SHOCK TROOPERS 2nd Squad

I came into this one knowing the first Shock Troopers had a devoted fanbase, and 2nd Squad's mixed Steam rating of 55% told me straight away this port was not going to be a smooth ride. What you get is a top-down run-and-gun built on arcade hardware from 1998, ported to PC with the original performance quirks largely intact. The core loop is simple: pick one of four mercenaries, lock your aim with a held fire button, grenade with B, dodge with a leaping somersault on C, and blast everything in the stage until a boss shows up. That structure sounds clean, and for the first twenty minutes it feels genuinely quick and punchy. The four characters, Leon, Angel, Lulu, and Toy, each carry a different default weapon and special attack, which is actually a step up from the first game's character variety in one narrow sense. Leon is the tanky slow bruiser, Lulu is the fast glass-cannon with wide spread shots, and so on. The problem the community identified immediately is that the roster is not balanced. Leon and Toy both have screen-clearing specials that become essential on later stages, while Angel and Lulu are strictly harder picks with no compensating upside that matters when the bullet density ramps up. That kind of lopsided design in a game this short is annoying rather than deep. Vehicles, tanks, jeeps, and mechs can be hijacked mid-stage and each has a charged shot, which is the game's most interesting new mechanic and gives it a passing resemblance to Metal Slug from a top-down angle. They get destroyed fast, but the burst of firepower while they last feels good. Here is where the Steam port hurts the most: the original Neo Geo hardware suffered slowdown when the screen filled up, and this PC version reproduces that faithfully rather than fixing it. Players have flagged that the emulation does not smooth out the frame pacing, so in co-op, or any stage where fifteen enemies converge on screen, the game slows to a crawl. That is a 1998 hardware limitation being passed off as a feature. For a game you buy in 2024 on PC, that is a hard pill. Achievements are also reported as broken by multiple Steam users, and the developer communication around these issues has been non-existent since the 2016 launch. On top of all that, the design regressions from the first game are real and meaningful. The original offered three branching routes with a total of seventeen distinct stages; 2nd Squad cuts that down to two routes, with the first, fourth, and fifth stages shared regardless of choice. The Team Mode, where you could roster three characters and swap between them tactically, is completely gone. Replayability takes a direct hit. The pre-rendered 3D sprite art has not aged as gracefully as the hand-drawn work in the original, either. It reads like early PlayStation FMV cutout sprites rather than the crisp Neo Geo pixel work fans loved. The bosses, to the game's credit, are multi-phase, fill the screen, and each plays genuinely differently, which is the single area where 2nd Squad arguably improves on its predecessor. Bottom line for the PC shooter crowd: if you missed the first Shock Troopers entirely and want a short, loud, fast top-down arcade blaster with online co-op support, there is an hour or two of genuine fun here. If you played the original and are expecting a worthy follow-up, the cuts are too deep and the port quality too rough. The slowdown is not charming retro texture, it is a legitimate gameplay blocker in co-op. Get the first one before touching this.

Fred · Scout Team

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