From the moment it was announced Metal Slug Tactics was a winner in our eyes. Marrying the SNK classic with the turn-based tactics genre is a golden idea on paper. Hearing it’s a roguelike in the vein of Into the Breach was the coup de grâce for this game being anything but a banger. And we’re happy to say it lives up to those lofty expectations.

Metal Slug Tactics does what it says on the tin: it’s a tactics game with the world, characters, and, most importantly, graphical style of SNK’s Metal Slug. You’ll take three characters to fight through four regions and defeat Morden, who has taken over the city. You’ll start with the main three of Marco, Eri, and Fio, but eventually you’ll unlock new Metal Slug characters and some SNK crossovers too.

Each character comes with their own unique skill sets and weapons, with three extra loadouts available, making for 36 different classes across nine characters. These range from balanced gunners, explosive experts, and in-your-face fighters that go in with nothing but a knife, a shotgun, and a dream.

While Into The Breach is inherently defensive as strategy games go, Metal Slug Tactics embraces the source material by encouraging a more extreme playstyle. You’ll gain adrenaline – which allows you to use skills – and dodge points – which reduces the damage taken – by moving further away from your starting point. Hunkering down will result in you getting blasted. Team placement is extremely important too, as it allows you to use Synchronisation attacks, enabling two teammates to attack enemies in their line of sight.

Each region of the game has you take on three missions before fighting the boss (you can take on the final boss region after completing just one other region if you’d like, though). Missions can range from depleting enemy ranks to escort quests, and each gives their own rewards like XP, supply drops, and ammo. However, each mission also has a secondary objective to make the rewards even greater.

Unfortunately, during the review process, we’ve encountered a bug that causes the game to go through long loads during the combat sections constantly. We’ve tested the game on PC where this isn’t an issue, but unfortunately both the PS5 and PS4 have this problem. The team is aware of it, and the game has been patched since we got it, making things a bit better (it used to freeze during loads), but the long loads are still persistent as of launch day.

We’re hoping this will be solved swiftly, because right now it is a big blemish on an otherwise brilliant game.