An Absolutely Solid Finish
Metal Gear Solid 4 is here. You should buy it. Now.
Published: June 22, 2008
This is still a game about sneaking around... if you choose. At least for the first half or so. After that, things start to get funneled down a specific path. Now make no mistake, that path is an absolute roller coaster of awesomeness. Even when the game is rigidly forcing you to play it a certain way, you're still able to test the boundaries a little (though not without consequences), but the sooner you go with the flow and just let the game take you on a ride, the sooner you realize that Kojima has largely accomplished the very thing he's wanted to do since childhood: he's made an action movie.
An action move just as rife with big explosions and cheese as any Michael Bay epic (and at some points it's an action movie that Hollywood directors will see and vow to never make a movie again because of how brilliantly they're executed), told through a careful mix of digital cinematography and choreography on par with the best of HK Kung Fu flicks. It is, at turns, genuinely poignant and stirring coming out of sections that will have you still shaking from the adrenaline. This is an interactive action movie, plain an simple, and it's an absolutely enthralling one.
But that doesn't mean it doesn't have problems. The ending, in particular, almost tries to bring the expertly paced roller coaster of the final half of the game to a screeching halt. Some of it is necessary, of course, to help tie things up, but other parts were almost yawn-inducingly pointless. The boss battles, too, while certainly more imaginative than 90% of the stuff out there, they don't hold a candle to the brilliance of the best fights in Metal Gear Solid 3. That they all conclude in exactly the same way just makes them seem so much more copied and pasted in.
Luckily, they are -- and it's a little weird to even write this -- as sexy as they are creative. Most are throwbacks to fights in previous games in one way or another, but the freedom in how you tackle the boss battles means there were opportunities to pack in a fantastic amount of replay value (not to mention unlockables). It makes subsequent playthroughs of the game not only rewarding in a very real sense, but interesting. When MGS4 is at its best, it's better than almost any other game created, but that doesn't mean that it's constantly maintaining that high point.
Fortunately, there's also an entire online component to help bolster the already great single-player stuff, and that makes Metal Gear Solid 4 about as close to the perfect package as one can hope for on the PlayStation 3 right now. Metal Gear Online is largely unchanged from the beta released a few weeks ago, save for a few tweaks to the running speed and of course a couple of new levels. That's a good thing, though, as the pacing and feel of MGO is completely unlike anything else on any system. It's at times both intensely strategic and frustratingly rigid in how it handles shootouts. This isn't Call of Duty 4; twitch play isn't really rewarded in the same way.
Luckily, that means when the game pulls away from the usual deathmatch and team deathmatch fare, it really starts to shine. The Sneaking missions, where one player is Snake equipped with Octocammo, making him completely invisible to the players on the other teams, are filled with an incredibly unique sense of tension. With enough players in the game, someone can become the cloaking Metal Gear Mk. II and run around shocking people so Snake can pat them down for dog tags (otherwise, he loses if he's killed five times or just can't get the tags).
The other missions, which include variants on Capture the Flag and Capture-and-Hold mechanics, fall somewhere in between. I personally loved the Base missions, which were simple Battlefield-style capture-and-hold bits -- mainly because the skills system in the game allowed me to grab a guy and jab a needle into his neck to reveal aaaaaall his buddies around the map.
