Few video games actually deserve the remake remedy as a lot as Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater. Arguably the very best stealth-motion sport of its era, again in 2004 it pushed the PlayStation 2 to its very limits – a lot in order that the {hardware} sometimes weighed down its ambitions. Twenty years later, an entire remake from Konami utilizing the ability of contemporary consoles has the potential to unlock the total, uncompromised imaginative and prescient of the sport’s unique creators. As an alternative, this new, Kojima-much less Metal Gear Solid Delta appears extra like a really shiny HD remaster than the elegant remake it may have been. It’s an admittedly stunning nostalgia journey, however virtually trustworthy to a fault.
In a current palms-on demonstration I used to be capable of play via Metal Gear Solid Delta’s Virtuous Mission; an entire recreation of MGS3’s prologue inbuilt Unreal Engine 5. It seems to be each bit as incredible as you’d hope, notably in relation to character fashions – faces and clothes are an actual spotlight. The jungle is the true star of the present, although, with trendy lighting strategies serving to showcase the graphical overhaul to each blade of grass, each pool of mud, and each writhing python.
In case you’re a Metal Gear veteran, you’ll know that the roughly 90-minute period of the Virtuous Mission is dominated by cutscenes and codec calls. It’s not the perfect part to check drive any adjustments Konami has made (visuals apart) notably since Delta makes use of the identical dialogue audio as the unique Snake Eater and thus all cinematics are body-for-body and line-for-line similar. However, if this slice is something to go by, any gameplay adjustments are minimal. Delta seems to be a painstaking recreation of Metal Gear Solid 3 right down to the millimetre. Timber stand precisely the place they initially stood. The similar enemies patrol the identical routes. And frustratingly frequent load screens as soon as once more divide the jungle into small, self-contained maps.
This construction, completely preserved from the 2004 unique, makes Metal Gear Solid Delta really feel a lot older than its new excessive-definition visuals. The jungle is small and claustrophobic, not due to its imposing cover however due to its restricted playspaces. The loading screens act as laborious boundaries, that means what occurs in a single zone doesn’t impression one other – alerted guards can’t chase you into a special map, for example. This lack of continuity between every phase limits your creativity; there’s seemingly no strategy to trigger distractions that idiot enemies into investigating past a loading display boundary, or line up an ideal shot throughout the stitching between zones.
All of this, after all, was not simply forgivable again in 2004 however anticipated. The PS2 merely couldn’t render a complete seamless playspace this detailed. However in 2024 the liberty of Metal Gear Solid 5’s sprawling maps, which might be completely at house retrofitted into Snake Eater’s Soviet wilderness, is sorely lacking right here. I’m reminded of Capcom’s Resident Evil 2 remake, which eradicated the unique sport’s iconic door-opening loading screens in favour of a extra immersive, fully seamless police station. With out a comparable strategy, I fear that the general play expertise of MGS Delta received’t be considerably totally different sufficient from the Snake Eater HD remaster obtainable as a part of final yr’s Grasp Assortment Vol. 1 – a sport with a a lot lower cost level and packaged with two different actually glorious video games.
After enjoying the demo I had the possibility to speak with producer Noriaki Okamura and I requested why the group didn’t decide to convey MGS3’s map design updated. “We did debate about this internally,” he advised me. “Possibly we should always reskin the sport into the present open-world sort map? However after fascinated with this, we might undoubtedly need to mainly remake the sport from scratch, and by doing so it may alter different issues in regards to the sport, and we determined that’s not the course we actually needed to take.”
Whereas the playspace of the Virtuous Mission is strictly what you keep in mind, Konami has made some sensible adjustments that incontestably make Delta extra snug to play than its mother or father. The most essential is a modernised management scheme that works in tandem with over-the-shoulder aiming, a characteristic pulled from the 3DS model of MGS3. This setup is virtually revolutionary. The unique Snake Eater used inputs that had their roots within the comparatively primary MGS1, however the more and more complicated and impressive boss battles demanded a stage of high-quality management that the scheme merely couldn’t sustain with. Fortunately the previous, fiddly purpose mechanics are actually gone, changed with up to date set off-based mostly gun management that enables for simple, exact headshots. There’s nothing within the Virtuous Mission that actually challenged my marksmanship, however I’m actually wanting ahead to battling The Fury; a boss whose velocity and assault patterns have been an uncomfortable match for the unique sport’s clunky controls.
Different welcome enhancements are a fast-dial system on your codec, permitting you to entry very important capabilities like saving the sport by tapping down on the d-pad, whereas the up button opens a fast-choose on your camouflage. The two remaining d-pad buttons cycle via your gear, which is a minor however stable enchancment over the unique scheme.
Extra important is the truth that Snake can now crouch stroll (one other characteristic first included within the 3DS model), which virtually appears like a necessity in a stealth sport. Mixed with the refreshed aiming system and trendy 3D digicam, Snake Eater now performs rather more intuitively. Nevertheless, I’ll caveat that by saying it does nonetheless really feel like a sport from a previous era; Snake sadly doesn’t transfer with the fluidity of his MGS5 counterpart. Once more, it appears like Konami has missed a transparent alternative to convey trendy enhancements to MGS Delta.
Offered the whole sport follows go well with with this demo, I feel your emotions on Delta are going to depend upon simply how trustworthy you need this remake to be. In case you’re a purist, then you definitely’re in luck: the brand new MGS group at Konami clearly sees the unique Snake Eater as one thing of a non secular textual content. However it means Delta’s inventive imaginative and prescient is held prisoner by the early 2000s. Even the cutscenes characteristic the identical fade-to-black loading between scenes as the unique – one thing certainly cinephile Kojima would have exorcised if solely he’d had entry to SSDs again within the day.
Past the up to date graphics and controls, there’s nothing shocking, refreshing, or dare I say thrilling about MGS Delta, at the very least on this demo. The solely important change we did discover was that capturing Ocelot didn’t set off the time paradox sport over display. It’s not clear if this omission is just because the demo shouldn’t be pulled from the ultimate model of the sport, however such a well-known Kojima-ism being lacking from the primary press displaying of Delta did increase a involved eyebrow. Hopefully it makes it into the total launch.
Okamura advised me that he “needed to keep away from a state of affairs the place this collection shall be forgotten in time,” and that the aim of Delta was to “be certain we ship the sport as faithfully as attainable so it doesn’t take away from the nostalgic facet.” That’s a noble aim, however I can’t assist however really feel that was the job of the Grasp Assortment. I had hoped Delta would have seen the group improve and improve Snake Eater with concepts from The Phantom Ache and past, providing the identical story and targets however in a extra trendy, extra versatile, and extra reactive stealth searching floor. That might have made it the remake to topple Resident Evil 2 from its perch. As an alternative, Metal Gear Solid Delta is shaping as much as be little greater than a prettier, extra intuitive model of 2004’s most important stealth sport.
Matt Purslow is IGN’s Senior Options Editor.