Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots ^{(PlayStation 3)}

Genre: Third-Person Action RPG Publisher: Konami Developer: Kojima Productions Players: 1-16

By Keith B (20th Jun 2008)

Solid Snake’s last outing is one of the most intricate and immersive games ever made, but inevitably suffers from trying to be all things to all men.

Whether you’re a fan of the Metal Gear series or not, Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots is a defining moment in gaming, because the scope and breadth of the story, and the main players you rotate around, are gloriously well-developed and detailed. From our meeting Snake on the dusty roads of a Middle Eastern town, where he is farming himself out as a hired gun, you just know that this is going to be something special. He is no longer the pliable and athletic young man of before, the victim of an unknown ageing ailment so he’s more like your grandad than a super hero, complete with continual coughing from his non-stop smoking (kiddies messages beware) and his back cracking every time he looks over his shoulder. But it’s Solid Snake and even as an old man, he can still turn on the pain when he needs to.

Trying to tell you the plot would be futile and a spoiler-ridden journey so I’ll try and give you a super condensed version. Snake is tracking Ocelot-turned-Liquid to kill him, because Liquid has a way to make redundant the entire global armed forces. That’s about all we’ll say on it, and instead look at MGS4 as a concept.
If you’ve ever played a Metal Gear game then you’re going to find things in this that make your chest get filled with a warm feeling. The developers have spared no effort in trying to wrap up the tales spun from the previous instalments of games, so if you know your MG story you’re going to love this. Not so much if you don’t. Not only does this final Snake instalment pay homage to the series by flooding you with small flashbacks but you’ll even revisit one or two of the locations from earlier games. So if you know your Metal Gear world then this game is for you.

My issue with Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, though, is this: if I go out and buy a video game, is it okay for the people who made the item I’m investing in to take control away from me and make me a spectator? I don’t think so, and I’m sure there’s going to be a lot of people who don’t agree with me, but that’s life. The first half of MGS4 is stunning, immersive, a little challenging and well paced. The second half becomes more like a series of running sections just to get to another cut scene where Kojima can unleash his ‘creative vision’ on the player again. The Kojima-factor comes through in the unique humour throughout and the roughly 290 times his name glides past on the credits.

I have to be honest and say that I wasn’t bothered at all about the less-than-perfect textures because there is a blurring effect that makes it less than painful; and I didn’t mind the cut scene length (don’t be put off by the rumoured 90 minute scenes, there’s only one that long, and it’s combined with the credits and actually quite watchable). It took me 28 hours to complete it and I had a good look around each level, and the first 18 hours or so I was enthralled. The enemies you face, the Boss Battles and the locations are really well thought out and beautifully created. But could they have been better than they are if Kojima didn’t insist on squeezing so much cut scene stuff onto the 50Gb. Absolutely.

Combat is pretty decent with multiple ways of approaching situations, but it’s still as linear as you can get. Enemies roam in patterns and respond to varying alert statuses, which Snake can avoid by using his Octo-Camo, or chameleon camouflage. Certain enemies are particularly intimidating but again, going further would remove the surprise for people who haven't played it yet.

The final portions of the experience will see you face foes so similar to previous instalments that I’m surprised that there hasn’t been more furores about it. Mantis, Wolf and the cast (albeit in different form) are here again, as are most of the same tricks. However, when the exact same sort of producer-injected ‘vision’ appears in a game nine years after it was initially showcased then I’m not particularly impressed. The screen cutting out with HIDEO as the channel and even the controller moving on the floor both make a return (I appreciate the memories, but was there nothing new they could do?), although more fun is had with reference to disk changes and laughing about being on the PS3 in a gentle dig to the 360’s DVDs.

Character development is again paramount and Otacon, Naomi, Raiden and others are fleshed out well and each has their own closing finale, drawing the curtain down on digital characters that have engrossed fans of the series for so long. So putting up with the incessant cut scenes and never-ending references to the previous games isn’t as difficult as it normally would because I wanted to know what happened to all the cast.

The PS3 gets another stab at an online success with Guns of the Patriots after the dismal flop that was Haze. After dragging through the Konami online signup process I played a couple of maps, but it didn’t seem to be anything incredibly exciting about it. You can customize your character and get stuck into your normal modes including deathmatch and so forth. There are also sneaking missions where one person is Snake and the rest on the team are soldiers, but the drama from the single player experience is never recaptured.

So how do you recap on the game that most of the world claims is one of the greatest ever made? Well, I was surprised with MGS4. Surprised that the installs weren’t as bad as I imagined, or that the scenes so watchable. Surprised that the same enemies were here as before, that there were so many never-ending health warnings flashing on the screen during loading for everything from smoking to posture to warning I’d played longer than eight hours. But surprised that it wasn’t better, to be honest, because creating a great game means giving gamers something, not forcing them to the sidelines. Yes, it’s an excellent game to play and a work of art in its own way, but the best game ever made? Maybe not. But certainly, very good.