When Leikir Studio CEO Aurélien Loos first pitched the concept of Metal Slug Tactics to Dotemu, he wasn’t entirely certain whether the studio could actually pull it off. A relatively obscure outfit based in the Paris suburbs, Leikir’s most recent game is Rogue Lords — a party-based roguelite featuring famous monsters such as Dracula and Bloody Mary. There’s little in the studio’s portfolio to suggest that it has the chops to recreate the look and feel of one of the most beautiful 2D action games ever made.
"The first thing we needed to do was to check that we were good enough for Metal Slug because the series is huge. The pixel art is beautiful," Loos says.
As it turned out, Leikir was more than capable of recreating Metal Slug’s famous pixel art, even without the benefit of being able to use pre-existing assets. When Metal Slug Tactics’ trailer debuted during E3 2021, retro fans were immediately excited by the possibilities afforded by the shift to the tactics genre, as well as the apparent fidelity to the source material. It helped that it was being developed in partnership with Dotemu, the publisher behind Streets of Rage 4 recently acquired by Focus Home Interactive (SNK isn’t directly involved with development).
Up until this point, the reveal trailer has been allowed to largely stand on its own. But in a new interview with IGN, Loos revealed several new details, saying that fans can expect an experience similar to Into the Breach — the highly-regarded 2018 tactics game that was among the first to combine turn-based tactics with the roguelite genre. He also says that it will be a tribute to all things Metal Slug, with plenty of bosses, characters, and concepts being pulled directly from the series.
The notion of turning Metal Slug into a tactics game first came up over drinks, says Dotemu CEO Cyrille Imbert. It was the solution to a problem that Imbert had been wrestling with for a while: how could he adapt a retro series that he already considered to be close to perfect? SNK had originally extended an invitation to pitch a game based around one of its properties after being impressed by Dotemu’s work on Wonder Boy and Streets of Rage 4, which Imbert found daunting.
"Most [SNK games] are fighting games, and the fighting game market is a very hard one. Fighting games are really hard to make, and they’re high risk. And on the other side, there was Metal Slug, but all the Metal Slugs for the Neo-Geo are very good games — very beautiful, top-notch pixel art games. […] I think it’s still one of the most beautiful pixel art games ever made, along with Street Fighter 3rd Strike, for example," Imbert says. "So there was no reason to do a remake of that — it's already great. So what can you do? And doing a sequel would have meant bringing something new to the table […] and they were already perfect, so what can you do?"
Dotemu was intimately familiar with the challenges posed by the series, having worked with SNK to port various Metal Slug games to Steam. An arcade stalwart, Metal Slug was famous for crowding the screen with hordes of lavishly-animated enemies, each more elaborate than the last. Even on Dotemu’s admittedly clunky arcade emulator, it remains a sight to behold, especially when one of its enormous bosses appears on the screen. Its stunning artwork has helped the series retain a dedicated following over the years, even as the sequels have largely dried up.
Metal Slug Tactics and Into the Breach
A straightforward revival probably would have won Dotemu and Leikir plenty of plaudits, but shifting it to the tactics genre provided them with a unique opportunity to put their own stamp on the series. And sure enough, Metal Slug appears to be a perfect fit for the genre made famous by Fire Emblem, Advance Wars, and XCOM.
"Into the Breach was of course a big inspiration,” Imbert says. “It's smaller scale. It's a bit quicker. There's this arcade feel that goes along very nicely with the Metal Slug license."
Mindful of Metal Slug’s action-based roots, Leikir is crafting a turn-based experience built around speed — one in which abilities are powered up by moving constantly around the map and completing attack combos, and missions rarely take more than nine turns to complete. Teams will comprise three selectable characters battling across a series of handmade maps, with the missions being randomized. Being a roguelite, it will naturally be structured around a series of discrete runs that will earn characters experience and money, which can in turn be used to acquire new weapons and abilities via individual skill trees.
Characters will be "really different to play," Loos says. Aside from having their own skill tree, they will have their own combo abilities and weapon loadouts, which will in turn have a large impact on how each run is approached. It’s unclear whether it will be possible to be, say, turned into a zombie — Leikir is picking and choosing which mechanics feel right for the game’s more tactical approach.
As for the eponymous Slugs — the tanks and other vehicles featured in the main series — some will be discoverable on the map, while others will be able to be summoned by individual characters. True to the series, they will be very powerful. “They are a really, really powerful weapon obviously, and they can break some rules of the game,” Loos says. “But at the same time they can be tricky to use. So it's pretty fun to use the Slugs in Metal Slug Tactics.”
It’s a well-worn formula at this point, but not yet a wholly stale one. Its main strength is that it’s flexible enough to be applied to a variety of gameplay styles, as Into the Breach so richly demonstrated. And a system built around dying repeatedly only makes sense for a series like Metal Slug, which is famous for its gruesome and yet oddly charming habit of melting, decapitating, and dismembering its heroes.
The main challenge, Imbert says, is balancing between the different types of fans that he expects to be drawn to the game. "What we're trying to do is to get the interest from the hardcore players as well as some more mid-core players, because Metals Slug Tactics will attract people from the run-and-gun and Neo-Geo community, and they don't necessarily know tactical games really well. So for them, it must not be too complicated and a headache. But on the other side, some people don't know Metal Slug and they will come for the tactical aspect of it, so they need to be satisfied as well. And so the difficulty must not be too easy, otherwise they will get bored pretty quick. So it's a hard balance, but I think with different difficulty settings… we’ll have that for sure."
Dotemu and Leikir also plan to delve into Metal Slug’s lore, which is purportedly quite dense. Choosing different characters will unlock different branches of the story, Loos says, and will develop familiar characters like Marco and Eri.
"It was one of the things that was really important for us,” Loos says. “One thing is really cool about the [tactics genre] is we have much more space to tell stories, and Metal Slug has a huge background universe with a really cool story. Each character has a lot of stories about their past. But most of the fans don't know this story because they don't have the space to talk about this in the run-and-gun series."
A charming revival of an SNK classic
It all adds up to a charming revival for the series, which has not seen the release of a mainline entry in more than a decade. Metal Slug Tactics may not be a true sequel, but it does seem like it will retain much of the personality (and violence) that made the original arcade games so appealing.
The biggest question right now is when it will be available on console. While it would seem to be a natural fit for the Nintendo Switch — most of Dotemu’s games are available on the platform — Metal Slug Tactics has only been announced for PC. On that front, Imbert only says that a console release would be "super awesome," and that Dotemu needs to “what would make sense for the game.”
Metal Slug Tactics’ release date is similarly murky. “It’s a bit early to tell,” Imbert says. “I always try to protect the studios from that because then we're trapped. So yeah, it's a bit early for us to tell, but it's going well. So the wait should not be too long.”
Waiting is certainly nothing new for Metal Slug fans, what with it having been more than a decade since the last full entry in the series. Dotemu’s spinoff may not be quite what they hoped for, but at the very least it seems to be faithful to the spirit of the original games. And at this point, that’s all Metal Slug fans can really ask.
Kat Bailey is a Senior News Editor at IGN.