You can also fire straight up or straight down by pressing up or down on the D-pad while shooting, and bullets will actually pass through many walls, enabling you to flank under or above an enemy and take it out safely. Jumping while pressing up will reverse gravity, and this can be done on the ground or in mid-air. Movement and jumping is quick and responsive. Your M-308 Gunner is a very agile machine. You’ll spend much more time with the stages than the bosses, because if you die on a boss you’ll need to replay the entire stage leading up to it. The “boss” after beating the final stage feels like an even bigger let down, because the game just forces you through a gauntlet of all the previous bosses, one after another. Half of the bosses wouldn’t feel out-of-place in any other run-and-gun game, and most can be beaten without ever reversing the gravity. You need to be prepared to deal with a little frustration to successfully beat this game.Īside from the stages, the bosses are equally challenging, but feel a lot less creative. It is fun to retry a stage over and over until you discover the path through it, but several hazards and challenges feel almost unfair the first time you run into them – and explode. Much like the R-Type series, Metal Storm requires memorization to survive. Most situations that appear at first glance to require twitch reflexes and impeccable timing actually have a much safer solution, but this approach to level design comes at a cost.
In true Irem fashion, many of the levels require extensive trial and error to discover the perfect route. Levels are not merely challenges to overcome but puzzles to solve. Many enemies and barriers will alter their behavior depending on how gravity is switched. Platforms alternate spikes on the top or on the bottom. While one stage might feature conventional platforming, the next will scroll endlessly in the vertical dimension, or will wrap the floor with the ceiling. While there are only six real stages, each presents a very unique challenge that demands creative exploitation of gravity switching. Thankfully, the game eases you into the gravity mechanic, starting simple and becoming more complex later. It’s a subtle nuance that keeps the gameplay challenging.Īt first, wrapping your head around platforming and avoiding bullets while upside-down seems daunting. This ability is not possible twice without touching the ground between a gravity-switch, to prevent the player from rapidly switching gravity and levitating through a stage.
Pressing down and jump while upside-down will reverse this process and shift gravity again. All the enemies of the stage will also fly from ground to ceiling, or ceiling to ground, as the case may be.
The player will fly upward and land, feet-first, on the ceiling. Aim up while jumping, however, and this formula gets turned literally upside-down as the gravity of the stage reverses itself. At the end of each stage is a boss to defeat. The player controls a humanoid mecha, progressing from left to right, jumping on platforms, shooting robotic enemies and avoiding bullets and hazards. Truly, Metal Storm was ahead of its time.Īt its core, Metal Storm is a platforming shooter similar to Contra or Megaman. Even now, platformers featuring player control of gravity – such as Nintendo’s Super Mario Galaxy – are considered revolutionary. While it shares some similarities in design and pacing to R-Type, it also happens to be one of the most unusual platformers ever to grace the Nintendo Entertainment System. Metal Storm is a lesser-known game from developer Irem, better known as the creators of the R-Type series.