Metal Slug 4: Final Mission (Level-8)

Difficulty: Level-8. No cheats used.

This mission is entirely garbage.

First we have a hanging section to start the mission off, and it's horribly awkward and slow, so you'll die a lot if you don't know what you're doing. It's also blatantly obvious that the developers just modified the scuba gear off the sprites of the playable characters to make this section; You can see Marco kick his legs to swim when he turns around briefly, and he has idle animation for unclogging his gun underwater. When you're moving at a speed that you would be underwater, but everything else can attack you as though on land, somebody's got to call bullshit on it.

And then the mission just goes on and on, with little change in the environment or enemies. You then get a Metal Slug which you're inexplicably forced to ditch. The slopes are angled in such a way that the Metal Slug tank can't even animate properly.

And then the final boss... urgh.

Whomever green lit this game deserves to burn. It's amazing to me how the new developers can see the Vulcan Cannons, the zombies, the extremely hard gameplay of the previous series, but they fail to see how to make an inviting, enticing and progressive arcade game. They fail to see how the developers of the previous titles inject life into everything on the screen, from vehicles to environments. They fail to see the goofy humour of the series, and how they just want you to have fun, and instead make a game that wants to kill you from Mission 1, riddled with glitches.

Noise Factory ought to be ashamed of themselves.