#3 - Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater
It's very difficult for a game to start off great and maintain that level of quality up to the very end. Most games will have a hiccup here and there, a crappy water level, an annoying character, you name it. But Metal Gear Solid 3 somehow manages to keep it all together all the way through. The characters are all very well written and just feel human opposed to the more flat characterisitics of previous Metal Gears. There is never a dull moment in the codec calls or watching the characters interact and ontop of the crazy Metal Gear universe, the game doesn't take itself too seriously except when it needs to. It's a campy action flick one moment and it's making you cry the next. The story is also much eaiser to understand, since this game takes place 30 years before the first Metal Gear, it's mostly a self contained story and it's not as cutscene heavy as the other games.
The game also looks fantastic, it really pushed the PS2 to whole new levels and it even had online multiplayer. The gameplay itself is amazing, the best Metal Gear has been to this point. While the original game had a fixed camera, the Subsistence edition of the game featured a free camera and with that, it felt so much more fluid and natural to control Snake in a 3D environment for the first time. The game has a variety of settings, it doesn't start you off at the enemy base like previous games, instead it starts you in the jungle which you need to get through along with smaller bases and mountains to get to your target: Gronznji Grad. Along the way Snake will have to feed himself, there's plently of food to be found around either from the animals or from soldier food, Snake has different tastes and preferences which will affect how effective a certain food item is. You need food in order to keep your stanmia gague up, which can be drained by various hazards or just starts to run out naturally. Healing yourself is also quite different, you can no longer just stuff your face with a ration and get all better. You need to treat your wounds properly and with the right tools this time. Finally camo, since Snake has to travel through a variety of different environments, you have at your disposial a variety of stealth camos which you can use to blend in, some special camos have different effects other than just hiding you like the ones you get from the Cobra Unit. In any case this is an important tool to keep Snake hidden.
The stealth in this game is very refined. Enemies are smarter than ever, not as basic as they were in MGS1 and 2, you now have a camo index which shows how visible you are and enemies also have more refined hearing which requires you to take advantage that Snake can now walk stealthly by using the dpad and run by using the analog stick. You'll be crawling more than any other MGS game, along with that using the first person camera mode to take out enemies more than ever. Things which Snake does earlier in the game can also effect certain events later on in the game such as blowing up a helicopter so it won't appear flying near a mountain section later on. Also CQC, prehaps Snake's most important tool yet. In previous games, melee combat was very basic but in MGS3 Snake has much more options when dealing with enemies hand to hand. I can't do it justice so if anyone is interested, check this video out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8HpDdRHct4k. I am not sure what else to say really, MGS3 is definitely one of the more refined games ever made and my favourite stealth game, overall well deserving to be in my top 3.
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