Metal Gear Acid
Sure, it’s Metal Gear, but this is anything but solid.
Published: April 4, 2005
There were probably few people that actually started doing backflips across the room when they heard that the first PSP outing for Solid Snake would come in the form of a card battle game, but most were at least hopeful that Hideo Kojima’s long-running stealth action game could make the transition smoothly, and possibly even give the PSP’s launch lineup a solid, innovative offering to round out all the racers and sports games.
After countless hours (okay, the game reports it at somewhere around 30 hours – yes, 30), I’ve finally arrived at the conclusion that despite the familiar convoluted storyline, returning characters, references to past games, and basic stealth gameplay, this is a Metal Gear game in name only. Sure, there are moments when the game can be incredibly rewarding, but for each of those, there are 10 more instances where frustration and waning patience are at the fore.
To understand why the latter experiences far, far outweigh the former, you have to wrap your head around the head-scratchingly complex card-based gameplay. It’s a tall order to be sure, but I’ll try my best to outline things without losing everyone, but I make no guarantees.
When an airline with 500+ passengers is hijacked with a presidential candidate on board, the government quickly responds to by sending Solid Snake in to get to the bottom of the hijacker’s demands. Those demands are simple: the US is to give them something called “Pythagoras” within 10 hours or all passengers will die from a lethal dose of nerve gas. If the plane drops below 35,000 feet, it’ll explode. Yes, this is like the movie Speed with Solid “...” Snake instead of Keanu “whoa” Reeves.
The thing is, the government doesn’t know what the hell Pythagoras is, which is why Snake has been dispatched to Lobito Island, which resides off the coast of southern Africa (well, at least in the minds of Konami storytellers). The local privately-funded government research station has been hard at work at… well, something, not the least of which may be this mysterious Pythagoras.
Snake factors into things because the ultra-awesome black ops team that was sent in to suss things out were apparently all offed, and that’s evidently reason enough to bring the grizzled tough guy out of retirement. There’s more to the story, but it’s both too complicated and too hush-hush to get into. Suffice it to say not everyone was wiped out, and in fact one sassy girl escaped more or less unharmed and will join snake a few hours into the game.
This game is, as you’ve probably heard (cause, y’know, we wrote a preview), a turn-based card battle affair. Levels are broken down into grid-based chunks that determine movement, weapon blast radius and where and how well enemies and cameras can see. Each turn, two cards from a deck you can assemble in between levels are dealt into your hand, up to six cards. Most cards are either movement, item or weapon cards, and carry with them the obvious uses you’d infer from the name.
Almost all cards can be sacrificed to allow some limited movement for a few squares on the grid if you’re out of move cards, and some of the item cards can be combined with certain equippable weapons to produce some interesting status effects like delaying an enemy’s turn or knocking them down. There are also a few cards labeled with characters from previous Metal Gear entries that donate some extremely helpful special effects that range from better accuracy to hit-em-from-anywhere attacks to massive wide-radius blasts.
Doing anything in the game, from using cards to resting to ditching cards in your hand is offset by something called cost. Cost determines how long you’ll have to wait until you can act again and the grease on which the whole Metal Gear Acid machine slides around. Unless boosted with a special card, you can only act twice if you’re Snake or three times if you’re his female chum Teliko, meaning you’ll have to balance out moving and attacking with keeping yourself out of sight, since getting spotted results in the same alert status from the other Metal Gear games, and that makes for more enemies and a whole lot tougher battles.
After countless hours (okay, the game reports it at somewhere around 30 hours – yes, 30), I’ve finally arrived at the conclusion that despite the familiar convoluted storyline, returning characters, references to past games, and basic stealth gameplay, this is a Metal Gear game in name only. Sure, there are moments when the game can be incredibly rewarding, but for each of those, there are 10 more instances where frustration and waning patience are at the fore.
To understand why the latter experiences far, far outweigh the former, you have to wrap your head around the head-scratchingly complex card-based gameplay. It’s a tall order to be sure, but I’ll try my best to outline things without losing everyone, but I make no guarantees.
When an airline with 500+ passengers is hijacked with a presidential candidate on board, the government quickly responds to by sending Solid Snake in to get to the bottom of the hijacker’s demands. Those demands are simple: the US is to give them something called “Pythagoras” within 10 hours or all passengers will die from a lethal dose of nerve gas. If the plane drops below 35,000 feet, it’ll explode. Yes, this is like the movie Speed with Solid “...” Snake instead of Keanu “whoa” Reeves.
The thing is, the government doesn’t know what the hell Pythagoras is, which is why Snake has been dispatched to Lobito Island, which resides off the coast of southern Africa (well, at least in the minds of Konami storytellers). The local privately-funded government research station has been hard at work at… well, something, not the least of which may be this mysterious Pythagoras.
Snake factors into things because the ultra-awesome black ops team that was sent in to suss things out were apparently all offed, and that’s evidently reason enough to bring the grizzled tough guy out of retirement. There’s more to the story, but it’s both too complicated and too hush-hush to get into. Suffice it to say not everyone was wiped out, and in fact one sassy girl escaped more or less unharmed and will join snake a few hours into the game.
This game is, as you’ve probably heard (cause, y’know, we wrote a preview), a turn-based card battle affair. Levels are broken down into grid-based chunks that determine movement, weapon blast radius and where and how well enemies and cameras can see. Each turn, two cards from a deck you can assemble in between levels are dealt into your hand, up to six cards. Most cards are either movement, item or weapon cards, and carry with them the obvious uses you’d infer from the name.
Almost all cards can be sacrificed to allow some limited movement for a few squares on the grid if you’re out of move cards, and some of the item cards can be combined with certain equippable weapons to produce some interesting status effects like delaying an enemy’s turn or knocking them down. There are also a few cards labeled with characters from previous Metal Gear entries that donate some extremely helpful special effects that range from better accuracy to hit-em-from-anywhere attacks to massive wide-radius blasts.
Doing anything in the game, from using cards to resting to ditching cards in your hand is offset by something called cost. Cost determines how long you’ll have to wait until you can act again and the grease on which the whole Metal Gear Acid machine slides around. Unless boosted with a special card, you can only act twice if you’re Snake or three times if you’re his female chum Teliko, meaning you’ll have to balance out moving and attacking with keeping yourself out of sight, since getting spotted results in the same alert status from the other Metal Gear games, and that makes for more enemies and a whole lot tougher battles.
