Metal Shooter Slug

Metal Shooter Slug is a side-scrolling run-and-gun game in the arcade tradition, and it is not subtle about it. It runs in the browser — no download, no account, no install.

You control a soldier moving left to right through a stage that is full of enemies, and the job is to shoot all of them without being shot. Movement and aiming are separate concerns: you can advance, retreat or jump while keeping the barrel pointed at whatever is currently a problem, which is what makes the level design readable — a new enemy type is usually introduced in a position where you have room to deal with it before the next one arrives.

It is a multi-level game, so the structure is a run of stages that get denser as they go. Ammunition and health are limited, and the difficulty comes from the accumulation of small decisions rather than from any single hard encounter: pushing forward when you should have backed off costs more than a missed shot ever does.

It is a keyboard game at heart, and it runs on a phone with on-screen controls.

On cool games spot this page is the index entry: cover, description, and search terms. The game itself is loaded from a third-party web build in an iframe on Play, so nothing is bundled into the site. It is filed under shooting, so it appears alongside the rest of the shooting games in the catalog.

Press Play and find out.