Metal Gear Solid 4 is anything but the typical game on the action market right now. It personifies an entirely different central focus than most games by making it possible to get through the entire game without killing hardly anyone, and often without even firing a shot.
Game play mechanics have solid systems for hiding, sneaking, playing dead, and knocking out/disabling your opponents instead of outright shooting or killing them. However, this edition of the series is much more accepting of the player’s power to choose as it also allows for the use of gratuitous force and violence to simply gun down everything in your path until you reach your destination.
The choice is yours and for once it really IS yours. While at different times throughout the game it is made easier or harder for you to achieve an objective using a particular play style it is well balanced and constructed to allow the player the freedom to truly choose and stick to their path.
While the plot is not changed by the way you complete the game, your overall score is determined by the number of times you do, or do not, do certain things throughout the course of the level you are on. Killing people is considered to be a bad thing by the game’s scoring engine. In fact it is best if you don’t aggress anyone at all! The highest possible score in most parts of the game can be obtained by simply navigating your way around all potential conflicts.
Your score throughout the game is used to provide you with the in-game equivalent of money, Dreben points. These points, which can also be obtained when you pick up weapons and equipment that you have no use for, may be redeemed for ammunition, modifications to existing weapons, or simply used to unlock a weapon which you picked up that still has the locks placed on it by “the system.”
The game runs smoothly, with a truly excellent engine. Characters move an interact with their environment with an eerily realistic quality and can continue to do so while up to 4 (so far) instances of the game engine are rendering interactive high quality cut scenes simultaneously.
Particle effects, lighting, and other little details are taken to the point of a true art throughout the game and are expertly displayed in and out of cut scenes. The maps additionally are drawn in one big load at the beginning of each stage of the game, which allows the entire map to be drawn at once. Many game engines would choke on loading such extensive maps all at one time, particularly because the maps are designed to allow a player to look all the way to the virtual horizon without cutting anything out or fading things away at a distance. Not MSG 4, this game resolutely performs according to the director’s high standard to pushing the graphics as far as he can without losing anything in the process.
This game presumably will slow down or hitch if you run it for long enough or hard enough, but this has yet to be detected in our play testing sessions.
Guns in the game have real moving, tiny parts which can be manipulated individually and dynamically during cut scenes and game play. This allows for some nice showing off of the superior animation quality of MSG 4’s engine over the competition as well as allowing for realistic reloading and unloading animations.
One place in which the game really made a mixed impression was on its rendering of fire. Smoke coming off of fires looked excellent, but the dynamic fires created by the game looked extremely strange and can cause a jarring of the player, bringing them back down out of the illusion of the game. However this is fixed with some of the non-dynamic fires found throughout the game which leads me to presume that the game was simply not given sufficient time to the dynamic fire’s rendering.
One difficulty of the game is that it suffers from “Magic Doors,” the condition in which a character is unable to leave an area or progress until they have defeated the boss located in the same general area as them. While this is somewhat of a time honored tradition and it definitely fits right into the flow of the game, it does not really seem to fit with the overall theme.
There is no good reason that Snake cannot simply hop out a window and toss an explosive back into the building with the boss. In fact it seems more than likely this would be his first reaction to coming face to face with some of them.
In the end the game is a wonderful experience and the game has a lot of potential replay value for those who are able to “get it.” It is highly recommended for anyone who wishes to play a game which is not a simple, straight forward FPS. It is also recommended for all those who are big fans of FPS games. It may contain more story, cut scenes, and character development than most FPS games do by far, but you will still likely really enjoy the game.