Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker Review
By:
Schuyler Lystad
|
June 22, 2010, 10:00 pm
An otherwise fantastic single-player is marred by terrible controls.
On the battlefield, there's no time for bad controls
Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker started off on a bad foot with me. The controls were terrible and the camouflage system had been severely dumbed down from Metal Gear Solid 3. Crouching ten feet in front of a guard rendered me seemingly invisible, making the visibility percentage near worthless. Missions were short and in small spaces, which got on my nerves quickly. Loading screens were excessive. Cinematics were needlessly long and melodramatic. I couldn't adjust the camera while moving, which is a pretty big oversight. Because the camera and movement controls are both handled by the left thumb (which seemed to be the least disagreeable of the three available options) I could only advance so far forward before having to stop and adjust the camera, or just risk running through an area I hadn't scoped out yet. What's more, to select a weapon, I have to hold circle, then press R for long enough to engage the menu, and then select your weapon from that menu. Supposing it doesn't go away as a glitch, or you accidentally tap R to switch to your stun rod and not bring up the menu at all, you may be shot, and the menu will drop from that. This also happens with the item menu. So, if you're trying to equip or use a health item as you're being shot, when you may need it the most, you're not going to get the option. Same for equipping new guns.
While you can get used to all of these problems after the first five hours of gameplay or so, they never really go away, right up into the final boss battle. I'd estimate 95% of the deaths I experienced were created due to poor controls. I knew what I wanted to do, but I couldn't. This becomes especially painful when you're actually in out-and-out combat, forgoing sneakin, and for a moment I thought maybe that was intentional and some poorly conceived way of teaching the player to avoid combat. Unfortunately, during boss battles, these problems compound on themselves, and I ended up having to reach my index finger around the PSP to perform rudimentary camera controls so I had some idea of what I was doing. If I didn't need to review this game, I would've put it down for good within the first hour. I'm glad I didn't. There are so many cool features in this game, so many unique takes on it, so much of Hideo Kojima's signature humor, and so much to do, even the worst controls I've encountered would hold me back from getting absorbed into the experience--and considering the importance of controls, that's saying something.
Not So Peacefully Walking
The game's biggest addition is Mother Base, a location where all of the characters are housed except Snake. Though it takes a few hours for enough of it to be unlocked to become fun, this is a pursuit which will take up almost as much time as the missions, both story and extra. You can gain up to 300 staffers during the course of the game, assigning them to one of several teams, from combat to medical, to R&D, intel, etc. As each team grows, more items and weapons can be produced. For example, your R&D and Mess Hall teams need to reach a certain benchmark together to let you discover and develop curry which you can take on missions with you to regain health. You can make new weapons, develop existing ones further, and level them up by using them in the field. Mother Base also develops as your staff grows, with new buildings added to the base. Combat personnel can eventually go on "Outer Ops" and fight battles in other countries while you perform missions, bringing back with them either extra money and experience, or just their wounded comrades. You even get the option to build your own Metal Gear, the parts for which need to be salvaged from certain boss fights in the main story.
The missions of MGS get a lot more complex as you go along, and seem to hit a good stride in length and amount of locations. You will explore facilities, jungles, a military base, docks, mines, and so on, keeping the action fresh. While there aren't a good deal of different enemies, they're placed increasingly more cleverly, and some even don their own camouflage for one section, making them nearly impossible to find first...unless you develop the correct weapon at Mother Base and bring it along. And for each story mission you complete, an extra mission or two is unlocked that let you hone your skills, or take one of your staffers out into the field and do well to increase their stats. All of these can even be replayed as many times as you like to get more staff, parts, or rescue more prisoners that are scattered around most of the levels.
The boss fights are truly magnificent too, and are of a scope much larger than the rest of the game. Some are truly ferocious, and though fighting them with the terrible controls available was nothing short of a chore, the rest of the fight was inexplicably fun. There's even incentive to go back and play them again using a different method with better weapons. Some of the combat moments in this game are really cool and unique, and the way they unfold is entirely up to you. I didn't like that if you suddenly have an insufficient weapon for a particular section, you need to quit the mission and restart it with better equipment, but that sort of situation only befell me a couple times. Ultimately, you learn which weapons you're best with, and I had a standard set I used to get almost every job done. If I did have trouble, though, I could switch camouflage which had different weight, speed, pros/cons, and numbers of guns, and items I could carry. Really, there are a lot of different ways to make this game unfold.
There's so much to do in this game that when I finished the main story missions, I hardly felt like I was finished with everything that was open to me, nor had I gotten more than halfway into it. There are a lot of little things to discover, a bunch of easter eggs in true Kojima fashion, and more options than you could want, or that you can keep track of when initially faced with them all. This is definitely up there with some of the best games I've played...I just wish it wasn't such a pain to play it.
Multiplayer portion coming soon.
