Metal Slug: 2nd Mission

Metal Slug: 2nd Mission picks up where the series' handheld debut left off, essentially taking everything that worked and expanding on it. The branching mission system is more developed, the campaign map offers more detours, and a single playthrough only reveals part of the available levels. The selection of vehicles and weapons has grown, there are more situations where terrain and elevation matter, and enemy formations are arranged to force players to alternate between cautious advances and quick strikes. Fuel and ammo remain limited, which turns brute force into a short-term solution and rewards players who save their weapons for the right moment.

Visually it's finer and more varied than the first entry. Environments change more often, from desert bases to snowy and industrial locations, and the console's color palette is put to better use, so the foreground reliably stands out from the background even during hectic firefights. The animation of soldiers and explosions keeps the series' characteristically exaggerated humor, right down to small details in enemy reactions. The music works with marching motifs and rhythmic loops that complement the pace of battle well, sounding surprisingly full-bodied even from a single small speaker.

The game released just as the console was heading toward a premature end, so it received less attention than it deserved. In retrospective surveys of the Neo Geo Pocket Color library, though, it regularly shows up as one of the platform's best-crafted action titles, precisely because of its amount of content and its appetite for replay. Today it's a solid choice for longer play sessions, since the detours and different endings give reason to return. Compared to the arcade Metal Slugs it's a different, somewhat slower and more tactical brand of entertainment, but one that carries the same signature. If a player has to pick a single action game from this platform for long evenings, this is the strongest candidate.