Metal Marines

The Good
Metal Marines plays very well, missiles fly from one part of the screen to the other (a nice touch by the way), and interception rockets rush to knock them from the sky. I’m telling you watching your missiles slip through his interception net and the following explosions is just one of those gaming moments that you’ll be remembering for days afterwards Even though the plot is poor, there is a wealth of information on the game's world in the help file. It's interesting and helpful to read about the enemy commander's life and preferred combat tactics

The Bad
The plot is really, really laughable. Just take a look at the introduction for a laugh. I just don't understand why they didn't stick to a standard post-nuclear war format. It might not be original, but it works. One problem with the gameplay of Metal Marines is that when there’s a lot of action happening on screen there’s a tremendous lag. This is just part of the game, it doesn’t matter if you’re running it on a 386, 486 or Pentium 4. It’s a serious flaw that takes from the game. Graphically Metal Marines isn’t spectacular. Adequate is about the best word. The game is easy on the eye for the most part but the graphics do break down when a lot of action is taking place. And those much lauded metal marines? These titanic, robotic, towers of steel emerged as tiny smudged blobs on the screen. A big disappointment…

The Bottom Line
If you’re a command and conquer junkie looking for one of the hardest strategy games around, this is it! Really, I have never encountered a game half as hard as this one. It could be described as a fault of the game, because the enemy generals start out always with way too many advantages. Every battle is an up hill struggle. While most gamers will whine about such difficulties, for the hardcore gaming generals out there this game is well worth giving a chance...

The Good
This port of the Windows 3.x game has attractive low-res graphics and animation. Attack cutscenes and the ability to customize (to a minor degree) your Metal Marines' equipment have been added to the SNES port.

The first/tutorial mission present in the Windows 3.x version is not in the SNES port, instead the SNES game starts on the second island of the Windows version.

The Bad
The limitations of the Super Nintendo console has apparently resulted in several changes to how the game plays and they are not very welcome.

For one, Metal Marine deployment by either yourself or the enemy is set by selecting a 5x5 area of the island in which to drop your Marines. Anything outside this area is ignored and useless for the duration of the skirmish.

The enemy will use this to its advantage by making sure the Marines adjacent to the target is outside of the combat area, so they can't defend your installations. This means the player has to spam Marines a lot more than in the Windows version where combat was not restricted to an 'arena'. This is costly and limits the player's options in-game.

It player's review is similarly restricted and scrolling is not particularly fast. This combined with the high frequency of attacks can mean that building more than a few installations at a time can be quite a chore.

The enemy is a great deal more aggressive than in the original Windows version, so this may be a port of the Metal Marines Deluxe game which did feature increased enemy aggression and a quicker pace of play.

The Bottom Line
Ultimately the SNES port of Metal Marines is a valiant attempt that falls short in some areas, but only in comparison to the Windows 3.x version, which chances are most people won't have played beforehand anyway. In terms of the SNES game library, Metal Marines is a great addition to the strategy genre and well worth a try.