The PS3 gets its "savior", Kojima gets his masterpiece, and we gamers get one of the best games of all time
Here we encounter Snake as a prematurely grizzled senior, the victim of a mysterious biological condition that's accelerated his aging process and rendered him frail but for the use of a muscle-suit that allows him to channel his combat skills without the limitations imposed by senescence. His primary mission-never less than saving the world-also entails securing answers to numerous lingering questions teased but unresolved in previous installments. What happened to Snake's half-brother Liquid Ocelot and the robotic mech Metal Gear RAY? What about FoxDie, a virus engineered to kill people harboring specific genetic markers? What of its creator, Naomi Campbell? How does the dystopian shadow organization calling itself the Patriots factor? Who is Solid Snake, really? To get those answers and dozens more, players assume control of Snake (no longer "Solid," but "Old") using third-person and over-the-shoulder views to run, crouch, climb and crawl through bullet-clawed battlefields ranging from the Middle East to a jungle village in South America and the mazelike streets of a city in Eastern Europe.
Still functionally a sneaker punctuated by shooting sequences, MGS4 intros the OctoCamo stealth suit, which lets players blend chameleon-like with any flat surface. Pressing against walls and floors to assume their texture, players monitor a percentile-based camouflage rating that relates back to nearby enemies based on variables like stance, motion, line of sight and lighting. Gadgets like the Solid Eye (it brackets objects in the environment with extra info) and a remote-controllable robotic scout called the Metal Gear Mk.II complement traditional moves like grabbing or holding up enemies and dragging them around or using them as shields. The most radical departure from past games involves a weapons launderer named Drebin whom players can access anytime to instantly purchase or unlock firearms and ammunition (even in the midst of battle) with points accrued from auto-selling guns gathered in the field.
Is it a movie or a game? Answering that question and one other-do you need to be familiar with prior installments to "get" this one?-is central to whether you'll fully appreciate Metal Gear Solid 4. The good news is that both the interactive and filmic aspects of the game dovetail brilliantly. The bad may be that some players looking for more game, less movie, won't take kindly to the hybridization.
Fair warning: There's no sidestepping the fact that Kojima's final thundering opus assumes you know a lot about its characters and their byzantine backgrounds. More importantly, it assumes you care a lot about them as well. For all the game's sermonizing about self-determination, MGS4 is a largely predetermined study in the harrowing physical and psychological dissolution of a badly misused human pawn. You're allowed the freedom to sneak and gunfight as you like between cutscene triggers in modestly branching areas; otherwise this story was never really ours to tell. It's the final movement of a faintly postmodern polemic suffused with convoluted themes ranging from fratricide and patricide to social fractiousness, existentialism, eugenics and the validity of notions like free will. A remarkable third of MGS4 is spent not playing at all, but simply watching those themes resolved.
When you are playing, though, the sneak mechanics represent the best possible compromise between nostalgia and innovation. Aiming and shooting are finally modern enough to get the job done and bettered by all the psychological ways in which Snake's mental state can impact his accuracy. Close-quarter combat still feels a little dicey, though the only place you actually have to use it is late in the game as a finishing move to overpower a major villain. The most controversial element-the way you can buy nearly anything at any time and watch it magically teleport into your arsenal-turns out to be immaterial. It's Kojima's way of giving you what you need to keep the story flowing, but also of challenging you to sneak and not shoot your way through what is in a very meaningful sense an anti-gun, anti-war, anti-violence game.
About that second question: You can enjoy the game on its own terms, but it's a bit like jumping into Lost or Battlestar Galactica for the first time in their respective fourth seasons. If you're new to this series, consider picking up the first three MGS games and playing through them first. They're available right now as a cheap "essentials" collection. You'll need a PS2-compatible PS3 (or an actual PS2), but as long as that's not an obstacle and you can look past the first game's primitive visuals, you're in for a treat.
When you finally get to MGS4, don't let the way it looks distract you, though it comes close to pulling off in real time what Square Enix only realized a few years ago through advanced prerendering in its CGI film Final Fantasy: Advent Children. Don't get caught up in the way Snake's combat abilities have been streamlined to include a modifiable over-the-shoulder shooting view that's as empowering and liberating here as it was when Shinji Mikami added it to Resident Evil 4. And don't lose yourself in the metric ton of Bond-like tech or the large militia's worth of projectile and incendiary weaponry Snake somehow carts around like a two-legged TARDIS.
Instead, pay attention to the way Kojima manufactures a kind of queasy anxiety throughout, as when the camera prowls desiccated desert vistas like a paranoid animal during the intro, picking at the corpses with the crows as trucks filled with PMC reinforcements motor onto the battlefield. Think about indices like the psyche and stress meters that adjoin Snake's health, compromising his aim when they drop and dropping when he's under all sorts of duress-including standing near dead bodies. And consider the way Kojima shrewdly answers aphorisms like Tim Cain's "War never changes" (famously uttered by Ron Perlman during the intro to 1997's Fallout) with "War has changed," followed by a Homeric series denouement that's every bit as sophisticated as last year's BioShock. Like that game, this one raises the bar forever, looking back on occasion only to show us how far it's come.
Snake...
I salute you.