Metal Gear Solid 4 for Playstation 3: Video Game Review

MGS4, one of the most anticipated games for PS3, has largely met with widespread praise from critics and gamers, and with good reason. The gameplay is solid, the graphics are amazing, and the story, while confusing, ultimately proves engaging and achieves its goal of neatly tying up all the loose ends left by the previous installments in the series.

I won't say much about the graphics--I think the screenshots, videos, and other media pretty much speak for themselves. Environments, characters, weapons--everything is beautifully rendered, and painstaking detail is applied to everything imaginable. The graphics in conjunction with the sound really make you feel like you're in the middle of a battlefield. Also, the environments in this game have shown more realism than in previous games. For example, guns, ammo, and item boxes are no longer floating, spinning prisms--they actually lie on the ground. This makes the game look, frankly, less like a game.

The gameplay is somewhat tweaked in this game, but is unmistakably a Metal Gear Solid. The control scheme has been reworked to cater to more FPS-type gameplay, and although this takes some getting used to (very little, actually), I think was ultimately a good decision because of all the new options it opens up for the player. In fact, you could play through the game as though it were a shooter, and it would be every bit of fun as a dedicated shooter game--that's the beauty of MGS4. It is as good a shooter as any other out there, but it's so much more. At its core, it is still a sneaking game (even though you could go through it as a shooter). However, the game's various levels go through an amazing diversity of environments to sneak through. Without giving any spoilers, I'll just say you get to sneak through battlefields (sneaking past rebels fighting PMC's), you sneak through the the traditional enemy bases (as in MGS1 or 2), you sneak through some city blocks, and then some. However, this game isn't just about sneaking--you get a diversity of tasks in ADDITION to sneaking, such as tracking and tailing. During times when you're NOT sneaking, you get boss fights and vehicle chases, which are similar in feel to previous installments.

Mainstays of previous games are maintained in updated or modified forms. CQC (close quarters combat) makes a comeback, with some new features, although it doesn't play too prominent a role, given that many of your engagements will be longer range than they were in the jungles of MGS3, and given that your boss fights are with non-CQC-able enemies (for the most part--for example, you get a jet-pack boss, a robotic wolf boss, a Doc-Oc type boss, and a floating psychic boss). The codec unfortunately has taken a back seat to cutscenes and gameplay. However, given the tense, addicting gameplay, I honestly didn't find much downtime to take a break and make codec calls for silly conversations.

The story actually is somewhat convoluted, and I don't think it is particularly brilliant (although it is brilliant in terms of being able to close up the many loose ends from previous games). But as you go along you really do get the sense that you need to stop Liquid (the main bad guy), and the story does engage you in that way. Cut scenes are LONG in this game, much of it explanatory, so for those new to the series they may not make very much sense (and even to those familiar with the series, they still may not make much sense). The action in the cutscenes is really top notch, though, especially the CQC scenes taken by motion capture. Needless to say, while coherence/comprehension-friendliness is not a strong point of this game's plot, it certainly gets the job done. As an added bonus, for fans of the series, there are constantly throwbacks and flashbacks to events in the series' history, especially given that Snake is now old and he's all nostalgic now.

All in all, MGS4 really gets it all right--solid gameplay, great graphics, and a story to explain the whole series. I really was most impressed with the diversity of the gameplay. You are always on your toes--just when you think you've had enough sneaking, suddenly there's a vehicle chase to spice things up. Unlike the previous MGS games, MGS4 takes place in several different locations all over the world, not just one big enemy complex. All of this adds up to one hell of a masterpiece of a game. Highly recommended.