Big Boss is back, ready for headache of politics and emotions. Now he can recruit soldiers, which adds a new dimention.
Recruiting. I really enjoy finding new recruits, although it gets boring dragging around with soldiers all the time, but here’s where rescuers come in. They can quite simply carry the unconscious soldiers much faster to your truck, where you capture the,. That is a part of the carrier, there are 4 slots for carriers, all of them, some or none are filled when you get the soldier, you can’t get new carriers for your soldiers unfortunately though. Every soldier has stats, these contain the weapons and gadgets they are carrying, the four carriers and a list of abilities, these are life, stamina, sense which are counted in numbers and the rest which are how good they are with a pistol, submachine gun, assault rifle, shotgun, sniper, heavy weapons, CQC, throwing, setting traps, technical and medical are counted on an S, A, B, C where S is the highest and C is the lowest. This gives you a reason to recruit, since you never know when you get a soldier that is good in any kind of way, my perfect solder would be a scout, athlete and a rescuer and have fair stats (at least in CQC and handguns) I havn’t found anything near that yet, but I’m still looking. Your stats might also affect what team you put them on, if you get a useless soldier that has high sense you can put him on the spy team, if he has great combat sense send him on one of the sneaking team s(mission teams) If they are good medics send them on the medic team and if he is a good technician send him on the tech team. You might also want to discard your totally useless members, since there is a limit on 100 soldiers. All the thing you can do makes the replay value vast. There also is a nice thing that is kind of like a radar, the sound indicator, it’s a circular thing that shows from what directions there are noises and how far the noise is. This can therefore be used to track down an enemy and is fun as hell in multiplayer. ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
The Story is really great for a video game, especially for a portable game. But it is not that great compared to the other MGS games. This is possibly because of the limitations of the PSP. The cut-scenes are fewer and there are not nearly as many. They’re also drawn, it’s a lot of 2D sprites animated together, this does work quite well. Ashley Woods does a terrific job on this, although some is better than other. But I would have preferred 3D cut-scenes, it might have a lot lesser quality, than those we know from the series, but I would have excepted that and when you have made the models you don’t have to use much more space to make cut-scenes, other than movements and of course sounds which would be there anyway. This is the first MGS I have played where I can honestly say that I’m way more attracted to the gameplay than the story, although the story is really good, with lots of twists, politics and characters you’ll never forget. ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
The graphics are also really nice, the best graphics that I have seen on the PSP so far. considering that I haven’t played Tekken: DR, which should have brilliant graphics. It’s especially the character models that are amazing and have vast polygon counts. They are pretty much flawless. The environments are also impressive, since the draw distant is really long and the environment still looks nice, but are a tad fading compared to the character models. ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
The sound is also great, there is a vast soundtrack, pretty much one for each map and the day and night versions of these. The weapon sounds are also great and the cut-scene sound do not seem to be suppressed at all (while hearing it from head phones). It is also your pall when you forgot to look at the sound indicator, since you’ll hear every noise that is near you, so you know that you’ll have to hide and check out the situation while hearing footsteps, it also helps you hear cameras (which is useful on extreme where they seem to be scattered all over the place) You also hear when a soldiers falls unconscious and when the enemy has spotted you. ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
I will try to keep the article short about multiplayer, since I haven’t tried it much. I really liked the multiplayer, I played some rounds the other day over ad hoc with my best friend (my internet connections seems to have a problem logging on to the online servers, but the web browser works, just fine..) Here the sound indicator got the big role it deserves, you don’t make sounds while you sneak, therefore the sneaking element gets a big part of the spot light, since the sound indicator is the only thing other than what you see on screen that can hint to where your opponent is, this is especially important when playing while it’s night in-game, since you can have a hard time finding you opponent. You can also hide somewhere and then lay still so the opponent will have a really hard time finding you. This can’t be used in the manner of quickly killing your opponent and hide so your opponent can’t find you the rest of the round and by doing that winning, since the winning player will have a noisy frog on top of his head as a help for the losing player. Although I lost all the time, I found it really interesting. ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
So this was it, in my opinion it’s a great game.