5.0/10 - Good God, what happened Kojima?

Story - full of plotholes, contradictions and pretty much every plot twist involved nanomachines. Why is Vamp the way he is? Nanomachines. Dialogue suffered from repetition thus making a lot of the cutscenes too drawn out: Person A says something and Person B repeats what person A said. Also the story/dialogue was pretty cheesy. I know MGS games had some cheesy moments, but MGS4 took it to the next level.

"You were the lightning in that rain, you can still shine through the darkness."

Let's not forget Otacon crying over a one-night stand. It was so hilarious, and I didn't buy the romance between the two. Oh and watching Meryl & Akiba fight off the frogs in the last chapter was classic Hollywood stuff. Speaking of Akiba...

Akiba - It boggles my mind that he was brought in as one of the main characters; he's a comedic relief for the series. Anyways, he ended up being annoying, and every scene he was involved in made me roll my eyes. I just couldn't take Akiba serious.

Zero - I don't why they brought him. Watching Big Boss cut off the oxygen tank on this 100 year old man was pretty awkward. This was more ridiculous than Dante sewing a cross across his chest in Dante's Inferno.

Drebin Points - made the game very easy and didn't compel you to conserve ammo. Ran out of ammo during a boss fight? No problem! Just buy some by pressing start. You can also purchase stealth camo and infinite ammo. What a joke.

Beauty & The Beast Corps - suffered from poor character development. You knew nothing about them before fighting them, and they weren't involved in the story. You got to know backstory of the B&B Corps after defeating which was basically too late. I skipped the backstory of the last two because they were already dead. Who cares, let's move on.

Weak codec support - this was a huge disappointment for me. MGS1 had a fantastic supporting cast, MGS2 had a lot of funny codec moments, as well as MGS3, but MGS4 had nothing. There were two people on support, and there were very little to none interesting codec conversations.

A.I. - awful. I stood in front of the enemies, and they couldn't detect me. WTF? Getting around places was pretty easy.

Cutscene to gameplay ratio - nine hours of cutscenes with only four hours of gameplay. Kojima, take note from Uncharted 2: that's how you tell a story. What pissed me off what that there were many cutscenes that made me think, "wow, I wish I could play that scene." Some notable scenes are Raiden v Vamp, Snake encountering the first Gecko, etc. I wish there were more gameplay; I don't mind long cutscenes as long as the story isn't terrible. Unfortunately, MGS4 was atrocious and felt too drawn out with its repetitive dialogue.

I did like the gameplay minus the Drebin points. Rex v Ray and the final boss were solid. The final fight brought so many memories; quite possibly the best way to end it. Visuals & music were excellent as well. Everything else was a failure.