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Reviews It's about time it ended., August 9, 2008 Rating: 6.0/10 By Nineteen Seven After completing Metal Gear Solid 4, I had reached that breaking point of tolerance and decided that enough was enough. I’m not talking about the gameplay or the lack thereof, but the superfluous narrative of the story. Hell, the name of the game, entitled Guns of the Patriots: Tactical Espionage Action reaffirms you that Hideo Kojima, the series’ creator is still without an editor to tone down the shitstorm that’ll be contained within, especially seeing as it’s the final game of the series. Even dating back to the first Metal Gear Solid for the Playstation, the surprising albeit dated quality in its presentation and detail was, and still is able to distract players from the sloppy and extraneous dialogue, arbitrary and overcomplicated plot twists, and lackluster gameplay that simply bridged the gaps between one cutscene to the next. It took two sequels to get the gameplay as good as it could get, despite the controls being clunky and irritating to adapt to once you transitioned from stealth to full-on action.
As I said before, Guns of the Patriots is the final game for the series and Hideo Kojima’s last chance to satisfy fans by wrapping up the mystifying plot holes left behind by Metal Gear Solid 2, which was released six years ago. For those of you unacquainted with the series, I’ll attempt to explain the story as well as I can, seeing as it’s a little too complicated for its own good, but here goes regardless: you play as Solid Snake, an American soldier and clone of the world’s greatest soldier, Big Boss. Each game culminates with him having to sneak and hide behind enemy lines in order to stop the Metal Gears, a series of giant anime robots that can fire a nuclear weapon from any stance. In the finale, Snake has grown to old age within a matter of years due to a flaw in his cloning.
Okay, get ready.
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Snake has only six months to live, and he must stop Liquid Ocelot, a renegade spy with the transplanted hand of Liquid Snake, the brother he killed in the first game and who has now merged with Ocelot’s personality. Ocelot has control of a series of Personal Military Contractors and, with the use of body-enhancing nanomachines that everyone uses including his troops, intends to destroy the Patriots, a group of mysterious cybernetic figures that control the United States, while intending to do away with Snake in the process. Snake has to travel around the world with his partner Otacon, a scientist that helped create the Metal Gear REX model and whose name means Otaku Convention because he’s a nerd and such, and connects with people that can assist him, including Drebin, a black gunrunner with a pet monkey and a knack for magic tricks with grenades, Snake’s former military adviser Roy Campbell, nanomachines specialist and cancer patient Naomi Hunter, and Raiden, a soldier from the second game that looks like a woman and has become a cyborg ninja with an augmented battle suit and synthetic high heels in order to maximize his battle capabilities.
Oh yeah, and there’s a bisexual vampire knife fighter, last seen in the second game flying a Harrier jet while the eye-patched and former President of the United States surfed on the back of it in a metal body suit with mechanical tentacles sprouting from the back.
***
To sum it up, the plot is a traceable yet unnecessary mess and while Kojima attempts to patch things up as best as he can, the story ends up feeling rushed. It’s an odd statement to make about a series where each game has five to ten hours devoted to the story, but then again maybe it has to do with the game being divided into five separate acts, as opposed to a single operation, with the odd hour-long prologue mission. The gameplay is lifted straight from Snake Eater, a previous title that allowed you control over your camera as opposed to a fixed overhead view, and an attempted emphasis on camouflage. I say attempted because, despite your ‘OctoCamo’ allowing you to blend into your surroundings with picture-perfect precision via optic camouflage, pure stealth is somewhat difficult to achieve in the game, whether it be by design or by nature. You still have your cardboard box and even a drum can to hide in, as well as other alternatives to use to your silent advantage, but I say ‘nature’ due to the title’s origins as a stealth-action game. The design, however seems to have flipped the genre around. The first mission, for example, has you hunting down Ocelot in the Middle East and battling against two opposing force, Ocelot’s PMCs or the Rebels, whom you can fight alongside. The game awards you with Drebin Points, which you can accumulate from defeated enemies and use to purchase over fifty realistic firearms with attachments, all interchangeable but entertaining to use. In the past, the series would almost taunt you by handing you powerful weaponry and promoting a ‘no killing’ experience, which meant using a tranquilizer pistol for a title’s entirety, but the sheer amount of weaponry and mayhem surrounding you seems to be doing the opposite.
However, the controls simply aren’t tailored for an action game, and the flaws in the design have an effect on your enemies. For example, say I’m fighting against someone and I’m using crates for cover. I can press the X button to rise from a crouching position and return fire, but I have to press it again to duck… OR I can stay crouched and aim through first-person mode, then press the shoulder buttons to peer over the edge, while improving my aim, while holding my finger on the trigger. That can be an upward of four buttons. If you’re surrounded by enemies, your best bet is to run away and gain a distance advantage, or you can quickly judo-throw them into the ground and risk getting reverse-attacked with no way around it. Standing still and letting them shoot you is also a viable option; sometimes they stop and stare at you, as if to give you a chance to get used to the controls.
The controls aren’t game-breaking, and while the first few and unfortunately shortened chapters were nonetheless highly entertaining with the amount of battlefield chaos and gunfights; some of the action set pieces in this game, such as the first encounter with the FROG soldiers and the handful of rail-shooting segments reach a level of fun that puts the rest of the game to shame. In fact, the gradual change of pace within the game’s mission structure eventually takes a sour turn from the small-scale wars. Unless you’re wishing Snake could get back to fight robots, and lots of them, you just might not like where the game is heading because, yes, Snake does get back to fighting robots, and lots of them. The machines you battle simply pale in comparison to standard infantry due to their overpowered nature and the sheer numbers you have to battle against. The story might end up being your only motivation and if you’re a fan of the story, you should end up impressed with the outcome. Then again, you might be disappointed in the idea of second-hand characters having a sudden importance to the end results and a handful of instances where Kojima’s true intentions towards past occurrences are realized in ways that seem to ignore how said occurrences were portrayed in the past. Right, Ocelot?
Despite the disappointment over the narrative’s lack of focus and hindsight, the ending still remains satisfying. That being said, there still is quite a bit to enjoy. The game looks amazing, maintaining its reputation as a game riddled with graphical detail. The character design is top-notch this time around, without a single character looking out of place (acting out of place is another story) and seemingly making every character, even those with lackluster design in the past, seemingly likable on face value alone. The cutscenes are still long and tiresome despite Kojima’s undisputed skill with a camera, and the action scenes are truly amongst the handful you’ll bother to watch once you’ve got a firm grip on the story. There are certain scenes that feel perfect and involving, while others are far too melodramatic for their own good and end up cheapening the emotional value of the moments (the microwave hallway scene is a prime example of this, though the section before it worked surprisingly well) The music is decent; including tracks from previous Hideo Kojima games was a neat move in order to expose some catchy music that might have been missed otherwise.
All in all, fans of the series shouldn’t be surprised as to what should be expected: long cutscenes that will constitute for a good amount of your play time, cinematic set pieces, tons of character and dialogue to keep you interested and paying attention, and a suitable finale to Snake’s legacy. Underneath all the polish and jargon, however, lies an unbalanced stealth game masquerading as an average third-person shooter. Guns of the Patriots is adequate enough to deserve your time, but if this is as good as next-gen gameplay gets, I'm not impressed.
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