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Is Snake's final mission his greatest yet? Edge gives its verdict on arguably the biggest PS3 exclusive to date.
For much of an opening act which is arguably its best, Metal Gear Solid 4 is less a sneaking mission than a cowering mission. Alone on a new-age battlefield, made to take orders from a man he barely knows – himself – Solid Snake is scrabbling for a bearing, doing the best he can to keep his body upright, his mind intact. Trampled by athletic mechs, chased by nihilistic soldiers, and forced to ally himself with faceless militias, he is outnumbered and outgunned, but above all outmoded.
How much of this is really Hideo Kojima, staggering into a new age of gaming, awed and overwhelmed by its inventions, is for the man himself to answer. But if each successive Snake reflects a part of its creator, or a mindset, then Old Snake is surely the most affecting. He is, like this final MGS, a mixture of great agility and sloth, drive and resignation. For all the incredible technology he brings to the battle, all the abilities and charisma, he feels throughout like a species on the brink of extinction.
The year is 2014, and global warfare has been privatized, creating five military companies that constitute the world’s newest superpowers. Chairman of every board is Liquid Ocelot, Snake’s arch rival and now owner of over half the world’s armed forces. Worse, he’s managed to commander SOP, a system designed to control, through nanomachines, every weapon and soldier on the battlefield. Once again, Snake is pulled out of retirement to neutralize the threat – even though his body, bred from the genes of the legendary Big Boss, is dying on its feet.
Be warned if you need to ask who these people are: this is not a game for Metal Gear outsiders. Though every mention of a name, event or entity raises a button prompt, which in turn triggers a momentary flashback, these simply exist to refresh the memory, not stock it with new information. Being a kind of farewell tour, MGS4 is not a story that spikes where you expect it to, either – more a collection of emotional triggers, each attached to a known person or place.
Nor is it one that seeks to appease the critics, specifically those who lost consciousness during hour two of MGS2’s finale. The cutscenes here are sure to invoke that thousand-yard stare, two in particular coming perilously close to the 90-minute mark. But that’s the price of admission – they can be paused and skipped now, but at the cost of half the experience – which for fans will seem more like a gift. If you’ve sat in lockers while footsteps came and went, basked in the glow of Codec chats without once checking your watch, or taken time to learn the difference between patriots and Patriots, MGS4 is your just reward.
Kojima has, of course, admitted to the game’s failings (though reports of his ‘disappointment’ have been greatly exaggerated). The greatest is the size of its maps, each venue split between several zones, themselves divided by loading screens. So your objective, rather than something tangible and relevant, often becomes just a marker on the HUD which doubles as a reset point for enemies, making escapes unduly easy. And it creates a sense of restlessness, allowing you all the time you want to explore but giving the levels little space to explore themselves.
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Technology aside, the problem is that MGS4’s agenda, unlike that of its predecessor, is not its own. Not content to just rekindle memories of Metal Gear, the game insists on physically revisiting them, veering this way and that, back and forth in time, the fates of its characters wrenched in improbable directions. An entire game could (and someday might) plug the gap in Raiden’s backstory, the Patriots’ one-time pet project returning as a Frank Jaeger-style cyborg ninja. And while few would begrudge the return of Metal Gear Solid’s classic bosses in the animalized form of The Beauty And Beast Unit, the shadow of MGS3’s Cobra Unit looms large.
That game felt like a dialogue between Kojima and the player, a determined blend of action, cinema and podcast. In contrast, MGS4 feels more like a genie struggling to find enough goodies in the lamp, slave to the demands of everyone but itself. Thankfully, its ambitions do find space on the battlefield, where its cameras flow effortlessly between first and thirdperson views, its control system finding, at last, the ideal balance of intuitiveness and range.
Though it narrows into a landslide of closing levels, action here is remarkably open, the AI honoring all kinds of approach. Opt for stealth, using the Solid Eye patch and Mk II droid for scouting and sabotage, and the battle focuses on chokepoints and patrol paths. Side with the militia, firing freely at the PMC soldiers, and the call goes out for reinforcements, waves of enemies sucking down your bullets.
Judgments are saved for when the game is over, prompting you to do things differently across multiple difficulty levels. Factor in the twin bars of Psyche and Stress, which boost and debilitate Snake as the battle evolves, and you have a game fit for months instead of days.
Metal Gear Solid has always been a story of duty in the face of obsolescence, and if this is really it for Kojima’s chapter – and who knows, maybe the entire series – his duty has been fulfilled. MGS4 is not the game it could have been; nor is it the game it would have been had the series grown with the benefit of hindsight; nor is it the game it should have been if you believed that early trailer. But it is faithful to its fans, its premise and its heart, delivering an experience that is, in so many ways, without equal. In years to come, as people stand before the grave marked ‘Tactical Espionage Action’, they’ll feel little choice but to salute.
VERDICT: 8/10
