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Last week, the publisher Pix'n Love Games shared a tease for an "explosive" upcoming announcement related to the Metal Slug series, telling its followers to "Get ready to head back into battle with Marco, Tarma, Fio, and Eri..."
With little more to go on than that, fans online inevitably got hyped about the possibility of a new game announcement, with many hoping for a fresh Metal Slug Anthology Collection for modern platforms, ahead of the new game's release.
It seems, however, that they were way off base with their predictions, with this "explosive" announcement turning out to be a new tabletop board game, based on the run 'n gun series that will be heading to crowdfunding sites in the future.
Safe to say, this reveal hasn't exactly gone down well with fans, with the majority of replies to the announcement on Twitter/X criticising Pix'n Love Games for overhyping the project in its initial tease.
"This was the 'explosive announcement'? JFC," wrote one frustrated Twitter/X user, while another added, "This was the supposed big, can't-miss news. Well, I won't be falling for any other 'BIG' news you guys ever announce again."
Others, meanwhile, told Pix'n Love they were "not sure gamers were waiting for this for the 30th anniversary," with some asking the company whether "we needed a pre-announcement for this" and telling them directly they were "expecting a collection release of all previous games," based on the announcement, not a board game.
In this case, I think it's probably fair to say Pix'n Love Games have shot themselves in the foot a bit with the way they've announced this. The idea of the Metal Slug board game isn't completely terrible on its own, but it's clearly something that, from the off, will only appeal to a certain subset of existing fans. And even those people haven't been given much reason to care beyond the Metal Slug branding.
That's because, for now at least, we know pretty much nothing about the game, except that it was designed for 1-4 players and will seemingly feature 60 to 90-minute games.
This isn't the first time a Metal Slug announcement has gone down like a lead balloon in the past few months, with the unveiling of Ring Games Corp's Vampire Survivors-esque mobile game Metal Slug Rush being met with a scathing reaction online, including one comment that compared it to "seeing your dead granny's corpse refurbished into a chair..." The only silver lining to this bit of news was that it wasn't related to the upcoming reboot, announced by SNK back in April 2026, which has itself been criticised due to SNK's current ownership.