Metal Gear Solid 4

Words simply cannot describe how much I enjoyed this game, but I'll try anyway. I picked it up at last Friday afternoon and finished it Saturday night, totalling 25 hours of gameplay – I could not put it down.

The Metal Gear Solid series has always been my favourite example of how deep, intelligent and involving video games can be, and MGS4 is no exception. It largely wraps up the loose ends from the previous Metal Gear games, but does so with unparalleled production quality and despite being the seventh canonical game and the series having very political genres throughout, the plot remained fresh and interesting. Every cutscene was artistically composed and meticulously directed, and ontop of that, the game just looks beautiful.

MGS4 is a departure from the previous games in terms of gameplay, but it works extremely well. Stealth is still a large element of the gameplay, but the action element has been kicked up a notch. Unlike the previous games in the series, the action parts flow well and mesh with the rest of the game. It feels far less clumsy, partly because the controls have been modified to reflect this shift in gameplay. As much as I loved the earlier MGS games, MGS3 and to a lesser extent MGS2 felt a bit like movies with interactive scenes. The gameplay in MGS4 seems to have had extra life breathed into it and more truely resembles it's subtitle, "Tactical Espionage Action".

In MGS4, you revisit some key locations from the first MGS game. The game is full of flashbacks and reminiscence from earlier in Solid Snake's life. If you have played the first MGS game, as I did when I was ten, these ghostly voices will help you relive the events of Shadow Moses. I can't explain why, but this was a very nice touch. Nostalgia perhaps...

I couldn't give any game a 100% rating, but Metal Gear Solid 4, and the MGS series in general, are extremely close. I only hope this game is remembered in years to come for the masterpiece it surely is, so that our children and their children can play it.