Metal Slug Defence (iOS)

Watch her hat when you hit the screen...

Normally, I don't like this kind of game. You know the type, the Tower Defence games. Or Defence games in general. The idea for the most part that you can put down a few items without really knowing your opponents and hope that somehow, what you made and placed will be perfectly suited to kill the enemies of which you have no clue as to how many there are, nor what they have, nor what they can do. Some might argue "That's the point" or "That's what war is like" I would to take this moment to respond that for the most part, it's very unfulfilling and bores me to the point that I want to puke BLOOD in your faces! Having said that, I gave Metal Slug Defence a shot because I heard it was a little like Army of Darkness Defence and I quite enjoyed hearing Bruce Campbell sound bytes while playing.

It doesn't take long before the game becomes utter mayhem while you're spewing out units left and right

Let's get this straight first of all, you'll enjoy this game a LITTLE more if you're a fan of the Metal Slug series. It's got the graphics from the games, most of the characters and enemies and uses them all in a sort of rolling tower defence strategy.

How much? For how little?

The game itself runs on this basis, you get points by simply sitting there. When you've accrued enough points you can spend them on a unit to deploy, said unit then runs right until it gets to an enemy unit and then they fight. The loser dies, the winner goes on with reduced (usually) health until they die. You keep doing this until you're attacking their base (or they're attacking yours) and someone's base is blown up. Game over, move on.

He makes a return, he'll kill your units very quickly. Better pump out some more by now.

Progression through levels (of which there are 3-5 per area), will net bigger and bigger challenges, while gaining more and more in-game cash to spend on upgrades and improvements. There's also the Prisoners of War to rescue akin to the original series though they seem to be only found on chance when the game deems you've played enough to earn them. There might be conditions behind it but I'll be damned if I can work out what they are from here. In unlocking all the prisoners from an area you can gain boosts to specific units, to all units, to the rate at which you charge points, even down to just getting new units and items to use in battle.

So many units you really shouldn't buy. You don't need them.

Pointless items to get you to spunk money at the system. I've loads and paid for none as you win many in the game anyway.

Other nods to the game are the use of backgrounds from the games, key and recognisable bosses that have been fought across the series from the giant hermit crab to the aliens from the meteor, a giant robot with laser cannon eyes and even (almost as synonymous with the game as the main characters are) Mr "Come on, Boy" Allen O'Neil with his heavy machinegun and usual vocal insults. It reeks of nostalgia and it's loved for it.

The background is red, this is clearly hard mode now.

And that's it. However what this game does have, which a lot of similar games do not, is style. The added bonus to this kind of game is that each character has a special move which highlights even more of the series. Marco has his Heavy Machine Gun, Tarma has his Shotgun, Fio has a Rawket Lawncher (yes with the original odd accent) and Eri has a laser. Other weapons and units come in from various games including the Metal Slug Tank itself, an Ostrich with a gun mounted on its wing and an Elephant. Other units include virtually ALL the enemies but you're not going to get those straight away and I'll happily tell you as to why.

Another welcome return boss!

In-App Purchases. They're here and they don't exactly help. You win credits in the game, but stars are used to buy extra units and items to boost your abilities in the game. You can win SOME stars during the game but then these become more valuable than gold dust and by the time you've enough to get something really big like the giant tanks or walking crab monsters, you're likely upgraded enough to be able to one-shot most levels and bosses even on the hardest setting. There's a whole 2nd world at least (only played for a week, sod off) offering the same levels as before but with more P.O.Ws to rescue and harder enemies and bosses. Along with that, other bonuses too from beating the levels, new enemies to buy with REAL CASH stars and so on and so forth. But you can get to this point easily if you play through the older levels repeatedly until you unlock all the P.O.Ws, get their bonus effects and you can breeze most of the boss levels by that point in the harder worlds. The only annoying part is that you've got a Sortie points level that determines which levels you can do and each attempt costs points, but you regain one point every minute. A full refill costs about 30 stars... or you wait about 2 hours i.e. FOOADS, (Fuck Off Outside And Do Something).

Or play another time based waiting game.

...whoo

There is also a Vs Mode for people to play with friendly games and full rank versus games. The linking up is reasonable for the game itself, assuming people are still playing it by the time you get to play. You get to see what they're taking into the game from their deck of characters/soldiers/tanks and you play from your own point of the game onwards. Becomes amusing when you see what they focused on and what they actually bought and you're slapping the shit out of them with you game-won items rather than paying real cash and STILL WINNING, so I'm seeing even less of an incentive to pay for items I just destroyed while keeping all my cash-monies to blow on Jelly-Babies.

They're only memorable because they're weird.

It's good to play as a quick pick-up, as something you can come back to every now and then between work shifts, over lunch breaks etc and the multiplayer is fairly innocuous to the point of being a chuckle seeing how badly you're doing or how over powered you are compared to some other equally sad prick on the internet. It's an ok game with little depth but a lot of upgrade potential for those that want to get ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING marred by the flagrant abuse of the in-app purchases but the game itself is free (for now) perhaps if it was worth a little but had none of the in-app purchasing, I'd be more appreciative of this system and the dynamics of multiple units and the tactics behind those.

Nearly every original series, game enemy, makes an appearance here.

However it doesn't, so I'm not. An ok game that you'll get tired of eventually, likely before you beat everything and unlock everything.

Gripe: Achievements, Trophies and other such "carrots" of gaming.

In an age of gaming where the current generation consoles are lining up to be online, where games are expected to have some form of online mode (or a good excuse why not, in some cases it doesn’t NEED the online mode but many of the whining public won’t accept that) It has become a standard to have a means of saying “Hey look, I managed to do this in a game, am I not awesome?” 

No, no you’re not.  But more about that later.

Unless corrected, this all began back in 2005 with Microsoft and its Gamerscore implementation. But over the years it has seeped into Windows games, Playstation with its Trophies, Flash games with their own achievements (satirised fantastically by the flash game Achievement Unlocked), to various mediums in the digital age including smart phones and apps.  A lot of these achievements are utterly pointless or diverge from the key focus of a person playing a game.

Some may argue, some may disagree, to state that Achievements and such Tasks are a good way of increasing a games’ longevity and reward the players with recognition for their skill and ability in the game. For some achievements I can agree with that, such as for perhaps “Beating the game” and awarding the player a suitable moniker for such. However when it comes to “Beating the game” then “Beating the game on Hard” and “Beating the game on Hard while using one hand and punching yourself in the face repeatedly” we’ve struck upon an issue of mindless repetition just to get players to keep playing.

The premise is a good one, get people to play the game, reward them with a big fat ego boost for playing it in specific ways, once they’re keen to boost that score and their ego, the games can put in whatever ill-conceived achievements they want to keep poor saps going and claim to make their game last longer. No, it doesn’t last longer, it becomes a painful chore after a while and once the player has gotten all they can or even all the achievements, they will never touch the game again. Good achievements can boost a game, bad achievements will bury it in a bargain bucket.

But it’s all very well me just stating that, but let’s take a look at such aspects.

“Find all the collectables”

In some games you’ll be rewarded for finding and collecting all of a set number of items. Again, this can be positive and negative for a game. If the number of an item to collect is small, it should be something that might take a few “secret routes” or a few paths off the main track to find them, but not something that requires the player to be awake at 3am, their character to be dressed in a macaroni outfit while the feet and toes are indirectly dyed a rainbow spectrum helix that crosses over with their gloves and fingers, just to find a single item. Ideally the items to find should be part of side-quests or provide the player with a means of starting on a trail to locate them.

Alternatively, if the number of an item is huge, then there should be a map available IN GAME for the player to locate all the items, or a scanner, or search function of some sort. Hiding them away in something like a sandbox game, with no means to locate them or even to track how many they have, is a cheap and poor way of getting the player to cover every square inch of what the map-designers have made, this will usually be the last achievement gained from the player before the game is buried IF they bother to go that far.

“Fake longevity”

Games with an achievement for beating those games are perfectly fine (assuming you have a game that allows for that). An achievement that recognises a person has played the game, played it enough to warrant seeing the final boss, beating the last team to win the championship, figured out the last puzzle, are a positive side of achievements and EVERY GAME should have an achievement for beating it.

Where this has gone horribly wrong, is when achievements are provided for beating the game under specific conditions... Easy mode, Normal mode, Hard mode, Impossible mode, Even the Programmers Can’t Beat This mode... the list can go on forever (Playing badminton on the moon while engaging in a 72way porn film mode... actually I want to see that). It’s a fake longevity as you’re forcing the player to play through the game in a way they’re less likely to enjoy. Some games allow for beating the hardest mode to unlock all the easier achievements as well, but not everyone is going to be able to beat the hardest mode or have the time and patience for it. Have the game with Easy, Medium, Hard etc, but regardless of the difficulty the achievement should just remain for beating the game.

“Online achievements”

This is a trickier one to tackle. If a game has an offline and online mode, then any achievement that can be gained online, MUST be able to be gained offline as well. Achievements ruin a game when it’s demanded that not only must a player be able to meet the criteria but OTHER PEOPLE AS WELL must also meet the criteria, then you’re not awarding an achievement for playing but being in the right place at the right time.

If a game is fully online ONLY, then have online achievements that reflect the players own abilities (And not bullshit like become #1 in the world, or #1 rank in a game) but if it’s based on experience points gained, such achievements will be attained eventually by everyone, the better players getting them sooner rather than later. Games that have achievements for doing something once or a hundred times, as these are things a lot of people can still achieve (and NOT coming first a hundred times... dick move...), should be commended for encouraging people to play for the sake of playing and enjoyment, not overly brash and forced competitiveness. (It might also get some of those screaming kids off the mic)

“Lost Achievements”

Another tough one, this refers to any achievement that cannot be achieved for whatever reason. In some cases it could be because a player died during their game (not so bad on a short game but with some games lasting 25hours+ that’s a real headache to have play it ALL again just to get that achievement), not picking up an item right at the start of a game that was behind where you began, having to make a choice that takes the game in two different direction and each direction is laden with its own achievements (this can be done well if the diversity is LARGE, with many achievements on each respective path, but forcing players to play a game twice just to say either “yes” or “no” at one key point is another example of fake longevity).

Granted however, that players usually do not see everything on their first play through unless the game is VERY linear and forces them to do absolutely everything they must do, achievements can and will be missed by players not taking the correct route or such. This is easily rectified if the player has an option (usually at the end of the game) to go back and play key parts again, or pick specific puzzles, or some function of a game that permits them to return to an earlier point to try something again or try something new they didn’t or couldn’t try at the time.  It should be noted that such achievements should not require the player to have to play through 3-5 hours of a game just to get that alternative route/choice etc, because once again that’s the fake longevity. 

All in all, achievements can really add to a game and make it more fun if they’re thought out carefully and implemented with the right level of care and attention to the focus of making the game fun and enjoyable. Otherwise they could all just be removed. 

I still go back and play older console/computer games and they didn’t have achievements in them because, guess what, they’re still fun to play!