by thenewneon
Haven't played Revengeance. Happy for all of you that like it, but not my bag. Also only played PoOps for a little bit, not enough to rank, but my impressions were not positive.
Never touched the Ac!d games or Survive or anything else not here.
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What can you say, its the best story and best gameplay of the series combined. Hiding in plain sight is tense and fun (although yes, equipping camo through a menu is cumbersome) and there are a million different little things to try in every situation. It also avoids the trap most of the series falls into, and stays a stealth game the whole way through.
Incredible story and presentation, great bosses. But this game has the aforementioned "stops being a stealth game" problem maybe worse than any other game. There is something like 20 guards you need to sneak past in the whole game. And they're all at the beginning. The second half of the game is just cutscenes, boss fights, and the occasional action set piece. But, most of the series does have that problem so I can't knock it too hard. Still, what a game! The story is the standout feature here.
Kojima this is the third time you've brought in Metal Gear 2 and called it a new game, you can't keep doing this. Presentation is better than ever, the story is prescient (if told in an extremely clunky and off-putting way), and the level of detail and little tricks and secrets is crazy. This is where the series really started to become immersive sim adjacent and it pays off big time. The gameplay is the big draw here.
As far as I'm concerned, this is where Metal Gear really dials in what it is. And you know Kojima agrees because Metal Gear Solid 1 is a straight up carbon copy of this game (and then MGS2 being a sort of copy of 1). A non-exhaustive list of similarities: you need to find a woman posing as a guard by following her into a bathroom, shape-changing keys, an ambush in an elevator, a run-and-gun section up a spiral staircase, a fist fight against Grey Fox, and many more! However, unlike MGS1, there is a ton of gameplay in here. It really feels like a full-length experience, similar to MGS3. So why is MGS1 higher on my list? Well, the story and presentation there are just too good. But if you want a full meal of sneaking gameplay, you come play this game right here.
I appreciate that the database calls this Metal Gear Solid 2000, because I'm pretty sure the words Ghost Babel are nowhere in this game. Anyway, this is Ghost Babel and its good. Its a little weird cause its like, stage based with a score given at the end of each one? Not really what I'm here for. But they pack a lot of MGS flavor in that little GBC cartridge. This is the Link's Awakening to MG2's Link to the Past: lesser but surprisingly good, hamstrung by control limitations.
A friend once described MGS4 as having a lot of good ideas, and not sticking with any of them long enough to feel like a full game. This is like 6 demos of different MGS games all stitched together. The first two chapters are good! I even appreciate the different type of "tailing" stealth at the beginning of Chapter 3. But after that its just cutscenes, boss fights, and action setpieces. On top of that, MGS4 does not have a story. It has a lot of explanations about how the thing from the other game connects to this other thing from that other game. But no actual story of its own. Just lore connections. Overall, its fine, but every time I play it I say to myself, "I probably don't need to play that again for like 10 years."
Listen, do the controls feel good? Sure! But this is otherwise a completely sauceless experience. Story is crap (made more crap by the fact that most of it is told through cassette tapes), missions are endless copy-paste, and you have to like, grind for fucking resources? So all your little Pikmin back at Mother Base can develop new weapons for you? The fuck is this? I'm sorry, all that lowkey sucks ass. And all in service of retconning how evil Big Boss was because Kojima fell in love with his own villain too hard. Frankly a cowardly game.
All of my complaints with MGSV plus the controls are bad and every boss is a horrible bullet spongey slog. Straight garbo. Although the first, I dont know, 20% of the game is fine?
Its just not fun. They either did not have the tech or the know-how to make stealth fun yet. That's ok, I'm glad they kept at it because Metal Gear 2 is incredible, but I ain't ever playing this again.