B-Team: Metal Cartoon Squad

If you’re a fan of arcade shooters here’s an isometric squad-based one that’s loads of fun. V.2 Play’s ‘B-Team: Metal Cartoon Squad’ is a cartoony Nintendo DS game that doesn’t take itself too seriously and delivers hours of brainless action that’s sure to leave your DS stylus fingers sore.

The game introduces itself via a cut scene showing a team of lazy mercenaries receiving a bundle of cash to perform some random mission. That’s as deep as the storyline gets. The spoofy feel of the game extends to the art style of everything from the cut scenes, to the mission briefing. The cut scenes are basically cut-out styled characters barely animated, giving it a deliberate low-budget feel. The mission briefings spoof most action games too, by showing the mission objectives in text while the colonel actually says “blah blah blah blah blah”, accentuating the fact that most people don’t give a flying hot chocolate about mission briefings in action games. I’m a big fan of dry spoofy humor, so the entire look and feel of B-Team appealed to me tremendously!

The light-hearted approach permeates through the gameplay too and it’s all out action from start to end. The game basically has you play as a squad of misfit mercenaries, ranging from a machine-gun wielding Eskimo to a terribly obvious looking spy. There are no squad-based mechanics though, and each squad member is basically an extra life. What I mean is that once your health bar gets over, one of your squad member falls in battle leaving you with one less life and less firepower. Once all three of your squad members die the mission fails and you’ve got to start it over again.

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The controls are pretty simple too - you tap the screen to shoot and use the D-pad to move around. They’re both easy to understand and simple to master, but the game’s still quite challenging. Missions are of four basic types - Elimination, Rescue, Escape and Boss battles.__STARTQUOTE__If you’re looking for a quick-fix light-hearted arcade shooter, this one’s certainly worth a look.__ENDQUOTE__

They’re all short and have a mini-map to guide you, but they’re simple enough so that you can just go through them mindlessly and focus mainly on the fun factor. This makes it an ideal game for a semi-distracted afternoon, when you need something that you can get in and out of quickly.

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The enemy AI isn’t the brightest, but it can get tricky when they horde you in numbers, ensuring that you’re always on your toes (or on your stylus, rather). The best offering of the game though, comes in the form of Boss battles that keep things fresh intermittently. Amongst the 30+ missions the game has to offer, you come across Boss battles quite frequently. These can range from a giant tank, to a chopper equipped with huge payloads. They’re pretty easy to master though, with just a few special attacks you’ve got to learn to dodge, making them a slightly challenging walk in the park (a walk without shoes maybe?), keeping both the challenge level and the fun factor intact.

To sum it up, B-Team: Metal Cartoon Squad may not be the most innovative or the most ingenious game on the DS, but it doesn’t try anything fancy and manages to please those arcade shooter pangs quite well.