Metal Gear Solid 4

To be perfectly frank, not much is new. The touted ability to get on one side of a battle is just that, one-sided. You can't ever make the Private Military Companyies like you, so it's more a gimmick that's in play for two levels and is promptly forgotten.

My biggest issue is with the story. Metal Gear 2 had a terrible story for a myriad of reasons, but primarily because the story is told through phone conversations and powerpoint presentations. For all the hype about Kojima being a filmmaker, he'd blown it on the editorial front. You play a level, see a cutscene and then Otacon or Snake or someone gets you on the phone to explain why you can't pick up the dead guy's gun. And it takes him 10 minutes to explain it. Metal Gear 2 is more someone reading a book at you than a visual story. Cut just the cutscenes together and you'd have zero idea what that game was about.

Metal Gear 3 made up for it. Kojima must have heard the criticism, cos the cutscenes told the story. They were much better directed and the story itself was considerably tighter. It didn't center around the rather mediocre explanation for why you can't pick up everyone's guns (nanomachines).

And this is where Metal Gear 4's story falls apart. It's focused on a NES gameplay element. Only now there's ton's of PMCs and they (and the full US military) are staffed entirely by nanomachine enhanced humans with nanomachine tagged guns. Even their fucking battleships are nanoed up.

This all serves the story fine, but it sucks.

It sucks because by coming back to the present day, Kojima has gone back to excessively long dialoge sequences and tons of yammering about nanomachines and artificial intelligence.

I'm pissed because Metal Gear 3 was so good, and so on message. It's depictions of the arms race, of the concept of patriotism and the motivations for the villain of the original Metal Gear were all excellently told. MGS4 has some great points about private militaries, but they get lost in Liquid Ocelot's arbitrary goals and his obsession with a fucking server.

One thing the game does phenomenally is Old Snake. He's old, he's given up on life and just wants to get through this last mission. It's great to see and if I focus on it over the nanomachine bull I feel very positively about the game.

Raiden as well, is very interesting this time out. Meryl's okay and the Johnny guy I could do without completely, though it is nice to see how they tie him in to the whole story. The other two guys in Rat Patrol are forgetable, which is pretty sad when you think about how cool Foxhound and Cobra Unit were. Drebin is decent, his monkey's totally awesome. The detail in the character animations for everyone is dead nuts and shames all other games out there. The game does a lot of things well.

But I can't help but imagine what the game could have been if Kojima had decided to focus less on nanomachines and AI and more on actual people (who are not Old Snake).

3 stars.