Kalimat al-Mutafalsif

Another game review coming at you, took about a week off for the holidays and worked in some PS3 time.

Game: Metal Gear Solid 4
Developer: Kojima Productions
System: PS3
Difficulty: Solid Normal (3rd highest of 5)

Background
Metal Gear Solid 4 is set in a bleak future where war is a driving force for the world economy. Instead of standing armies, countries turn to Private Military Companies (only referred to as PMCs) to fight their wars, and the game portrays these wars as being purely for business sake. The soldiers are all kept in control by nanomachines running throughout their body, and every piece of equipment is 'tagged' to respond only if an authorized user is using it.

Full review below the cut.

Graphics
By far the strongest suit of the game, the graphics are gorgeous. While not 'life-like' due to a slight anime feel, there are some sunset scenes that are just breath taking. The weapons look good, the way the characters move with their weapons looks even better: Very fluid, tactical motions.

The landscapes were breathtaking in some places. One level is a winter area, and during the course of the mission the snow intensifies and backs off. At some points you can't see a bad guy until you're on top them (and vice versa *grin*), and at others you can see clear across the map. Its very well done and sticks in my mind as perhaps the best level in terms of the graphics.

There are some slight annoyances when the camera just won't pan the right way for you to see around a corner, but I've never seen a game that was perfect with regard to camera controls. I didn't find any clipping problems either, even when eating grenades that I didn't see coming.

Difficulty
The difficulty presented felt right. I really liked that there's two different 'medium' settings, as 'easy'/'medium'/'hard' a lot of times runs into medium being too easy, and hard being too hard (for a first play through). Solid Normal took me the right amount of time for a game, and gave me challenges, but very few places where the challenges were to the point of being frustrating. I'd recommend any experienced gamer start on Solid Normal.

Naked Normal is what my roommate started on, and it appears to be a good "I'm not a newbie" difficulty. You can get away with being fairly unstealthy, yet you can still die if you're very uncareful. I have a feeling the 'easy' setting (I don't know the name since I never bothered to look) will be easy for just about everyone, and that's never fun.

I also like how well the difficulty scales up. I just took a shot at the hardest (that I know of) difficulty (level 5, forget the name) and wow. It appears they scale up not just the damage, but how well the enemies perceive you. I died a few times in the first section, granted I was trying an end run past an APC for fun! There's enough difference between levels to make you want to play all of them (except 'easy') not just skip between.

Gameplay
This isn't a tactical shooter, and to approach it as such will result in some frustration. To appreciate the gameplay you must get into character and get your Ninja on. I enjoyed this much as I did back in Assassin's Creed, but thought that it was also stifling in a few places.

First off the good bits: When you're stealthing around, the game feels right. Its easy to tell how noisy you're being, which way the wind's going (make sure there's no guards down wind if you're going to smoke), and how concealed you are. Once you get on a good roll slinking through a village everything's great. You can distract guards by knocking on walls, get them to poke their heads around corners, and all manner of fun tricks before giving a good hip throw and putting them down.

You don't need any fancy tricks to get by, but if you want to learn them, just go to 'Briefing' under the pause menu and they'll show them all to you. I found this very helpful, and the tricks do increase the gameplay. Rather than put a guard to sleep with your tranq gun, you can just distract him to leave position and walk past. Bingo, no body to have to hide.

The bad part comes after you're discovered and the guards are alerted. Your maximum movement speed stays the same, and there's no sprint. To me this is an issue, a big one, because it severely impacts the player's ability to get away once an alert goes out, thus forcing him to fight his way through at least some number of guards. As you kill more, the alert refreshes (unless you kill all the guards in the area) and more keep popping. I got very frustrated a few times on bigger maps where you couldn't hope to fight your way through the guards because too many would be still coming, and you just have to run. I'm sorry, saunter. In my mind Snake is the best of the best, and as such would know how to run, and to not include that detracts from the immersion.

Now, by doing this they make you play stealthy, and I can easily see how over powered the player would be if he could run through most levels (and there were a few I just high-tailed it through, shooting only when the guards had closed in) and shoot willy-nilly.

The really bad part is that some bits are forced to be slow. I don't mean stealthy slow, I mean you have to crawl on your hands and knees because that's the only thing available from all your commands. You have to fight in slow-motion for a few minutes. These parts are maddening.

The worst is a bit traveling through a ship, at first you're just stumbling along, and then, and I couldn't believe this, you fall to your knees. At this point you have to press the triangle button. You fall again. Now you have to crawl, for what feels like a few minutes, spamming the triangle button. This is singly the worst part of the game, and a HORRIBLE decision. I'm young and in decent shape, and not only my thumb, but my wrist, and my arm were sore after that part. It blows my mind that someone thought this was a good idea. Due to how close to the end this part is, I probably won't replay it, but consider the game 'beat' at that point.

Combat
The combat system is decent and it does effectively capture both tactical firefights and stealth operations. However I found that without customizing the main weapons you use, the combat system is very hard to use. That's on purpose, but I've met people who simply never realized they could customize weapons in the game. Believe me, without a fore-grip on a few of the guns, you won't be able to get more than 3 rounds on target before you have to stop firing and this makes the combat system very frustrating.

Now once you do customize the guns, they get fun. I really liked that they took modern guns that are very adaptable and let you put real-life attachments on them. For instance, my M4 in the game ended up with a laser, red-dot sight, fore-grip, and suppressors, allowing me to: Fire at enemies without allowing them to get a good bead on my position; Go full auto and stay on target (for the most part); See what I'm shooting at, and have a nice red-dot scope to look through in FPS mode. The default M4 has a hit-area about the size of a shotgun blast so its very hard to tell exactly what you're aiming at, jumps all over when shooting, and makes you use the iron sights (much smaller picture).

Customizing the guns made the game seem unique to my play style, as I could keep my M4 for silent engagements, a Mk. 17 for when the guards are already alerted, and an XM8 for the underslung grenade launcher in case I faced waves of robots. I was still experimenting on the bets mix by the time the game ended and could easily have kept playing around with it.

The silent combat is fairly straight forward, simply hitting the attack button while near your opponent, but it gets fun with moves like holdin the guy you grabbed as a shield, or using an injector to put them to sleep. Unfortunately I felt that the stealth combat was just... easy. If I got near someone, even a group of guards, I could take them out unarmed.

It should be noted that the boss fights are very fun. There's 5 unique bosses, although I honestly found the first and the last to be much harder than the others. Your style of combat will chance for each boss, and they do feel like true 'boss' fights, much harder than the other encounters in the game. I don't want to spoil any of them so I won't go into any more detail.

Cutscenes
My gripe. This game has a reported 90 minute cutscene, and overall I'd guess easily over 24 hours of 'movie'. The upside is that they let you pause the movies or skip them. The downside, and this is a major oversight, is I've yet to find a way to watch those movies once I've skipped them! To include that much cinematography and essentially force you to watch it if you want the plot info is just wrong. (Please, if I'm just being dumb and can't find it, someone tell me where it is). The cutscenes are gorgeous, but they're also long, unnecessarily so it feels like. There's a few that I saw on my roommate's game that included almost random dialog. Good dialog, but to me it felt 'extra', and that it could have been taken out.

The length overall is also just mind-bloggling. There were whole levels with one save point in them, and then I saved three times for the cut-scenes (once before, once during, once after)!

I didn't watch a single cut-scene other than the ones on my roommate's game, and the final one. It turns out I didn't even see HALF the final one, I walked away when the credits started rolling, came downstairs a while later and there was talking again! It blew my mind!

The upside here is that there's only one case where they give you vital information (I dunno, maybe they give you tips to help on the bosses?) in the cut scenes. Thankfully that one is very short, and in the middle of a level.

Story
Wouldn't know, see above.

Ok, I know some of the story, and that bit seemed ok. Howeve, while they say this game stands on its own, I think you have to know former MSG lore to understand a lot of it. I've never played the previous MSGs, so I felt a bit lost in a few places as my roommate exclaimed: "That's so-and-so!"

Story is important for me deciding I really like a game or not, and sadly in this case I just can't speak to it. While I could have sat through all the videos, I wasn't about to spend unknown amounts of time during fixed amounts of play time watching, rather than playing. If I have an hour for the PS3, I want that hour to be mostly gameplay.

I won't count against MGS4 in the story category, because it was my choice to skip the cutscenes, however many games have managed to drive the story without such heavy cutscenes and only using the cutscenes is definitely a bad choice on the part of the developers.

Political Undertones
These weren't undertones so much as slap-you-in-the-face-tones. From the very first cutscene/newbie zone it was evident what path the writers were going down, though to be honest its the obvious choice for Hollywood/games nowadays. The developers paint a picture of a future where war runs everything, an insinuate that using PMCs at all is a horrendous choice that will lead down the path to the MSG4 future.

My feelings on that idea aside, I would have been ok with it as an undertone, I could see this in much of the story I did get to see and I don't play my games to be preached to. For me, video games are a nice escape, a make believe place much like when I read and in this place I like to get away from the real issues I get to see every day. Could I have seen this coming before I bought the game? Maybe, and that's why I never got Army of Two, however this was a present and I didn't do any research before I got it.

Will the political dabblings affect my score for the game? No, because gamers can make up their own minds about what's right and what's wrong, and I know many agree with the way PMCs/the government are portrayed in the game.

Down Time
This game does recreate one bit of the military very effectively, hurry up and wait. Thanks to the gorgeous graphics in cutscenes and phone calls, as well as just being a freaking big game, there's a lot of loading. For starters, you have to install the game in 5 portions. The upside is it has a "small" disk footprint, only about 4GB. The big downside is every act must be installed. This takes 3 minutes each time, and if you're on one act, and a friend's on another, you'll have to install it each time you start up.

There's also nice loading before every cutscene and phone call. Not severe, but noticeable, especially when so much of the game is cutscenes already.

Multiplayer
Yes, there is multiplayer, Metal Gear Online. I decided to install it (another install) and test it out, only to find that I'd have to create two more IDs, besides my Playstation ID, to play! I can't see a good reason for that to be the case, so I won't waste my time on this, and instead keep on keeping on in Resistance 2.

Replayability
This looks like it has decent to good replay value. There were more than one bits where I thought "You know, I'll bet I could do that without tipping off any guards" and actually wanted to go back and replay that little bit to get better.

Besides the fun of certain missions (there's one that had me howling in laughter and glee) it also appears to have decent replayability for single player. If what the game says is true, you get back the gear you had at the end of the mission when you would get your initial gear at the beginning. I've not yet had a chance to test this out, but if true it'll be what's required to get through the harder difficulties.

Scoring
Many, many, many critics gave this game very good scores, 95% and higher, and while I can see where they get that number, I think its inflated value.

Remember, my scale goes from a 0 ("Are you KIDDING ME?!?!") to 5 ("Literally nothing could be changed."), and I'm not basing this on any franchise coolness.

Graphics: 5/5 - Hands down, excellent. If you don't have a high-def, take the PS3 over to a friend's, your eyes will thank you.

Difficulty: 4/5 - Well planned out.

Gameplay: 3.5/5 - When you can stay stealthy its a great game. Once you turn tactical Snake is found lacking. As for the triangle mashing and slow-motion gameplay, I could have done without.

Combat: 4/5 - Gun customization really takes the combat system somewhere fun. I'd like to see a bit more work done to control of the unarmed combat, it felt like flailing in some cases. It'd also be nice to make the guard's hand to hand have more counters.

Cut Scenes: 2.5/5 - No gamer should have to watch more video than have game time, period. If this was, say, an interactive DVD it'd be great, but with only 19 hours of gameplay on the second hardest difficulty, and easily over 20 hours of video it is simply too much. Gorgeous, but too much.

Story: Unrated.

Politics: Unrated.

Multiplayer: Unrated due to nonsense requirements.

Replayability: A tentative 3/5. If you really can get your gear in harder difficulties, this would be a HUGE boon. I'd be much more likely to replay through on the highest difficulty if I had the guns I set up in the 3rd highest difficulty still with me. However, the thought of reinstalling each act all the time makes me want to go play something else.

Down Time: 2/5 - I can forgive loading before and after cutscenes, even if it takes 10-20 seconds. To need to install 5 times, and separately for each act really impacts my desire to go back and play through other acts again.

Overall: 3.5/5 (70%) - Not only is this about the score I wanted to give it after putting the game down, its what my above scores work out to be! How's that for a good call?!

Conclusion
This was a fun game, I'll say that first off, and a good game. I really enjoyed it the first time through, and it felt unique to me. I found I could just keep writing about the game, there's so much to talk about, which is good. However there are a few decisions the developers should not have made: Requiring button mashing at an unbelievable rate; Cutscenes taking up my time; Too much loading. These detract from the game in a very noticeable way, and this is why I feel the other game reviews are inflated. I don't see how a good, unbiased, game reviewer could overlook these.

Bottom line: Get this game if you want a movie with a game inside of it. Otherwise, be prepared to hurry up and wait for the fun to start!