Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater Review: An excellent, if safe, remake of one of the PS2’s best games

Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater is very safe. It’s also exactly what it needed to be.

While the Metal Gear franchise is utterly beloved by generations of fans, there has been very little to shout about for a decade. The last release in the main series, Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain, was lauded by critics for its gameplay and squinted at for its strange story choices.

However, that game was released under a cloud. The acrimonious divorce between Konami and Hideo Kojima pulled much of the focus away from what should have been a triumphant final chapter.

Since then, Metal Gear has been roundly relegated to side projects, gambling machines, and a serviceable rerelease of past remasters. Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater is the first “new” mainline Metal Gear since Phantom Pain, even though it’s virtually a shot-for-shot remake of one of the PlayStation 2’s very best games.

Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater is MGS 3, but it plays like MGS 5. That’s the long and short of it. For many, including us, it’s exactly what we wanted from a return to the series, but it’s easy to imagine a world where some players wanted more.

For example, the game’s levels are still extremely segmented, broken into tiny chunks with a handful of NPCs in each. This, a limit imposed by the PS2, could have been eradicated in favour of each area becoming a sweeping, seamless open world, but that’s not what Konami is going for here. It’s less of a remake and more of an extremely pretty remaster, save for one key difference: controls.

Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater offers classic or modern control options. The modern options make the gameplay like MGS 5, or any other contemporary third-person shooter. This also changes the perspective of the camera and makes the game unbelievably easy. Whether it’s down to the increased field of vision or the ease of control, anyone with even a passing glance at the MGS series in the past will need to up the difficulty from the jump if they’re looking for something challenging.

For new players, the classic control setup will make you question why anyone loved this game in the first place, but it was the mid-2000s, and thus, no one knew how games should control. Some mechanical flourishes, like bullet drop on the silenced tranquilizer, add a little bit of challenge and to stop Snake from being even more of an unstoppable killing machine.

Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater retains the weirdness. Boss fights have esoteric solutions. Some can still be skipped entirely if you’re a fan of killing pensioners from a distance. There are still ludicrously high-resolution glamour model posters kicking around. Kojima may be long gone but the spirit of that original team is still there. In fact, contrary to popular myth that the whole team set sail for Kojima Productions, plenty of those who worked on the PS2 game also worked on the remake.

While we couldn’t experience the game from the perspective of a newcomer, it will be fascinating to see how a whole new generation deals with a game that very rarely gives you hyper-specific instructions on what to do next. Even more so with fights like The Sorrow.

The game’s story of international espionage set against the Kennedy era of US politics is still as blockbuster and silly as ever. At least, since MGS 3 is the first game in the timeline canonically, new players have half a chance of understanding what is going on.

While the visual upgrade isn’t on a par with something like BluePoint’s Demon’s Souls, Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater’s lush jungles look great, and one of the game’s climactic scenes set in a field of white flowers still stuns two decades on. Character models capture the original spirit of Yoji Shinkawa’s art, and bring the game in line with the more realistic style established in MGS 5.

The game’s iconic soundtrack is largely intact, save for the decision to rerecord the title track, Snake Eater. While Cynthia Harrell’s vocals are still imperious, the original was perfect, so it seems like a strange decision. What makes it even more confusing is that the track no longer completely syncs up with the oft-memed trip up the massive ladder.

Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater also includes the charming minigame, Snake vs Monkey (or Bomberman on Xbox). This is a short sideshow that sees Snake chase the cast of Ape Escape around the levels of MGS 3. It’s very easy and you probably won’t play it more than once, but it’s worth running through it, especially since it features a cameo from another PlayStation icon. A multiplayer mode will be released later, free to players who own Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater.

Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater is a steady hand at the tiller of a franchise that has felt in mortal danger for some time. It’s not mindblowing, but it’s an incredibly comfortable way to once again experience a game that’s in so many players’ top five of all time.

The changes that have been made are smart, and often subtle, but little strays away from the North Star of the original game. The question now becomes whether Konami continues with remakes, including the much-requested Metal Gear Solid and MGS 2, or if it takes the confidence from this release and parleys it into Metal Gear Solid 6.

While we shudder to think of the absolutely exhausting, pointless discourse that would arise from continuing Kojima’s story without him, from a gameplay perspective, Metal Gear is once again in safe hands, and, for the first time in a long time, we’re excited to see what Konami does next.

As long as the thing they do next is free Metal Gear Solid 4 from the PS3.