Seriously? A Metal Slug tactics game? The only "tactic" I remember from these classic side-scrolling shoot-em-ups is "kill everything that isn't you". They were pure cartoony chaos, a delightfully silly and supernatural take on warfare where you died so often that you pressed "Continue?" almost as often as you pulled the trigger. Not the most obvious candidate for the slower-paced gameplay of turn-based tactics, then.
But Gears Tactics was surprisingly great (as our Gears Tactics review attests), so I went into this cautiously optimistic. You're given three soldiers which you take on missions like "kill all the enemies" or "protect this unarmed fool as they run across the map". Action is played out on an isometric grid that'll look familiar to veterans of the excellent Into the Breach. Each of your units has a poxy main weapon, a far more effective secondary weapon that has finite ammo, and several passive and active skills. A character's turn ends after they fire, so naturally you'll want to move them into the optimum position first before pulling the trigger.
