Metal Warriors is a side-scrolling mecha action game made by LucasArts and published by Konami. It was released only in North America for the Super Nintendo in April 1995.
I first thought this was a Japanese production when I gladly played this during the mid-1990s. It was because of the cool mech designs that were likely inspired from various mecha anime of the 1980s.
The Story
It is the year 2102, and the evil Dark Axis Forces are trying to take over Earth. You have a powerful battle mech suit with lasers, cannons, and a jet pack to fight back. You can pilot six different mechs with various abilities across nine big missions, or battle a friend in 2-player mode. Are you damn tough enough to be a true Metal Warrior?
The Graphics and Sound
The graphics in here were really impressive for the SNES. It felt almost like I was playing an arcade game. The movement was smooth, the game framerate never slowed down, and the animations were clear. The detailed environments fit the game perfectly and made the action kind of even more exciting.
The music fits the action and has some catchy tunes, but most of them get reused, so you’ll hear the same tracks often, from boss fights to regular stages. The sound effects, however, are really well done. The explosions feel powerful, the clunky “metal on metal” sounds when you land or crash into enemies add weight, and every weapon has its own unique sound like boosters to lasers to plasma cannons. The only negative is that sometimes one sound effect cancels out another, like an explosion covering up a plasma shot, which feels a little unrealistic.
The Gameplay
You start with just one robot in single player, but the game has a unique feature: You can actually leave your suit. While your pilot is weak and easily destroyed, he can hop into another robot, which makes battles exciting. The main goal is to fight and destroy enemy robots using your special weapons.
The real fun is in multiplayer, where you can choose from 7 different robots, each with unique abilities. For example, the Spider can walk on walls and ceilings and even turn invisible, while the Prometheus is a slow powerhouse with massive weapons that destroy everything nearby. Levels also add variety, with icy stages where you slip and slide, or hilly areas that change how you move. You can also grab extra weapons during battles.
The controls in Metal Warriors are very easy to pick up for each robot. Every bot uses the same basic buttons—shoot, special weapon, jump, and so on. So it is simple to learn. The only tricky part is with the Spider robot: when you are walking upside-down, the controls are reversed, which can be frustrating and often gets you killed. Other than that, the controls work really well.
Overall, the gameplay is deep, fun, and full of strategy making it fun for 2 player versus battles especially. That alone makes the replay value better.
My Verdict
Metal Warriors is definitely worth playing. Once most retro gamers try it, they will probably want to own it because it is so much damn fun. The versus mode is the best part, with lots of strategies and different ways to play. Any retro games owner should have this game in their collection.
Play it on the still famous Super Nintendo/Super Famicom or play it on a simple emulator.
Let's keep on gaming in the free world!
This is one of those games that I wanted but never had a chance to get back in the day. The local gaming stores barely stocked anything outside the big names of gaming, and even then it was one or two copies per store (they received weekly shipments).
Metal Warriors was one I never saw on shelves. EB got one copy and it was a pre-order for a regular, they didn't order any for the store itself.
This always dumbfounded me because Konami was a well known, trusted, publisher within the gaming community back then. I guess this came down to the title being unknown so stores didn't put much investment in it.
Guess we were lucky cheap pirated game cartridges were available in my country since it is near Hongkong and Taiwan.🙂
I remember reading about pirate copies and hacks that were getting made back then. The gaming mags here would occasionally cover them in heavily slanted towards "don't support this stuff" articles that only made me want to support that stuff. 😂
Like, you are telling me there is a Street Fighter II game for the NES and we are not getting it in North America? There is a version of X game I love on Y console I just bought but licenses won't let anyone release it here in North America?
I was so mad at some of those hacks and pirate games not getting released here because they looked absolutely freaking awesome in the mags. I learned later after getting on the Internet that a great many of them were absolutely horrible. Still though, that was with hindsight of over a decade of curated games being released here - who knows what my opinion of SFII on NES might have been if I was able to play it back then before I was exposed to PlayStation, N64, better PC games, etc.
Street Fighter II game for the NES? I think I played that one before .
While I don't think I played this particular game I feel as though I played something similar to it. It's been so long since I had an SNES though, that I have no idea what it might have been.
You might have played Assault Suits Valken, also known as Cybernator.
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