Metal Gear Solid 3: Subsistence
Kojima Productions' masterpiece is an absolute must-buy. Seriously, go buy it now.
Published: April 6, 2006
Most of the enemy AI in the game is fairly simple. Alert a guard and you're gifted with the series' familiar exclamation sound, then it's simply time to hide. The difference in MGS3 is that the game has introduced close quarters combat. CQC effectively allows you to brute-force your way through most situations. It's still not advisable, but it's certainly possible. Snake can simply run up to a guard, slam him to the ground, slit his throat, use him as a human shield, or interrogate him for info. In this way, you can basically slam a handful of guards until you can make a break for cover, than wait until the heat dies off and try again, or just attempt to move on.
Of course, any alerts you pick up are carried with your from one section of the map to the other, so you can just powerslam through the whole game and coast into the next section, but they key is that there's flexibility there. MGS, like no other stealth game (or any action games with stealth levels for that matter) lets you screw up and doesn't penalize you so badly that you just give up. It's a perfect level of difficulty throughout, and it becomes a vehicle for the storyline, linking sections of high-tension sneaking with brilliantly directed cinematics.
In fact, I daresay this is the closest any game has ever gotten to being a Hollywood action title, but it has more heart, more intelligence and more nuance to the characters and storyline details in the 20 or so hours it'll take you to get through the storyline that it goes well beyond the realm of a playable action movie. This is an absolute masterpiece, and with the new camera, the game becomes, for lack of a better word, perfect at what it tries to do.
So engrossing and powerful is the storyline, the plot twists and the characters that are bandied about throughout that it gets to you, digs under your skin and forces you to take a vested interest in seeing the narrative through. By the time the game builds to a climax towards the end, it becomes an out-of-control rollercoaster of emotion, diving from suspense to aggression to hope to surprise to sorrow before finally coasting to a stop and wrapping up perfectly.
I haven't enjoyed a game ending more in the twenty or so years I've been playing video games, and I feel no shame in admitting that I actually wept during the ending scenes of the game. The revelations there are so poignant and powerful, the music so sweeping and the voice acting so well done that I just lost it, and I'm so glad games have gotten to the point where they can do that.
So much of this is due to the visual and aural presentation in the game. MGS3 may just be the most impressive looking game on the PS2. The cutscenes are gorgeously rendered in real-time, offering tons of close-ups of character faces (along with the genuine emotion they can convey), and even more motion capture data that moves the game beyond a simple action effort into a cinematic effort.
The actual game details are just as good, though; foliage moves as you trudge through it - something that was originally thought to be impossible on the aging PS2, soldiers react realistically to location-specific shots, particles abound. The texture work is superb, and the framerate, even with the new camera that lets you take in far more of your surroundings at a time, stays fairly solid throughout (though there were a couple spots where it dipped into slideshow territory).
As good as the visuals are, though, it's the vocal performances, carried by vets like David Hayter, Michael Bell, Brian Cummings and Jim Ward, but it's newcomer Suzetta Minet that made me fall in love with EVA's character. All of the performances, though, were fantastic, and when paired up with the familiar sound effects (most of them seemed carried over from MGS2) and absolutely phenomenal score by Harry Gregson-Williams, Rika Muranaka, Norihiko Hibino, Shuichi Kobori and Nobuko Toda, it transcends the kind of stuff you're used to hearing in games.
Again, the mix was so potent that I couldn't help but get stirred up by what was happening on screen. It wasn't just sadness at the end, there was swells of pride, bits of rage, spats of fear, huge stretches of tension. This is, without a doubt, the high water mark for how games should look and sound if they want to start moving into the realm of a Hollywood-level production.
Of course, after playing through a single-player experience that has been honed to an art form, it was time to see what new goodies I could get into.
