SHOCK TROOPERS

A fun Neogeo arcade game of old! The sprites hold up and the game is just flat out fun to play. I had no issues playing the game on my PC or my steam deck. Local co-op worked without issues and I love the cast of characters you get to play as. The game reminds me of Metal Slug if it was isometric. It's often on sale for around $1, absolutely pick it up at that price.

Hungry for more arcade games, my friend and I settled on Shock Troopers - another SNK game, essentially being a top down Metal Slug. Would it reach the highs I craved, or was it attempting to fill a void it couldn't possibly aspire to?
The story of this game is as basic an affair as you'd expect. Somebody gets kidnapped, you go to rescue them. The game actually has very basic cutscenes reminiscent of Ninja Gaiden, which feel like they're mostly there to show off the superb pixel art.
The controls of this game are surprisingly intuitive. You can move and fire in 8 directions, but holding the fire button lets you strafe. You can also activate/throw a special weapon depending on your character (but it has limited ammo, so use it wisely!), and you can dodge roll (this will become your best friend). When starting the game, you pick your character (or team if you want to play as three characters you switch between) and a route. Each character has a different speed, type of gun, and of course animations.
But, more ambitiously, the routes are almost completely different to one another. While bosses are sometimes shared, the level design and environments are completely different from one another. There's also a point midway through the campaign where you can actually hop from one of the three routes to another – making the game feel very replayable (I would know, my friend and I already played it twice thanks to an unfortunate glitch where the audio just stopped working...)
The cat's out of the bag at this point, I loved this game. It's brutally difficult – the amount of bullets you'll be dodging and the speed of some bosses towards the end would have consumed a great deal of my quarters were I an (American) kid, but the combat is just really, really fun. Working with a friend to split the enemies apart and round em up, frantically dodging through and between bullets, all while some genuinely great music plays in the background, it's euphoric.
I'm honestly a little sad there's only two entries in this series (to my knowledge) as I enjoyed this so much I want to look forward to much more of it.

Great selection of levels and characters. The bosses are repeat and the challenge is not very high however the style and gameplay make up for it. The soundtrack slaps as well

𝕄𝕖𝕥𝕒𝕝 𝕊𝕝𝕦𝕘 𝕓𝕦𝕥 𝕚𝕟 𝕥𝕠𝕡-𝕕𝕠𝕨𝕟 𝕗𝕠𝕣𝕞𝕒𝕥!

Shock Troopers is another game from the NeoGeo era, it was one of those Arcade Machines that nobody would come close to and they had that mysterious aura about them... Renown for being extremely difficult, even on Easy Difficulty.

That was then, when we'd literally crawl on the side of the pavement looking for coins that we can input into the Arcades and play... Now that we've had the blessing of UNLIMITED CREDITS, the game seems to suddenly be a tad more forgiving.

In Shock Troopers, you choose one of eight characters, with each having their own special stats. For example, "That Blonde Dude" is slow as hell, but he's got a lot of Health Points, while that "Scrawny Blonde Girl" has higher movement speed, but all it takes for her to die are two bullets. Another difference between the characters would be their "Side Weapon"; ranging from grenades to literal Rocket Launchers. The level design is pretty nice; you can choose one of three paths and the campaign is six missions long (just like Metal Slug). Some paths are easier but we're not going to discuss that! The graphics are amazingly done in glorious retro style pixel art... and it would make you quite intrigued to know that most objects in the level are entirely destructible. That's right, your gun can unleash a mayhem so vast you'd be glued to your screen trying to satisfy your OCD by leaving NOTHING standing. Each mission has a boss at the end of it, but they're usually the same tank with a different color swap and when you destroy it, a cringe boss-looking soldier jumps out of it to try their luck lol.

The plot includes some girl getting kidnapped that has ties with the president of the USA or something... Sorry, I was too invested in the killing and destruction to actually care. Shock Troopers gets a whooping 9.5/10. It's an almost perfect game in my book... Almost because too much mayhem sometimes causes the game to lag! But to some of us that'd be a blessing in disguise, as lag would help you dodge a few bullets at least haha!

If you want something a bit more serious, a bit more anime, and a bit more top-down than Metal Slug, play this!

B-tier

No complaints.
Game kicks ass.

Big Mama will always be the GOAT