Metal Gear Acid
Sure, it's Metal Gear, but this is anything but solid.
Published: April 4, 2005
In fact, tough is a word intrinsically linked with MGA's experience, especially towards the end of the game, and frustration can be almost overwhelming. It's one thing to get a nice sense of satisfaction from setting up a claymore, running to a wall and tapping it to watch with glee as a soldier comes to investigate only to be blown to smithereens. Those moments are usually sandwiched between a accidentally triggered alarm and being pelted from all sides by enemy fire, grenades and status effects.
Even worse, the game is supposed to be set up for stealth, but combat is almost always unavoidable, and later in the game means you're up against insane odds. Heavy doses of backtracking or inter-level retreads when the mission objectives inevitably change, don't help matters either. Worse yet, the clunky interface design means the same buttons used to cancel or confirm can be swapped at odd times, and infuriating things like using a movement card to get to position where you can attack an enemy unimpeded, only to have a codec call come in that cancels out the movement after just a step (effectively wasting the card's use) is just plain bad game design.
It really does feel like the game is punishing you after scoping out the entire level (you can get a bird's-eye view of things by pressing the triangle button), learning the patrol routes of enemies and establishing where they can and can't see, mainly because no matter how you lay out your deck, you can't be assured that necessary cards like keycards or special weapons will show up at the proper time. This means endless bouts of discarding and turn forfeiting until the right card shows up, all of which results in a lower score and missed bonuses at the end of a mission.
The game looks clean enough, visually, but the animations can seem a little odd at times. Since everything's turn-based, characters are more or less rooted where they are while opponents go about their movements. This is fine for the most part, but when you unload an entire clip into an enemy (or they you), and the result is a feet-planted torso-whipping chain of hits, it looks more amusing than impressive. When grenades or claymores explode, it's a little more convincing, but it still has an oddly disjointed feeling in between movements.
The camera can also be frustrating; the analog nub lets you pan around with limited visibility, and you can zoom out to an overhead view, but neither of these gives you a very good look at the environment in a way that lets you see if cameras are actively searching, how doors are labeled and so on. The environments are littered with some interesting details, but most of them will never be seen because the camera can't be wrangled into pointing at the right angle.
Konami chose not to tap voice actors for the extensive bits of dialog, which is fine by me, but it means things are otherwise pretty bleak on the sound front. The music is usually a mix of downtempo ambient industrial loops with some light percussion or synthed string notes with a slightly higher-energy, driving version when you're spotted. It fits perfectly with the series' music in the past, and it's definitely not a bad thing, but with so much space between rest of the game's sound effects, it can feel a bit droning.
The rest of the effects are mainly light clicks and swoops while navigating the menus and chosing cards, with the occasional explosion, weapons fire or infamous "spotted" exclamation from enemies, all of which were lifted from Konami's audio libraries from previous games, giving things a very clean, highly polished feel that instantly feels like an MGS game.
So it looks like MGS, it sounds like MGS, but it just doesn't play like MGS. Acid is fair game in its own right, but trying to shove the complexity of the card battle setup into the MGS mold means inevitably that the overall experience suffers. The series' hallmark stealth gameplay just doesn't really work in a convincing way when melded with card-based combat, though the turn-based aspects aren't really all that divorced from what you're trying to do in the other games.
The storyline is interestingly twisty and head-scratching at points, but when everything's said and done, it's not nearly enough to justify the unbalanced feeling of the game, and it doesn't appear that the dev team got that. Every time I would force myself to load up my save game and keep pressing on, I'd chuckle at the "times beaten" stat, because I honestly can't imagine too many people subjecting themselves to this game for more than one go-round - if they'd even make it that far.
If you're expecting something that fits nicely into the MGS cannon, you're going to be sorely disappointed. This is a card battle game with MGS dressing rather than the other way around, and it feels like a wasted effort in many respects. If you're a fan of strategy games, you may get your kicks for a while, but with so much of the game seemingly hell-bent on confusing and frustrating the player, I can't see anyone else getting any extended enjoyment out of things.
