VIDEO: The trailer for Metal Gear Solid 4
“War has changed,” Solid Snake tells us, both at the beginning and at the end of Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots. He would know. Over the course of several decades within the Metal Gear Solid canon, he’s been the key player in every armed conflict the world has had to offer. This fourth installment is the final one, both in the real world and in series chronology. Its core mission seems to be to wrap up all the dangling threads from a series that has long since grown unwieldy. Instead of providing a rich, satisfying conclusion, MGS4 piles one pat resolution on top of another, complete with tearful reunions, didactic speeches, and — I kid you not — a happily-ever-after wedding scene. War may have changed, but MGS’s style hasn’t — and, after 10 years, it’s starting to look shopworn.
Things weren’t always this way. True, if there’s one point of contention fans and critics have had with the series since the earth-shaking Metal Gear Solid launched on the PlayStation in 1998, it’s been the length of the cutscenes. The gameplay has been punctuated with long, verbose cinematic sequences. I remember being late to work on at least one occasion when I first played MGS. It could seem you were being held hostage to the developers’ whims. But the gameplay was so enthralling, and the story line so involving, that gamers felt they were in the care of an auteur without peer.
Now, it seems as if MGS’s driving creative force, Hideo Kojima, had let his genius get away from him. The cutscenes have become ever more bloated and prolix, and they come at the expensive of immersive gameplay sequences. The series’s mythology has overgrown like kudzu: characters spend half their time explaining to one another what’s happened in past games. And they spout this information without a spark of vitality or individuality — they might be reading a plot synopsis straight from a Wikipedia entry. If you’ve played MGS, none of this exposition is necessary. If you haven’t, it’s too dense to follow, packed as it is with acronyms and jargon.
This would be forgivable if the gameplay of Metal Gear Solid 4 showed the verve and invention of its predecessors, but it does so only in fits and starts. The tag line is “Tactical espionage action,” and at its best, the game delivers a suspenseful, cerebral spying experience. A sustained sequence midway through compels Snake to follow a civilian through the military-occupied streets of an unnamed Eastern European city. Everything works here: the atmosphere, the stealth gameplay, and the stakes. To be discovered by either the civilian or the armored sentries is to bring the fury of an army down on your head. It’s a masterful scenario, marked by the telltale whistling that distinguishes Solid Snake’s quarry — a slightly off-key rendering of the MGS overture.
Such sequences are rare. Each of the five acts offers just a few bursts of uninterrupted play time. In fact, MGS4 is top-loaded, starting off with wonderful stretches of gameplay before descending into a morass of cutscenes in its second half. The first two acts boast vibrant battlefields, dropping Snake into the middle of pitched battles between rebel troops and private military contractors. In the last two acts, these lively environments give way to austere surroundings populated mostly by drones. Even the full-contact fan service of the fourth act can’t disguise a lack of innovation in the basic play mechanics. There are also a couple of shooting-gallery levels, in which Snake mans the turret of a moving vehicle. It’s nothing that hasn’t been done before, and it isn’t presented here in a noteworthy style.
Worse still are the pedestrian boss battles. Consider such past high points as the fistfight against an invisible Gray Fox in the original and the protracted sniper fight against the End in MGS3. These engagements encouraged lateral thinking and taking full advantage of your surroundings. In MGS4, most of the bosses can be defeated by running around and shooting at them. There may be sexier strategies, but the game provides no incentive to formulate them.
One big reason the boss battles seem underwhelming is that there’s no vendetta established between Snake and his foes this time around. Although two major bosses — Liquid Ocelot and Vamp — return from past games with all their baggage in tow, the new baddies are four bio-mechanical monstrosities known collectively as the “Beauty and the Beast Corps.” You see each one only in glimpses before you fight them; you haven’t forged an antagonistic relationship. Comparison with past MGS incarnations is again instructive. Those games introduced their foes slyly, providing plenty of interaction with Snake before the big battles, which then delivered a visceral and emotional payoff. Here, it’s only after defeating members of the BB Corps that you discover anything about them. And you discover it in the most boring manner imaginable — listening to people describe their life stories over your codec.
