It’s hard to talk about 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater’s gameplay when most of the 90 minutes I had with the 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Unreal Engine 5 remake consisted of cutscenes and codec calls. But thisღ isn’t much of a surprise either, since the series is infamous for its clumsy exposition and story that often overindulges in absurdity. That’s a big part of why we love it so much.
Fans will recognise the opening of this ambitious remake as the VIRTUOS mission where Naked Snake performs a HALO jump into the dens🅷e jungles of Tselinoyarsk. It’s a timeless sequence with soaring music, epic dialogue, and stylish direction that was unheard of in the PlayStation 2 era. Two decades🃏 later, it still shines.
What A Thrill
But it also loses some of its stylistic lustre by opting for a more neutral colour palette than the original’s distinctive brown and green hues. This lends itself wonderfully to the more realistic ae🦩sthetic Delta is going for, but if you were a fan of the original’s pulpy, action movie feel, something is lost here. It looks incredible, don’t get me wrong.
The foliage is dense and lifelike, the animals you encounter are pulled right from a nature docum🍌entary, while the people you stumble upon are brought to life with a stunning level of visual authenticity. But beneath👍 it all, this is the exact same game you played 20 years ago.
One of the defining changes is a modern control scheme, which is now more reminiscent of 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain, which, in my opinion, remains the finest example of tactical espionage action 𒁏the world has ever seen. You can now crouch by hitting the circle button, go prone by holding it, and move about like a normal human being instead of a multi-limbed scorpion that struggles to lean against a wall.
You can also switch over the old controls too, if you have retained some muscle memo☂ry or simply hate yourself. Fun fact: I can admit to both!
In esse💧nce, it controls in ways a game like this should, since I always found the controls used by Sons 🐼of Liberty and Snake Eater to be needlessly abstruse, largely because modern third-person adventure titles of this ilk simply weren’t standardised at the time.
Not For Honour, But For You
Despite implementing modern controls, the level design seems unchanged. Levels are still made up of largౠely segmented jungle areas defined by frequent losing screens, small numbers of enemies, and instanced sequences of combat and exploration that don’t really let any of the new controls showcase their true potential. Beneath the lovely graphics and baseline mechanical tweaks, this is still the same game we played 20 years ago. I’m unsure if any new fans accustomed to modern action titles or open w๊orld experiences will be taken by this. Its antiquated, old school design tries to be a very specific, often off-putting thing.
Konami is also utilising the g𒊎ame’s new visual make-up to add some extra flair to how Snake reacts to injuries sustained during the game. I was tackled by a group of soldiers after a fight gone wrong, and noticed Snake had suffered a nasty gash on the side of his face that stuck around for the entire demo, even in cutscenes, and after I reloaded a save file.
It’s a wicked new detail, and one I’m curious to see evolve purely to see if scars, scrapes, bullet wounds, and crocodile bites will persist for an entire play🎐through. It’s an evolution of the original in a way that feels natural and rewardiℱng, but I wish it was folded into something more substantial.
Aside from that, this is an identical experience. Cutscene direction is unchanged, all the vocal performances by the likes of David Hayter haven’t been touched up or replaced, and it still drowns you in Codec calls every⛎ few minutes to deliver mountains of exposition. I love this game and have always appreciated its quirks, but for a full-priced, labour-intensive dive back into the same well, I’m not sure this steadfast authenticity is a good thingಞ.
Snake Eatteeeeeeeerrrrrrrrrr!
When speaking to senior producer Noriaki Okamura during my hands-on session, he admitted that Metal Gear Solid has slowly been losing popularity over the years, doubly so with mainstream audiences who haven’t seen a new entry for almost a decade. Konami then made the decision to bring the series back, starting with the first chronologica🌠l narrative entry before presumably moving onto Peace Walker, Sons of Liberty, Guns of the Patriots and the original Metal Gear Solid.
But some of those will need to be full remakes, and so, keeping every piece of level design, every performance, and every oddity untouched in Snake Eater feels like a strange choice. I understand not wanting to rock a boat this iconic, especial🐟ly if the series’ original and iconic creator Hideo Kojima isn’t involved, but this execution๊ just doesn’t sit right with me.
One of the fe🍷w new gameplay additions I notice𒉰d during my demo was cutely dressed ducks, which can now be found throughout the environment. One I spotted was sporting full camo gear.
I’m pretty conflicted about Delta. Snake Eater was recently released as part of the Legacy Collection, and before that in the HD Collection, and has become readily available on the majority of platfo🎉rms in both physical and digital form. It isn’t a very difficult game to play, an🐷d I love that it will remain in its original form for millions to access.
Because of this, however, part of me was hoping that Delta was going to go further and try a new thing or two instead of being slavishly shackled to tradition. It fe📖els like Konami is afraid of upsetting hardcore fans, moving too far away from the established canon, or wanting to keep the experience vanilla for potential new players.
But you are only going to turn thosဣe newcomers away by refusing to embrace any sort of change that isn’t merely surface level. Combine that with the erasure of visual identity in Unreal Engine 5 and unchanged level design, and the whole package is without any distinguishable purpose. I can’t wait to play it, but also can’t help but feel such resources could have been put towards something else. Perhaps something entirely new.
Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater brings MGS3 to modern systems, rebuilt from the ground up in a new engine. A prequel set during the Cold War, you play as Naked Snake, an operative🐲 tasked with infiltrating the Soviet Reunion and rescuing a weapons engineer.
