Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker is a total 5 out of a 5 game according to me. While the installation itself, it recommends the full fledged fun one would have through the voice-acting. It’s on a small set-up, but in terms of content and personality, Peace Walker is a full-sized blockbuster.
The plot, in true MGS custom, is comprehensive yet impassable to the point where you believe that it may be a enormous joke at your expense. A histrionic military opera loosely anchored in the cold war, you play as Big Boss, Solid Snake’s older replica, for the advantage of anyone not versed in Metal Gear’s convoluted backstory. BB is leading his self-created mercenary army, Militaires Sans Frontières, through leafy Costa Rica at the command of an undercover KGB agent who declares to be a professor at the “University of Peace”. Frankly, it’s best not to think about it too much.
As with the stunning outdoor mission surroundings, the cut-scenes in between them are elegant. 3D models melt into mottled comic-book graphics; onomatopoeic letters intersperse the screen as a character flicks a cigarette lighter with a “ssshk” or punches with a “thwack”. You can zoom and pan around them and sporadically participate.
But the balance is securely towards stealth rather than violence. It’s always been too easy to blunder your way through MGS, but Peace Walker demands that you debilitate rather than kill and avoid detection rather than take on strengthening. Once you’ve tranquillised a foe, you can disappear his sleeping form with a hilarious migration balloon, which adds him to the Militaires Sans Frontières ranks. Between the tightly calculated missions, there’s an army micro-management sub-game that proves weirdly compelling.
For all its goal, however, Peace Walker really struggles with the PSP’s limited controls; the absence of a second analogue stick makes aiming feel awkward and the absence of mid-mission checkpoints can worsen the frustration. Playing in co-op makes the story missions considerably less annoying to play, allowing you to recompense for each other’s mistakes. Co-op also allows MGS’s strange sense of humour to stretch its legs outside of the confines of the plot cut-scenes, as you sneak around in a two-person cardboard-box-disguised convoy.
None the less, Peace Walker is undoubtedly the most ambitious game on the PSP by far, and one of the best. But while playing, you can’t help wishing that, being such serious business, it were on a more powerful platform, allowing more space to breathe. Its true business after all! Do also drop in your comments with us.
Tags: 3d models, big boss, blockbuster, Game, metal gear solid, MGS custom, peace walker, Psp