Metal Slug: Awakening, the side-scrolling bullet hell Action is making all the noise this week! Globally released on 22nd August 2023, the game is developed by SNK and published by VNGGAmes. Players can experience an intense shooting mania in real-time as they manoeuvre their way among enemies, tactically sweeping them out and progressing through the multitude of thrilling stages. Metal Slug: Awakening is available to be downloaded and installed as a free-to-play game on both the Google Play Store and iOS App Store.

Whether you’re a new player or a veteran of the genre, you might still be a beginner when it comes to Metal Slug: Awakening due to the game being not even a week old! There’s a lot to understand pertaining to the in-game systems, and a lot to uncover regarding the different strategies that can be used to achieve victories. In this article for Metal Slug: Awakening, we will be providing some of our personally observed tips and tricks that will help you in your quest to get more progression in a shorter period of time.

Tip #1. Getting to Know the Game Mechanics

Metal Slug: Awakening is a unique game that requires the player to thoroughly understand the underlying game mechanics. Each stage in the game is uniquely designed and crafted to make the difficulty progressively harder over time. The base gameplay is a side-scrolling shooter where you can move your character using the virtual joystick or keyboard bindings if you’re playing on your PC with BlueStacks. Players are given the freedom to auto-aim or simply let the AI do the aiming for them. If you choose the latter option, then the gun will aim to nearby enemies as soon as you are in their attack range vicinity.

Mastering the art of dodging incoming attacks at the right time and perfecting your reflex timings is going to be the key for you to progress in the long run. Yes, other factors such as hero and weapons empowerments are also going to play a huge role but your skill remains to be the dominant factor. Hence, we would highly recommend simply playing through the adventure stages over and over to get a hang of the gameplay.

Tip #2. Focusing on the Main Quests

The Questing system in Metal Slug: Awakening is a fresh addition to the genre the game has acquired. Not many times do we see a full-fledged questing system that has daily quests, main quests, tutorial quests, and side quests. More akin to MMORPG and Gacha games, Metal Slug: Awakening has a plethora of content to be cleared at your leisure time. Clearing these quests will also help you understand more about the base systems embedded in the game, along with rewarding you generously for your valiant efforts.

Tip #3. Unlocking More Characters 

Metal Slug: Awakening is a hero-collector in disguise! It offers a wide variety of collectible characters, each of whom offer a unique set of active and passive abilities. Each character gives you a deep insight into what you can do with them in the game. Some characters can even help you progress faster, due to being more suitable and having better quality abilities. We would highly recommend players to check out an in-depth tier list for the best characters, especially due to the rigorous process you have to go through to even recruit them.

Tip #4. Unlocking and Upgrading Weapons

While many of you might not realize it at the beginning, but Metal Slug: Awakening relies more on weapons than your characters. This is due to the fact that weapons are divided into different rarities. Hence, a lower rarity weapons is obviously going to perform worse than a higher rarity weapon. Thankfully, there’s a lot of stats that you can use to compare different weapons, such as Fire Rare, Firing Range, Damage, Ammo Capacity, and more. Weapons also come in different types, such as rocket launchers, bazookas, hand guns, machine guns, shotguns, and much more. Choose a weapon that suits your playstyle.

Tip #5. Upgrading the Core to Get Bonus Stats

An underrated factor in deciding many of the battles is the “Core”. This feature is locked behind completing the quest titled “Story – Urgent Mission”. To put it simply, the core is the system through which players can get extra stats for their characters. These attributes can be further enhanced as you increase the level of your core. The attributes enhanced via the Core are as follows:

• Attack
• HP
• Accuracy
• Critical Hit Rate
• Critical Hit Damage
• Critical Hit Resistance

Playing Metal Slug: Awakening on a bigger screen of your PC with BlueStacks without worrying about battery drainage and smooth gameplay, is highly recommended.