now playing — metal gear solid Δ snake eater
played on — playstation 5
Was there ever a game more perfect for a thirteen-year old boy than Metal Gear Solid 3? The cold-war setting, the babes, the guns, the boss fights, the faux-intellectual biblical allegory, Snake himself, the occult…it all adds up to a cavalcade of teenage delights. In the same way that Led Zeppelin is the perfect band for a 13-year old boy, MGS3 is the perfect game. There’s nothing so enduring as the way you can love art when you are in your formative years.
Indeed, I myself pulled MGS3 out of a bargain bin at a Best Buy in 2006 or 2007, and thought to myself, “I’ve heard about Metal Gear in Newgrounds cartoons, but I’ve never played one”. I brought it home and was immediately transfixed by something that was clearly so much of a step up in ambition from most PS2 games of the era. The cutscenes, the voice-acting, the production of it all was so much stronger than other games of the era.
Now, almost twenty-years later, the classic PS2 title has been remade and rereleased for modern platforms.
Any remake or rerelease needs to be evaluated on two fronts — the strength of the original title, and the quality of the repackaging effort.
MGS3 remains, after all this time, an enduring classic. I think with a fresh set of eyes, there are minor problems with the pacing towards the front/end of the experience, but largely this is a masterful stealth-action title that condenses the best of MGS into a more grounded and digestible experience. It’s on everyone’s shortlist of best MGS games for a reason, and on my playthrough of Delta Δ, I was reminded of the numerous reasons why.
MGS3 takes the previous modern series and moves it back into the cold-war era of the early 1960s…I’ll try to summarize as best I can. The soviet union is close to developing a terrifying new destabilizing weapon that will solidify their standing as the world’s foremost superpower. Sokolov, the scientist responsible for the weapon, is being held against his will by extremist factions within the soviet government, and forced to work on the device. Snake is sent in to recover Sokolov and bring him back to the USA.
Things don’t go as planned — Snake’s mission fails when his former mentor, a woman known only as, “The Boss”, stops his escape, retakes Sokolov, defects to the Soviet Union, and brings two small miniature nuclear warheads with her. One of these devices is detonated, and now Russia wants to know what Snake was doing in their country, and why this american made nuke went off on their soil.
Snake now has a new mission — Re-enter the soviet union, rescue sokolov, destroy the weapon, and as proof of the United States innocence in the aforementioned nuclear disaster, assassinate The Boss.
The setup is grounded, and incredibly interesting right from the get-go. This is the best core story in the series history, right next to the original PlayStation title. You don’t have to know heaps of Metal Gear lore for it to make sense, it just does on it’s own merits.
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The presentation of this setup is mostly wonderful but let me touch on pacing real quick — The opening two hours of this game is very slow, and mostly expository dialogue. You play very little, and mostly watch it unfold either via cutscene, or two-way radio dialogue.
I also think that the ending suffers from bad pacing, but it’s almost completely reversed. There is a chase sequence at the end of this game, that aside from being interspersed with cutscenes and boss fights, lasts probably ninety minutes. You escape from a giant base after driving around it several times, down an airplane runway, over a bridge, down a mountain, through a forest, and then escort a badly injured comrade as she slowly walks behind you through an excruciating stealth sequence at the very last throw. It is 10/10 volume all the way up action sequences for a very very long stretch of time. They could have probably cut this sequence by 50% of it’s runtime and it would have been plenty. It is purposefully reminiscent of the driving sequence at the end of MGS1, but in that game, the sequence probably lasts all of ten minutes.
So in between a slow opening and an overly drawn out ending, what do you have?
One of the most finely paced and executed action games of all-time. No hyperbole. Every hour or so, you are in a completely different situation, infiltrating a completely different kind of environment. You are fighting one of the most interesting rogue’s galleries in all of video games, The Cobra Unit. You are playing with stealth mechanics that are totally unmatched outside of later efforts from the same development team (MGSV in particular). It’s beautiful, it’s sharp, it sounds awesome, the mechanics are polished to a mirror-sheen. People always deride Kojima as a movie-director wannabe who just accidentally got into games…no way. MGS3 has gameplay that is so incredibly deep and fun to play around with. I love how wide open some of the environments are, and how they let you decide how much or how little you want to engage with any given mechanic. You can spend the whole game hiding in the bushes and sniping people w/ your tranquilizer gun, or you can engage much much more deeply. Every little area has it’s secrets and little details that will totally change your perception of how the area can be conquered. It’s a wonderfully fun toy to engage with, and it’s just so incredibly responsive and “alive” feeling. It feels like you will never fully understand all the little secrets and details, or all the capability of the enemy AI. It doesn’t feel like a video game with limitations, it feels like a real living jungle.
So how does this all translate into a modern re-packing of the original 2004 classic?
The repackaging on display here is, I would say, 80% successful in it’s endeavor. In terms of being a complete collection of every previous version of MGS3, I think it’s hugely successful. The Snake vs Monkey mode is here, the bonus vampire action game has been remade and included. All of the secret theater tapes + some new additions have been included. You can choose to play in a new more modern gameplay style, with an ‘over-the-shoulder’ camera and new controls…or you can play the game in it’s original form with isometric camera and PS2-style controls. All the camouflage variants are included, with some bonus additions as well.
Where the repackaging isn’t as successful I’d say is largely two minor gripes. First, I think unreal engine makes every game look sort of the same, and while it’s a fine fit for the visual language of Metal Gear Solid, I find that the original look just has a little bit more soul to it. The fidelity is leaps and bounds better in the remake of course, but there are some effects and scenes that just don’t work with the new rendering technology — wet hair in Unreal Engine looks horrible, and that’s evident in some scenes with Eva towards the end of the game.
The second thing I’d point out, and this is nitty-gritty but important, is that MGS3 on PS2 took great advantage of the Dualshock 2’s pressure-sensative buttons…a feature that did not /does not exist on PS4/PS5 or Xbox/PC controllers. This pressure sensitive control is key in MGS3 and without it, every other version of the game has been an order of magnitude less playable than the original release in 2004. DeltaΔ tries and mostly succeeds to remap the controls for modern controllers and audiences, but particularly in the “legacy” mode, where you can play the game as it was originally designed, suffers from lack of pressure sensitive buttons. My take is that the legacy mode is a novelty, and if you really want to play the game like that, go track down a PS2 or PS3 and play the game’s original release. DeltaΔ should be wholly focused on the revamped version of the game.
DeltaΔ also, in relation to it running on Unreal, changes the way Snake moves and controls. It is minor, but Snake has a weight to him that didn’t exist in the original game, and it makes some actions related to movement a little slower and less responsive than they were in the original title. These changes in movement aren’t a detriment to the game until you crank the difficulty up, and tangle with some of the late game bosses. Volgin in particular is much harder to fight than he was in the PS2 version because your movement/rolling is much cruder, and it makes dodging his lightning attacks much harder. On the flip side, the way the new graphics are rendered makes the final fight against The Boss comically easy. What was a totally epic final showdown on the PS2 is reduced here to finding her in your sniper scope, and just blasting her away.
These changes are reminiscent of the problems with “Metal Gear Solid : The Twin Snakes”, which was the Nintendo GameCube re-release of the original PlayStation game. That title suffered from poor difficulty balancing, in giving Snake access to too many moves and features that were created for MGS2. Snake was never intended to be able to aim-down-sights in MGS1, and thus it made the game comically easy to include it. DeltaΔ suffers from similar issues, albeit they are a little less aggregious. You cannot change technical details about a game like this without throwing off the balancing in some other way, and I’m a little surprised they didn’t see this, considering that Twin Snakes is one of the most commonly cited examples of how NOT to remake a game. A vast majority of the game is untouched or unphased by these changes, but a few key boss fights are totally neutered here — namely the final boss battle, which is an egregious oversight.
Again — These gripes are relatively minor overall, in what is a package largely designed to bring new players into the MGS fold. Existing MGS diehards have the original releases and the recent “Master Collection” if they want the completely unaltered experience. It reminds me a lot of the consternation surrounding Star Wars and the special editions. The special editions wouldn’t be nearly as offensive if you could just see the original films in their intended forms…and thankfully that’s the case here. DeltaΔ has some issues but at least the originals are readily available.
Overall I’d say that DeltaΔ is a 7/10 remake of a 10/10 classic game. The core of what is here is so incredibly strong, that it’s hard not to recommend based on that alone…even if it were just a straight port with no added improvements or graphical updates. The DeltaΔ additions, I think do a lot to modernize the game for today’s technology and audience, although I think some of these changes hurt the core experience in more subtle ways. I think the greatest version of this game is still Subsistence on PS2 with the original controller, but DeltaΔ is a worthy addition to the MGS legacy. I also find it hard to be too critical when Konami has graciously made MGS3 in it’s original form, available for modern platforms. They have given us the best of both worlds, and DeltaΔ is just one expression of an undeniable classic.
