Metal Slug 2006 - Mission 2 (Normal, Marco, New Game)

So, yeah, remember how in the end of Mission 1's cutscene, you saw Tarma wipe out entire acres of enemy tanks with a Metal Slug Attack? Yeah well, I tried it in this mission, and all it did was to blow up on a motorbike. "The Slug I left on the highway" my ass. No, you can't bring the Slug out of the area. No, it makes no sense why Marco would ditch a perfectly functional Slug after driving it a walking distance from the start of the mission.

Mission 2 is where the game introduces you to the Metal Slug tank. For those not aware, the Metal Slug tank in this game controls drastically different from your character on foot, adopting tank controls. This means that pushing your left analog stick forward moves the Slug forward in the direction it's facing, not where you as the player are looking, in contrast to on-foot controls. The same applies for turning. Tank controls aren't inherently a bad thing, but the Metal Slug's Vulcan Cannons are strapped towards the rear of the tank, so the Vulcans can't rotate on the X Axis at all, so you have to basically be facing your target head on to shoot it. The Slug is also hopelessly slow and... sluggish, so oftentimes there is no way at all to avoid incoming enemy fire, such as the Masknell helicopters' machine gun sweeping attacks.

Speaking of which, Mission 2 also introduces aerial enemies! These are often off screen and will happily snipe you from off screen. Even with they ARE on screen, they have very subtle, if any, tells as to when they are going to attack, since they're just freaking helicopters, how would a helicopter telegraph and animate to inform you it's about to shoot you? The lock on system in this game is ABYSMAL for dealing with airbourne targets, because you have to manually aim the camera upwards and find the damn things before you can lock on to them, all while ground targets may or may not be trying to kill you. While locked on to flying targets, the camera goes insane as it tries to keep itself behind your character and the target, oftentimes trying to go underground, which it can't, so it phases into your character and you basically see nothing. Yeah, who needs to see when playing a video game, right?

The rest of the mission is pretty unremarkable. You tear through some urban areas, you get introduced to the Shotgun and the Rocket Launcher, which doesn't feature lock on, so you have to aim it manually. I will say that the Rocket Launcher in MS3D finally feels as powerful as it should be, capable of taking down enemy tanks and mechs in 2-3 rockets, in comparison to the 2D games which takes about half a clip of 30 to break a mech. However, it is slow as hell to fire, and the aiming reticle isn't nearly precise and delicate enough for it to work as well as I would like. The Rocket Launcher seems to have lost all its homing capabilities it had in the 2D game, meaning you need to aim the rockets with the precision of a sniper to deal proper damage to the enemies.