Much of the game's scenery is destructible. Correspondingly, many of the enemy troops have melee attacks. The player does not die for simply coming into contact with most enemies. The protagonists can perform melee attacks by using a knife and/or kicking. On the way through the mission, the player finds weapon upgrades and SV-001s for additional firepower and defense. At the end of each mission, the player must confront a boss who is often considerably larger than regular enemies and takes multiple shots to defeat.

The player has to constantly shoot at a continual stream of enemies in order to reach the end of a mission. If the vehicles can’t be captured, then destroy every last one of them. Their mission objective: recapture the stolen vehicles and use them to destroy the opposition. With the government and the military in shambles, Lieutenant Rossi gathers up most of the scattered Regular Army troops he can muster to launch a desperate counterattack. And with those tanks under the Rebel control, it was just a matter of time until their demise. Without those tanks the Regular Army could not even hope to win. The Rebellion forces found out and captured many of the caches, along with many of the tanks in them intact. During those two years, the Regular Army has been stockpiling the “Metal Slug” tanks in their caches with hopes to launch a massive assault against the Rebels and end the war. Not long after, a newly designed tank, code named “Metal Slug”, was forced into production. Seeing their disadvantage to carry out direct attacks against the Rebellion, the Regular Army then decided to carry out numerous special operations and create certain vehicles to accompany their commandos. With superior numbers of troops and weapons, the Rebels overwhelmed the Regular Army in all aspects. The fault was mostly in the hands of the Regular Army commanding officers, who failed to realize the value of information that the Regular Army intelligence division had provided.

No one expected this except for the Rebels who came up with these plans. In 2026, the Rebellion Army launches an assault that pushes the Regular Army forces into the brink of destruction. The Rebellion is formed by a group of people whose wishes are to change the world government into a military controlled one. The Regular Army is a government run military force used for various tasks such as peacekeeping and fending off terrorism. At the beginning of the 21st Century, two military groups known as the Regular Army and the Rebellion are at war.

Metal slug 1 was on which console