Kawazu's Metal Madness

Welcome to Kawazu's guide to Metal Assault. If you haven't played or heard of the metal slug series, here's a quick youtube vid for your enjoyment.



Now that we've all seen what this game is based off of, lets get down to business.

So you wanna play the game huh? You have downloaded, registered, and maybe even logged in already while idly reading this. Naturally, you wanna blow stuff up, shoot till you drop, respawn and shoot some more? Good. You're in the right room. If you wanna just stare at pretty pictures, you want the art room, that's down the hall, on your left, and with a big sign that reads: "wussies fall here". Now gear up soldier!

But wait, first things first. There are four characters to choose from. So who fits your style?

Carl, the oddly "well rounded" member of the group. Carl's are what you would call Riflemen. No real strengths, no real weaknesses. They possess a bit of everything, and yet nothing in particular. His skills include;

Running Jump, a long jump, to help cross gaps and chasms.
Endurance, much like it sounds, this skill lets you run for a lot longer. Triathlon anyone?
Throwing, for when chucking grenades needs to be done over a long distance.
Demo Instinct, when you can't possibly throw enough grenades all at once. This skill reduces cooldown on grenades, mines, and launchers.
Break Fall, when you gotta hit rock bottom in a hurry, you may as well avoid taking too much damage from it.

Burton, the heavy hitter, is a beast of a character. With dash skills, stuns, and some nice passive improvements to rockets. Burtons are the biguns they carry the biggest, baddest, meanest of all rocket launchers. Fear them, love them, become them. His skills include;

Spear, annoying hordes of zombies coming to get you? Never fear, charge recklessly head first into them with the spear move and watch as they are all stunned for a decent length of time.
Heavy Weapon Mobility,is that rocket launcher slowing you down? Can you just not get away fast enough? Try this bad boy out and learn how to catch your second wind.
Throwing - See above.
Rocket Upgrade, oh no that rocket is coming close, i'll just sidestep and let it hit that rock a few meters behind me... BOOM, *dead*. This skill upgrades the already considerable blast radius of your rockets.

Marie, the deadly sniper. A shorty with a mission, Marie is the sniper of the group, and her skills ensure she doesn't even need a scope to do it. Maries are usually found sitting on the far edge of a lane with a sniper rifle picking off zombies and characters with effortless precision. Her skills include;

Hawk Eyes, for when you absolutely must see across the entire map, right now.
Sharpshooting, Never miss. Ever. Even grenades are fair game, you're that sexy. No really!
Double Roll, roll not once, but twice! And it doesn't even have to be in the same direction. Isn't that nice?
Sniping Skill, hold your breath longer, zooming in for just about the rest of time.

Ai, the sexy "scout". Far from what anyone would ever call an actual scout, Ai is the oddest member of the bunch. She has skills that would seem to make her a "tank" type character, as well as skills that would make her a riflegirl. Essentially she is a female carl with a thing for explosions. Her skills include;

Dud Grenade,when one grenade simply isn't enough, why not throw 4 at once?
Back Step, a simple retreat. In style.
Demo Instinct - Same as above.
Survival, can't seem to live through those endless zombie hordes wailing on you? This little baby is for you, regrow that arm you lost in no time flat.

Guns

So you've chosen your hero, named them, and readied yourself to play the
tutorial. You should play it by the way, it teaches you how to walk,
talk, and most importantly. SHOOT! Well we can't have a shooting game if
you can't shoot right? so go ahead and give it a go.

Speaking of shooting, what can we shoot? Well there are numerous weapon
types. Each type has it's own peculiar things about it as well.

APCI = All purpose comparison index, a
basic ranking of how the gun fares compared to the rest of them at an
equal level. No point in comparing a level 30 with a level 2 is there? 1
being worst, 5 being best.

Pistols, your general purpose, 'oh shit I'm boned' gun. A last resort in pretty much every situation. You will almost
never find anyone main lining a pistol. That said, pistols do modest
damage, more so than rifles, less than shotguns/snipers or rockets. They
compensate by having a shorter range and rate of fire.

APCI:
Damage 2/5(good, but not great)
Rate of fire 4/5(pretty good, you'll never find a faster moving bullet)
Range & Accuracy 2/5(better than shotty, worse than anything else)
Usefulness 3/5(in some cases, these are your last chance)

Rifles, your 'bread and butter' gun. These babies will see you
through every mission from here till kingdom come, and probably then some. Rifles are fast firing, low damage weapons which make up for hitting power with insanely fast 'spray and pray' style moves. Death by a thousand cuts.

APCI:
Damage 1/5(each bullet is fairly weak on it's own...)
Rate of fire 5/5(...but damn there sure are alot of bullets)
Range & Accuracy 4/5(...and at a distance too)
Usefulness 5/5(you use it for everything, period.)

Sniper Rifles, Bang~ head shot. That alone pretty much sums up
the Sniper Rifle series. These buggars are massive, long ranged, and
accurate weapons of destruction. In the hands of an expert these are truly devastating. The scope mechanic in-game however turns me off to these, as it can be rather annoying.

APCI:
Damage 5/5(boom~ head shot!)
Rate of fire 3/5(faster than shotguns, usually)
Range & Accuracy 5/5(... x2)
Usefulness 3/5(the scope is off putting, but Marie can easily get around that)

Shotguns, while in many shooter games shotguns are the kings of
close range devastation, this game sadly suffers with them. Most
shotguns in-game are too slow at "reloading" between EVERY
shot, to provide any measurable usefulness. While still awesome and incredibly damaging, more so even than some of the sniper rifles, these guns suffer from the old pump action mechanic which makes snails look like NASCAR vehicles by compare.

APCI:
Damage 3/5(when all 3 pellets hit, it's amazing)
Rate of fire 2/5(at least they beat rockets right?)
Range & Accuracy 1/5(can you say short?)
Usefulness 1/5(mainly a pvp weapon, in coop even pistols beat these)

Rockets, when it must go boom, it must do it right now, and
because a giant pop bottle just rammed you in the face. Rockets go boom. Rocket launchers supply the oomph to make rockets go boom, on your opponent, not you.

APCI:
Damage 4/5(better than a sniper if you can't headshot frequently)
Rate of fire 1/5(it's actually a little worse than a shotgun)
Range & Accuracy 3/5(not many people could get a rocket to fly straight, even then they dont go terribly far)
Usefulness 4/5(quite useful, despite the horrific fire rate, and terrible accuracy)

Note: I underlined usefulness because it's my own personal opinion. Some people may find shotguns VERY useful, or VERY useless. To each their own. For someone who rarely pvp's these guidelines are fairly accurate.

Weapon Mods

You may have been playing and seen a gun with a special scope, or maybe a laser sight or even heard a silencer. These are all mods you can buy in the general store or from other players.

[Engineer] B. Roker will "modify" your gun and add or remove these parts for you. For a modest cost of only 500 coins.

The parts you can add are as follows.

Silencers: Gun too noisy? add a silencer, not only do they look cool, they actually make your weapons less noisy. It can be a real lifesaver if your ears are ringing from gunfire.

Laser Sights: These are an interesting attachment. Their uses are rather limited, but it still wouldn't hurt to have one on your main gun. Laser sights automatically place a small red circle over any enemy you aim at, showing you exactly where you're aiming. This has a very limited range though, roughly less than half of your visible screen while standing(flashlight range or - a tiny bit). Still, these can see THROUGH doors, and on some coop maps this can be deadly, Death escape 1&2 for instance, have a large number of zombies that pack tightly behind doors, waiting to kill unsuspecting players.

Red Dot Sights:The ever useful RDS makes its way into metal assault without any loss of usefulness. A red dot sight will literally turn your cursor from black to red whenever you aim at an enemy. You won't see exactly where you're shooting, but aim high and you'll almost certainly get a headshot.


Scopes: Contrary to popular belief, these can be attached to any weapon, including shotguns and pistols! Though their uses are limited, scopes are useful if you can get the hang of them. They allow unlimited vision range, albeit at the cost of SP per second and some fog of war issues. In pvp these can be very useful, however against zombies in coop they're not so great. Zombies tend to lumber on in the same path and not zig zag around like players.

Magazines: Only available on standard rifles(not snipers!), these increase the number of bullets in your clip by at least 2. Some special ones can boost the number by 3, 5, or even 7! Though these are very rare and often extremely expensive. Just to keep it clear, when the bullets are added on, they get added to every clip you carry or pickup. Instead of 30 rounds, with a magazine attached, every clip is now 32 rounds. This can add up very quickly.

So here are some recommended combos to help you out...

Rocket launcher + Laser Sight; seeing behind doors and being able to attack behind them makes this a very worthwhile investment.

Any weapon + Red Dot Sight; Knowing when you're actually aiming at something, or just shooting wildly like a hillbilly gone mad can help you save a lot of ammo. Not to mention score a lot more kills too.

Rifle + Magazine; More ammo on the single most ammo hungry weapon out there? YES PLEASE! Don't forget, the bullets will stack, every clip will get those extra rounds.

Sniper Rifle + Silencer; Whether or not you use a scope is up to you, but from what I've seen a Silencer makes the actual bullet itself seem somewhat smaller. More testing is needed on my part, but for now I'm going to say a cheap silencer on your sniper rifle won't hurt you, and may just make you that little bit harder to spot in PvP.

Images coming soon... -er or later...

updated to add some color. And info on weapon mods added.

Can i sticky this for future reference? this will be really useful to many newcomers in the future~

Certainly Day, although not many posts are being made here at the moment xP

Change Metal Slug 4 to a superior Metal Slug game. Like 3 or 7.

NovaZero wrote:

Change Metal Slug 4 to a superior Metal Slug game. Like 3 or 7.

I would but it doesn't really matter I was going for something that showed how the action played out more then how good the game actually was. Since there are no epic boss fights in this game, save for a very very few in mission mode, theres no point finding the metal slug 3 final boss vid and posting it up.
You're welcome of course to add more metal slug vids here if you want.