As I mentioned in the first part of this review, Guns of the Patriots is the Metal Gear that proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that, for the series and game type, passive viewing is every bit as much a part of the play experience as actual player control. It’s misleading, though, to think that Metal Gear Solid 4’s greatest achievement is its presentation. Since its debut on the MSX in 1986, the actual game under Metal Gear’s graphics and story has been about using a limited, often suffocating interface to explore multiple solutions to a problem. A classic scenario: Solid Snake enters a room filled with obstacles (packing crates, trees, stationary vehicles) and a handful of hostile artificial intelligences (soldiers, security cameras, dogs) moving along set paths.
Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake and Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater
The goal is to guide Snake past hostile elements without alerting them to his presence. The environment and tools acquired in its boundaries (anything from firearms to camouflage) create options; you could crawl under cars to avoid detection or tranquilize a soldier to distract the others as you move on. Snake is difficult to manage though; move too fast and you risk accidentally walking into an enemy’s line of sight, fire a gun and you risk being heard. You could argue that the finicky and imprecise control of Snake is immersive, simulating the stress and precision of actual stealth, but the truth is that it superficially increases difficulty, masking the rudimentary artificial intelligence’s faults. In Guns of the Patriots, not only is the environment and multiple-solution approach expanded upon in both scope and realism, but control is streamlined to a point where agency is truly in the player’s hands, no longer at the mercy of a stilted interface.
MGS4’s opening chapter sets the play standard for the game with aplomb. Snake is placed in a city under siege, a local militia in constant combat with a genetically enhanced mercenary group with towering, bi-pedal war machines at their disposal. Both forces are a concern in navigating the terrain, as getting caught in crossfire can lead to death. Access to offensive actions (shooting, and more importantly, the ability to shoot while still moving) is streamlined here, allowing direct confrontation to become a more viable solution. Hostile AIs are as predictable as ever, but there is a far greater number of threats performing disparate actions on the play field. These are Guns of the Patriots greatest play enhancements; with control no longer a hindrance and the addition of conflicting AIs on the field, the game’s old faults have been integrated into play. It’s an effective and smart answer to the series’ oldest problems. The arenas for action are not so different from previous installments, each one contained and transitioning into another, but their density and flexibility have been enhanced to the point that the feel less like obstacle courses and more like actual places. In many ways, Guns of the Patriots is Metal Gear’s first successful foray into true three-dimensional design, the dynamics of its larger environments accounting for a world that isn’t only seen from a bird’s-eye-view.
Come back next week for Part 3 of this review for a dissection of presentation and final thoughts on MGS4.
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