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Metal Slug 3 Review - Xbox

2D games are a dying breed. Nostalgia is big business. Instead of releasing original content, publishers fall back and merge the two, releasing old titles to be gobbled up by the masses with fond memories. Here's another one, and thankfully it's a great example of good gameplay that still stands it's own.

Metal Slug was never a complicated game. Running left to right and shooting stuff doesn't take a science degree, just an odd sense of humour and a desire to see things burn. Metal Slug 3 is actually the fourth in the series with Metal Slug X being a "special edition remix" of Metal Slug 2.

Gameplay

The game tells the story of the return of General Morden, enemy of the free people. Also, there's been strange occurrences reported throughout the land - eerie lights, giant crustaceans, man-eating mutant plants. You know what? It doesn't matter. Metal Slug is about shooting stuff; lots of stuff.

There are several different modes available in Metal Slug, and all of them are about causing lots of damage while dodging enemy fire in a variety of athletic ways. The Arcade mode is your standard five levels of death and carnage, with other modes available once you've finished said mode.

Fat Island involves you taking one character and surviving wave after wave of enemies, while Boarding the Mothership has you playing the role of an enemy grunt who must take control of an alien spaceship. All three modes are worth playing, but Arcade is by far the best and offers the most fun out of the lot. The other modes take on the role of filler content, but if all filler was this tasty, I would find myself stranded on Fat Island myself.

All the extra features in the world don't mean squat if the game plays like an overturned milk truck with it's disgorged contents going sour in the summer sun. Metal Slug has been criticised for not being as tight as other shooters, but I found no problems with the controls. They are responsive enough and make it a case of fighting enemies, rather than fighting with complex controls. There's a lot to be said for the simpler things, and this is a very good case in point.

The level design is simple, being a 2D shooter. There are five stages, the final being a marathon effort that makes the other four seem like micro games from some obscure handheld title. Each stage has many different pathways available, so even if you finish the game, you still won't have seen all there is to see and, more importantly, crushed, killed and destroyed everything.

This allows for some wonderful replay value and allows for some tactical choices. You can pick a direction depending on whether you want to take an easy path, or go for a high score. If you do manage to rack up the points, you can update the leaderboard over X-Box (continued next page)