Please do not post any SPOILERS past act 4. As that's where I am in the game so far.

-Story and characters are hard to follow if you didnt play the previous MGS titles. Hence, alienating new buyers interested in MGS.

-Length of cutscenes. Some may have loved it, but I personally felt they were a bit too long. Some of them however were VERY GOOD and entertaining. The scene between Naomi and Otacon was great.

-Boss battles are all the same so far. Boss appears infront of you and has some sort of teleport/flying/speed ability that gets them instantly behind you. Every once in a while they stop for a few seconds and you get some to launch missles at there head. Not much variety in the patterns of bosses though. To MGS4 credit, the stories behind those bosses that Drebin tells after you beat them are amazing.

-Some levels (South America, Europe) are so big that I was constantly getting lost and having to press pause to check the map.

-Kojima could take some hints from Naughty Dog's Uncharted. That game had a perfect gameplay + cutscene transition and flowed much better than MGS4.

-Some of the action was too easy. I felt like instead of having to do stealth, I could simply run through a whole level. The motorcycle shooting part with Big Mama was also surprisingly too easy.

1) huh? in europe you just have to fallow a dude how can you get lost fallowing someone?

2) that's why there's higher difficulty level :)

 1. When he magically changes his clothes in a millisecond, I lost him. And it took a long time to find another one to follow.

2. I'm on the normal difficulty...which is what everyone plays on the first time through.

well playing on big boss hard would be better and on the boss extreme even better also beating the game under 5 hours, no kills, no alert, no item is really what make this game great so you should try it when you're done on your first playtrough :) you won't look at the motorcycle chase the same way after that, anyway enjoy the game

Yup, this is what MGS has been all about since the beginning. I think it works great, quite unique and very entertaining. I can see how some people might not like it. I'm just glad Kojima doesn't listen to you =)

My only complaint was that Act 3 seemed unfnished and was really repetitive and samey.

@Aj
I recall the first Metal Gear on PS being faster paced and most stealth based.

The downside, at least for me, would be that MGS4 would lose all the depth of it's story if Kojima would take some hints from Naughty Dog. I think Naughty Dog did it perfectly with the story of Uncharted, i really love the whole vibe of that game. But still i don't want MGS4 to be anything like Uncharted. Different kind of story, different kind of storytelling. Both are great in my opinion.

1) Different environments - there's no feeling of progression, unlike the past three games (especially MGS3), where you felt like you were indeed sneaking further and further into an enemy stronghold.

Also given no chance to really connect with the locations. Just as you're really getting into each environment, you're suddenly shuttled off to somewhere else in the world.


2) Codec got neutered - only two people to speak to, and one of them just repeats the same useless rubbish each time you call her. (Really: we have an entire bar in the corner of the screen to tell us how stressed Snake is, why do we need someone to also tell us?)

The codec was actually one of my favourite thing in the old games. I loved just stopping and calling up my support group every now and then, just to see what they had to say. Only really having Otacon to talk too (who took on Colonel Cambell's and Major Zero's boring roles - telling the player where to go next) was dissapointing.


3) Cutscenes to gameplay ratio all over the place - sometimes it felt like you'd barely been playing much before yet another lengthy cutscene started. I think of all four MGS games, MGS3 got the gameplay to cutscene ratio the best.


4) Too many gunz/aquirement of gunz - loads of guns, but there's not really much point in buying most of them.

Not only that, but having these guns readily available to buy also meant the game lost yet more of the feeling of progression that past games had. In MGS1-3, when you found a new gun it was always an exciting moment. MGS4 lost that feeling.

That's quite the contradiction, stealth based action is not fast pased.

It did have more stealth, but overall it matches most your complaints.