ALSO does NOT use one of your 4 revives, and all your progress on the map is saved. I don't know the specifics of how the difficulty on your run increases, but it doesn't seem like there's any real penalty for abusing the teleporter. If you go for an elite fight and it's going poorly, just leave and beeline to the teleporter to hopefully do better on your next try, while being able to gear up before going back down.

The only real prominent one I've seen is when you have 5 holobytes (passive upgrades you can equip) and you try to replace one with a 6th that you find, MOST of the time the item isn't replaced and the 6th item just disappears, completely wasting it. There is a workaround thankfully by opening your menu and manually deleting the item you want to replace then simply equipping the 6th item, but hopefully this gets patched soon.

There are also these large radiation zones that randomly spawn on the map and while they're not too dangerous most of the time (they take a while to have an effect on the player and then only slowly drain their HP) I had a run where one spawned directly on top of the Telepad, and with no other option (my friend and I were both low) we tried to do the event, failing because the enemies had a lot of HP and we couldn't kill them fast enough. Hopefully the devs make it so those zones can't just spawn on the one place that's supposed to be for retreating and healing, haha.

Other bugs I've found are very minor, such as quickly mashing the special attack on the claws and dropping two sets of mines when you're only supposed to drop one.

完璧！

Only complaint is that, like others have said, sometimes your character having a physical body in the game causes some mishaps when interacting with the world like climbing ladders and whatnot. However, I think these issues are vastly overshadowed by how much fun it is to break a box over a zombie's head, headshot an Omniprojector at long range using a handgun, or repeatedly stab a Crablet with a shortsword.

Valve can still make masterpieces.

This game is fun and satisfying as hell. Block hits, swing back, dodge heavy blows, and you've got a pretty decent arsenal of weapons to unlock and mix and match (since you hold one in each hand at any time)

Don't read the negative reviews. The vast majority of them are a bunch of "This game's too hard" kinda reviews.

The game runs well from every computer I've had it on (5 now) with almost no glitches (there was only one I came across regarding duct taping two guns together, but after emptying the clip of this gun combo I was able to keep firing) and very easy to get into.

The beginning is pretty standard. Go through a short tutorial on the game, learn about the buttons, weapons, dodge rolling mechanics, etc. After that, you can run through the gungeon as many times as you want, and runs are typically around an hour long from floor 1 to 5 (if you go to the secret floors it will be longer, but rewarding more loot to use later on). Most complaints I see from the game are you don't ever have enough keys, and the drop rate after clearing a room is terrible, which are true. However, the game was made like this on purpose, as usually you want to clear the full floor before deciding to open chests. Chests have tiers, you see, and finding plain brown ones reward you with D tier loot (which still has good weapons mind you, such as the Regular Shotgun, my favorite gun in the game) but this lets you choose between opening a brown chest or, if you found a black chest (the best one) opening that. Saying you don't have enough keys is meaningless, because you don't always need them.

The other complaint is the drop system. A screenshot of a discord chat with one of the Devs can be found here: http://imgur.com/a/rUeIV ...that explains a lot about drop rates, the "coolness" perk, things like that. If you're not fond of links, the drop rate begins at 1%, but every room you clear without a drop it increases by some amount up to 80%, so you WILL get a drop eventually. It then resets back to 1%.

My summary of game and why you should get it (if you like dungeon crawlers with guns)? Tons of guns, seamless, flowing controls, great humor, local coop (2 player), lots of great secrets, and great, longlasting fun.

This game has struck a chord with me. Go lone wolf or join a platoon/squad to plan strategic attacks on the enemies, all the while levelling up and earning those oh so glorious cert points. Don't pass up this game.