Metal Gear Solid Δ: Snake Eater review — A philosopher's legacy

Metal Gear Solid 3 is one of my favorite games of all time. While it’s not my favorite game in its own series, I do find it the best to replay over and over. It has that nice mix of tactical espionage action, a compelling plot that largely stands on its own, and enough little details that I find something new on every playthrough. The game has gone through many iterations, from the initial release’s fixed camera to the 3DS version’s addition of crouching, but it’s always been the same PS2 game at its core. That is, until now. Metal Gear Solid Δ: Snake Eater is a full remake of the 2004 title in Unreal Engine 5. Its goal is to leave the game relatively untouched aside from fancy new visuals and a modernized control scheme; the story, level design, and even voice acting remain (mostly) the same. I was incredibly excited for Δ, hoping it to finally be the definitive edition of the game, including everything that was added to or removed from later versions such as Snake vs. Monkey. Having played the game twice now, I can say that while it comes very, very close to being that, the reality is more complex, specifically for fans of the original.

The year is 1964. The Cold War is in full swing as the CIA begins a rescue mission in the totally real jungles of Russia. The target is Nikolai Stepanovich Sokolov, a Soviet rocket scientist looking to defect to the United States before he completes work on a new nuclear weapons system called the Shagohod. The Shagohod is something of a walking tank, utilizing rocket propulsion to launch nuclear IRBMs anywhere within a 650 kilometer range, in other words anywhere in the United States. The last apprentice of The Boss, codename Naked Snake, has been selected for this Virtuous Mission, but if he fails Snake will have a deadly date with the firing squad.

As you’d expect from a Metal Gear title, the plot only gets more complex from there with tons of twists, turns, double and triple crosses, hidden goals, a blossoming romance, at least one ghost, and more military terminology than you can shake a stick at. However, it’s all in service to a spy narrative that has scathing social commentary on the military industrial complex, showing the player how the world takes everything from a soldier, stripping them of personality, thoughts, feelings, and even their free will in service of politicians who discard them without even a glance. Metal Gear Solid was about Genes, a person’s biological makeup not being their destiny, and MGS2 was about Memes, the social and cultural version of DNA that influences our thoughts and ideas. Snake Eater, to continue the rhyming scheme, is about Scene, in other words how the current moment influences our perception of reality. Naked Snake probably has more in common with the average Russian grunt he encounters than any of the big wigs who sent him on this mission, but because of the times and the choices of those in power they fight and kill each other.

Snake Eater was never subtle about any of this, laying out its themes and message in the finale of the game through several expository cutscenes and in your face songs, but that’s part of why I love Kojima games. He and his team make art more accessible to the average person, who isn’t really looking at games as satisfying, artistic experiences with things to say about the world we live in now. Of course, a player still needs to even be open to the idea of games being political or having messages. I mean, there are still people out there who think the series is apolitical despite literally everything about it, but I hope people coming back to the game through Δ use it as a jumping off point to see games as more than just disposable toys.

That said, Δ itself does feel a bit more like a game that will come and go with the current online conversation, ironically. It updates the original Snake Eater to be more like a typical AAA title, with an over the shoulder camera, aiming and shooting on the triggers, and hyper realistic graphics. It certainly makes the game easier to play and I have no doubt that people who didn’t like the original because of its controls and camera will probably love this version, but I can’t help but feel a lot was lost in the translation. Part of what made the game’s methodic stealth so interesting was the friction of not being able to easily see your surroundings at all times or having to go into first person to aim and set up your shot. 

To use a more concrete example, in the original versions The Fear was what I considered the most difficult boss in the game, always taking me a few tries to finally take him down. He’s basically invisible, so you need to track him through disturbances in the environment like falling leaves or a slight shimmer in the air. It was a tense fight, as you needed to make yourself vulnerable to shoot him, with his poison darts quickly sapping your health and stamina, or wait his stamina out so you could lure him into an ambush. 

In Δ, this fight took me less than 30 seconds. It seems like they use a shader for his invisibility camo, which makes him trivial to spot, and the ease of aiming means you never have to let him out of your crosshair. It makes what was an interesting test of line of sight and endurance into a joke. This affects the other bosses, except The Pain who somehow feels exactly the same, but The Fear has it the worst. The game just wasn’t designed around this level of control, and in Δ’s weakest moments you can really tell.

In its strongest moments the controls and visuals serve to make the game even better. The battle against The End was made much more interesting thanks to the denser foliage and higher fidelity camouflaging him even further, the same goes for the final boss. I still found both pretty easy, but I’m willing to chalk that up to me having played the game far too many times. In terms of mechanical improvements, the new controls makes the motorcycle chase a much more enjoyable sequence with your tranquilizer darts putting enemies to sleep immediately no matter where you hit them to match the quicker pace. The Snake vs. Monkey minigame is now a joy to play with the more typical controls and camera so you can focus less on memorizing where monkeys are and more on how hilarious and adorable the mode is, especially now with the added Astro Bot cameos in every stage. (Hey Sony, bring back Ape Escape, the people clearly want to return to monkey.) Δ even brings back the Guy Savage nightmare minigame, which straight up feels like a light character action game now. A lot of care was certainly put into Δ, but it could have used some more in certain areas to make the game a more even experience.

Δ plays similarly to the 3DS version, though much smoother thanks to running above 20 fps. In addition to running and crawling, Snake can crouch walk to remain slightly hidden but still mobile. Your camo index, or an approximation of how well you blend into the environment, will still be at its highest when prone in tall grass, so crouching never feels too overpowered and is a natural addition to the title's risk/reward of going faster or staying hidden. You also don’t need to pop into the survival viewer constantly to change your camo or heal wounds, as both now have convenient quick menus on the D-Pad. Of course that’s not really an issue when taking into account the third person aiming, since you can easily kill or tranquilize any guard at a moment’s notice, even if they’re just about to spot you. The slower, more precise first person aiming is still here, but I hardly ever felt the need to use it as third person is faster and more efficient. It removes a lot of the challenge of the game since it was never designed with this control scheme in mind and Konami hasn’t altered anything else about the game to compensate, except for giving tranquilizer darts a ridiculous amount of dropoff.

Not wanting to change anything about the core game is a double edged sword, and comes back to bite this remake. I’ve already described how the new controls affect gameplay, making things much easier or downright trivial at times, but not bringing the voice actors back for dialogue changes relating to the controls makes for some unnatural codec calls. In particular, the Cure menu was streamlined a bit, necessitating that Para-Medic’s tutorial changes to fit the new style. Instead of bringing back Heather Halley to rerecord these lines, they splice in the phrase “movement stick” either from other lines of dialogue or using AI. If the former is the case, it sounds terrible and really takes you out of the game at a pivotal moment, and if it's the latter it does the same while disrespecting the original artist. Games, developers, and players deserve better.

What makes this weirder is that Konami did get Cynthia Harrell back to redo the iconic opening theme. I don’t like this version as much as the original, it feels less bombastic, but it’s still really cool to hear her again. I can understand wanting to preserve the original style and direction of the voice acting, but it feels very weird that Konami wanted to change as little as possible… except for the parts where they did. It’s really a grab bag of changes too, the addition of lip sync is great, while the massive dropoff tranquilizer darts from the Hush Puppy makes a no kill run just a tad more frustrating. Being able to quickly change camo and call allies on the codec by holding a button makes the game move a lot faster, but why can’t I reverse the way the quick weapon and item menus scroll? They also seem to have forgotten that you can crouch while hiding in a locker, and to get one more thing out of the way the 2D cutscenes look way worse and have vastly different audio mixing than their 3D counterparts. It’s inconsistent, remaining faithful in some areas while diverting in others. 

Case in point, Δ has two playstyles you can select from at the start of a new game and swap between mid-game by reloading a checkpoint: Modern and Legacy. Modern is the mode I’ve been discussing thus far, with the over the shoulder camera, while Legacy goes all the way back to the original with fixed camera angles. Despite that being the first way I played the game, with the original, non-Subsistance release, it’s not very enjoyable both thanks to that camera and the way Δ tries to merge the classic and modern controls. Legacy puts most of the face button functions back to where they were originally, except for shooting. To fire your gun accurately in Legacy mode, you need to hold R1 to go into first person, hold L2 to ready your gun, then tap R2 to fire. It’s incredibly awkward, and while you can rebind the controls to some extent I’d rather just stick with Modern.

The game on PC does have a nice variety of options, graphical or otherwise. It’s a good thing too, as Δ is pushing even my fairly beefy PC to its limits on max settings without DLSS. Even with DLSS on Balanced I still needed to turn a setting or two down a notch to get a consistent 60 fps. Unfortunately, even with a more powerful PC, you won’t be going above 60 frames per second as the game is capped at either that or 30 through a toggle in the menu. I don’t know why this is, but it's frustrating. The game looks phenomenal, but you’ll never really be able to push it further.