Based on the popular SNK run-and-gun series, Metal Slug Tactic's reveal at E3 2021 stuck out to me as the most exciting thing at the show. Intrigued by this transformation of a beloved franchise into a genre that many may not have thought of, I spoke to Cyrille Impert, Dotmeu CEO, and Aurélien Loos, CEO of developer Leikir, about the upcoming roguelike tactics game.
Starting off, I posed the most obvious question: how did the team land on a tactics game? "We hadn't worked with SNK for quite some time, and they were like 'why aren’t we working together anymore?' They saw the work we did on Wonderboy and Streets of Rage and said, 'We should do something together!'" Impert explains. While fighting games are primarily what SNK is known for, Dotemu didn't feel that it had the capacity to make one stick out in the current market or create one that could be successful.
As such, the team went looking through SNK’s portfolio and landed on Metal Slug. It may seem obvious to produce another run-and-gun sequel, but Impert’s attraction to the series runs deeper. “The original games are the top of their art in terms of design and animation and everything," he says. "It’s one of the best pixel art games ever made. On the other side in terms of run-and-gun, it’s perfect. There was no point in doing a sequel or remake because what else new could we bring to the table?”
The team knew Metal Slug was going to be the franchise, but what could they do? One night at Leikir’s studio around 2018 in Paris while drinking beers, Loos had a revelation. “Tactical! Metal Slug Tactical,” he proclaimed. Impert agreed. Soon after, plans were set in motion for this new take on Metal Slug and Leikir got to work on a visual prototype and brought it to SNK. SNK didn’t have any opposition to the idea, so plans were set in motion to sign all of the contracts and get all of the business dealings out of the way for Metal Slug Tactics to begin in earnest.
While listening to Impert, I assumed that meant development started on Tactics in 2018. As it turns out, despite liking the visual prototype, SNK still required a pitch and that took several months to get approved. When dealing with popular Japanese licenses, it requires a lot of patience to wait for responses due to different time zones. Full development on Tactics wouldn’t begin until sometime in early 2019.
Despite only beginning in earnest fairly recently, the game seems to be quite far along - that's because the team had a clear idea of what they wanted. It doesn’t hurt that SNK gave the team access to all of the assets from the original Metal Slug titles. However, with the move to a new genre, that's more about inspiration that actual usefulness in development. “We can’t use any assets of the original game because we are in a different perspective,” Loos explains, “But the cool thing is SNK gave us access to all data from the old games, so we had a lot of reference.”
For those unaware, Metal Slug Tactics plays out from an isometric perspective like the original Fallout titles. It technically would have been possible to make this a sidescroller in the vein of something such as Darkest Dungeon, but Loos had a grander plan. “Having an isometric view helped us a lot with working on specialization of the map. It gave us the opportunity to include verticality in our layouts.” In essence, this shift in perspective would better capture the often-sprawling levels that the arcade classics had.
Metal Slug has never been a series that is big on plot, though it does feature plenty of character interactions in its levels. With the game already confirmed to be roguelike, I was curious if there would be a story mode or just randomized seeds every time you play. "The cool thing about tactical RPGs is that we have a lot of space to do narration," Loos says. "Metal Slug has a lot of stories that are not used in the games, so one part we took was to use narration to give characters background and set their paths. Another part is a little more political because we use the background of the story to expand on the war governments and the rebellion of Morden featured in previous titles."
Loos also mentions that different bits of narration will unlock across your different runs. You have one shot to reach the ending before dying, but replaying the game will give you new abilities and different battles to help spice up each run, similar in fashion to how The Binding of Isaac reveals extra bits of plot the more you play. "You will not have multiple endings," Loos confirms, "But you will get new narration tracks and more. You'll also unlock new characters, new slugs, new weapons, et cetera"
Metal Slug has always been known as a co-op run-and-gun, but for Tactics, things are going to remain single-player. "We really want to focus on a great solo game. Multiplayer is not something that really works in a tactical RPG," Loos said. "Because of that, we really wanted to focus on the solo experience."
Moving away from talking only about gameplay, I asked which titles in the series that Metal Slug Tactics would be drawing inspiration from. "The inspiration is based on all of the Metal Slug series, obviously, but we are a huge fan of Metal Slug 2 and X," Impert says. Both he and Loos confirmed that the team’s favorite installment is 2 and that that particular game was the one they played the most as kids.
"I don't know if 2 is the best one, but I think 2 for most people on the team is the first one we spent a lot of time on," Loos says. "This episode was really, really huge in terms of impact for story. When I was a child, I grew up in a little town in France. During one week each year, we had a fairground and at this fairground, we had an arcade with one or two cabinets. One was Jurassic Park and the other was Metal Slug 2. Over the course of 10 years in this little town, the challenge each year was to beat the high score in Metal Slug 2. We saw people from all around France come and set new scores and we wanted to become better and better. For us, it was more a choice of love to focus on Metal Slug 2 and not because we thought it was the best game in the series."
Of course, despite the clear affection for Metal Slug, this is still a move to a difference genre, and so surely other inspirations come into play as well. "We don’t have a precise inspiration because we're trying to make something new, but we're obviously huge tactical RPG players. Maybe Into the Breach in terms of art," Loos says. I mention XCOM, and that catches Loos' attention. "You have good intuition. In XCOM 2, you have a lot of mechanics that challenge you with movement. We have this philosophy where everything in our game is about movement. You need to build movement to build your adrenaline."
Metal Slug is a lot more lighthearted than XCOM, though, so I wasn’t sure if this meant Metal Slug Tactics would be making a turn for the dramatic. As it turns out, that won't be the case. The game puts an emphasis on picking specific characters and making a team out of them, but their personalities are so integral to Metal Slug that losing them during a battle would ruin the atmosphere. You'll die, but characters will seemingly revive at the end of skirmishes to join you again.
As far as which specific characters would be playable, all the team can tell me is that "many" characters will be playable. O'Neal will feature as a boss with the team looking to include many of the classic boss fights from across the series, but everything else is being kept under wraps.
"The cool thing about the bosses is that, in the main games, you never get to see them from the full length," Loos says. "You only see a part of them, usually, especially when they are big bosses. When we were negotiating the deal, it was very interesting to imagine these bosses as full length because the game is isometric. We had to reimagine how the boss would look from a new point of view and that was super interesting work."
There are certain issues with SNK’s ownership that remain (one cannot ignore that the prince of Saudi Arabia owns a majority stake in the company), but at least the team behind the game is passionate about Metal Slug and eager to see the series succeed in a new genre. Metal Slug Tactics is currently set to launcg some time in 2022.