Reviews// Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater

Another big addition is the whole camouflage thing. At first, it seemed like this could have been rather a nominal innovation, but it actually adds a lot to the satisfaction gleaned from sneaking right past an armed guard who’s so close he could probably smell the rat tartare on your cigar-soured breath. It can occasionally get a bit annoying having to go in and out of the menus for face paint and clothes though. But, if you can’t be bothered to do your make up, you could always just kill your stalkers. There’s the usual selection of up-close and nasty stealth kills, throat-slitting and such. Or a bit less mean: you could just take them hostage or give them bad food or scare them with your big snake. The options are always open.

When you do definitely have to kill folk is when the bosses make their respective appearances. And these are probably the best bits: as they traditionally have been with MGS games. There’s usually an element of puzzle -solving involved in defeating them, a fair amount of persistence but, thankfully, not too much challenge. You could well accuse some of being too easy, but there’s always the harder difficulty settings if you want to make a fuss. It may just be because we finally got the knack of MGS games that we found the whole thing easier, or maybe the game has just been constructed in a more fluid fashion: either way, it seems like a positive development.

As you can tell, we are duly impressed with Snake Eater, but like the mean old goats we are, we won’t suggest that it’s anywhere near perfect. There are occasional drops in frame rate that snag in the mind, and certain miscreant details that seem to have been overlooked: an early knife battle with a crocodile just looked stupid, as Snake stood stabbing feet above the croc, which just sat there motionless taking the remote knifing without complaint until it died and suddenly vanished. And then sometimes, when you’ve spent ages trying to conceal yourself, and you get caught red-handed, but the guard just lets off a single shot, letting you skip off into the distance unharmed, the illusion gets smeared, if not shattered, and you wonder just quite how much the game lets you get away with unchallenged. These things aren't enough to spoil the experience though, and it would take a particularly hard-hearted gamer to find anything truly problematic in the occasional moments of design carelessness.