METAL SLUG Hand-drawn chaos, best with a friend

This is a run and gun in its purest form: a small soldier marches left to right through six missions, shooting a constant stream of enemies while dodging bullets, blades and worse. One hit kills, so every jump matters. At the end of each stage the game tallies your prisoners and your score. The campaign takes well under an hour, but the point is replaying it: better runs, higher scores, and a spot on the leaderboards.

The Metal Slug itself, Super Vehicle-001, is the reason the game has a name. Find one and the whole run flips: you stomp forward in a cannon-armed tank that soaks up hits your soldier never could, and losing it feels like a real loss. The scenery around you is mostly destructible too, so stages crumble into debris, points and pickups as you go. Bosses cap most missions, and they are bigger than anything else on screen. The pixel art is hand-drawn with an absurd amount of animation in every frame, and it still looks like nothing else.

This is a game built for two people crammed in front of one screen, and the port keeps that spirit. Local co-op puts a friend beside you as Tarma while you play Marco, and online co-op lets you clear missions with someone far away. It is the perfect setup for a short evening: a full run takes half an hour or so, the difficulty is adjustable, and you can replay unlocked stages in Mission Mode to practice or just mess around. Two players also means twice the explosions and someone to blame when the screen fills with enemies.