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What is it?

Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker is Konami’s all-new original chapter in the Metal Gear Solid saga exclusively for the PlayStation Portable. Set after Metal Gear Solid 3 and Portable Ops and following the life of Big Boss, it chronicles the early days of his Military Sans Frontiers (MSF) or Soldiers Without Borders as they grow into a new ocean platform home base. The base is provided by a KGB operative who hires Snake but also dangles the possibility that Snake’s mentor – the original Boss from Metal Gear Solid 3 – is still alive.

How does it look and sound?

The visuals and the sound design in Peace Walker peg the Metal Gear universe perfectly. The user interface sounds, weapon sounds, and the voice work all come together to tell you that yes, this could easily have been called Metal Gear Solid 5. Those famous Metal Gear cut scenes are very different here, but they fit very well with the excellent voice work. They are done in a comic book style of animation that fit the subject matter very well and would probably work just as well on full-sized console versions of MGS in the future.

How does it play? We’ll find out after this install.

You’ll want to do the largest 880 MB optional install to your memory stick to enable voice-overs in the codec conversations in Peace Walker, but you can get away with under 400 MB if space is tight. The large install also gives you very short load times, and takes about 15 minutes to complete.

There’s lots to do in Peace Walker. Third-person sneaking missions are what Metal Gear players have come to expect and it’s here in excellent form. It doesn’t feel gimped by the platform but it does feel slightly easier with enemies sporting more forgiving reaction times and with Snake using a small set of CQC moves that are simple to execute. It adds fun and makes Snake seem like an even stronger soldier. The well-designed mission environments also keep things interesting. But it’s not all sneaking and stealth.

It’s Not All Sneaking And Stealth

The other third-person mission types are combat missions which pit Snake up against multiple soldiers and some piece of military hardware like a tank, armored personnel carrier, or something… stronger. These missions eschew stealth for raw firepower and they become very difficult very quickly. You’ll soon find your second in command pinging you urgently by codec and telling you to reconsider if you start one of these without bringing along a supply drop. This is the game’s clue that the supply drop – which airlifts in supplies and ammo and reduces some of your final score for the mission when you use it – feels necessary to take on the many of these missions. This difficulty level and the need to juggle supply drops between waves of soldiers while dodging tank shells, for example, can make solo play of these missions a harrowing experience.

Snake’s home base – Mother Base – organizes and drives you to keep playing new missions and replaying previous ones and brings the features of the game together. It also slowly unfolds its capabilities over the span of the first chapter of the game, almost too slowly and usually without warning, which is to its detriment. A fun feature like Outer Ops, where you send troops out to fight on their own while you do other missions, was sprung on me completely without warning, for example.

The first PSP outing for Metal Gear Solid, Portable Ops introduced the ability to recruit knocked out troops by dragging soldiers back to your truck, and Peace Walker does it faster and better. You attach a fast-inflating balloon-driven Fulton recovery device to a downed soldier or prisoner and they fly up into the sky and get snapped up by a helicopter for a trip back to Mother Base. This works even if they’re indoors which, while silly, benefits you as the player so I can’t see the point of complaining.

Which End Is Up?

The user interface has been very nicely refined since Portable Ops and MGS4. Inventory selection is far better than the motion-heavy sliding boxes of wireframe items from past games. Selecting items using a highlight bar moving left and right across a static screen of items is much easier to follow and remember. The side bar that shows weapon details gives clear warnings via color changes when you’re low on ammo and displays a large mottled checkerboard when you’re busy reloading as a clue to keep moving (or hiding).

The controls and inventory system were a sticking point for me with Portable Ops, ultimately causing me to stop playing it entirely, but there are three control schemes to choose from in Peace Walker. I used the “shooter” control scheme and it did take some time to get used to. Camera control remains manually done, so panicking in the heat of battle will get you killed.

All Things From And To Mother Base

Mother Base is home to all of your R&D efforts, and it’s where you divide up your soldiers into various jobs to help the greater good of the MSF. Earning item plans from various missions is a simple matter, and it’s easy to slot your captured soldiers and prisoners into the jobs that best suit them, maybe after a brief stay in the brig if they fail to see things your way at first. As each team gets members it will level up and once certain levels are achieved upgrade research for existing items can be done if money – earned by the combat soldiers each turn – is available. Earned item plans can be researched right away if you have the money, but either way this one-time research unlocks Mother Base’s ability to produce the item and associated ammunition each turn.

This research and, once researched, production of items takes place as time advances during missions. It’s an effective way to spur you on to new missions, or if you’re looking for a rematch or just want to experiment, back to previous story missions or Extra Ops side missions. As long as you succeed in the mission, items, soldiers, and even military machinery captured are taken back to Mother Base.

It’s also worth noting that the Extra Ops side missions are notable in that they offer diversions to brush up on weapon skills (shooting ranges) or takedown tactics in smaller sneaking environments. They are small enough that they offer a welcome feature other MGS games didn’t – places to fool around and experiment without sacrificing progress in a story mission. All you have to do is succeed to take anything you’ve picked up or earned back to Base.

Metal Gear Monster Hunter, or How are the Replayability and Multiplayer?

Repeatable missions and how it’s satisfying grinding them for resources and cash to help the Mother Base show how Hideo Kojima’s team took more than a couple of pages from the wildly successful Monster Hunter franchise. The developer even added Monster Hunter creatures and missions into the game with Capcom’s cooperation. This cooperation, however, ran deeper than it probably should have.

The boss-like action missions up against waves of soldiers and some military hardware are a prime example. They seem built to require multiplayer help and when you do have help they are definitely more fun. Enemies are distracted, there are co-op features that your soldiers can use to share weaponry and even health if you stay close to each other, and everyone gets a copy of anything captured during the mission. The problem is that these missions don’t scale the difficulty down when you’re playing alone. Some missions are even so difficult that even with four people together you’ll still often need supply drops to have a fighting chance.

All of this is hamstrung by the highly inconvenient fact that all multiplayer for Peace Walker is via adhoc wireless connections only.

Adhoc Party on the PS3 worked very well and allowed me to play online with some very helpful people, and the game ran very well during multiplayer. It also showed me that the co-op modes were much more popular than the versus head-to-head game mode. That said, if others don’t have a PS3 or the technical wherewithal to try and use Xlink Kai on a computer, the fact is that in the USA at least, unless you have several nearby friends with PSPs, you’re going to have to get very good at the game and possibly do a good amount of grinding to build up more items at Mother Base to advance.

Adhoc-only multiplayer is a critical problem with Monster Hunter on the PSP for me, and now it’s also Peace Walker’s problem. Granted we could see a patch for this – we did see a patch for another excellent PSP game Killzone: Liberation which added an entire online play component to a formerly single-player-only game but this is different. Peace Walker is designed with co-op fully integrated into the missions, and I don’t expect to see a patch from Konami to address this at all. It’s a shame that something that’s already been worked on to be more friendly to Western gamers falls down in this one area.

In retrospect I imagine it’s possible that some of the education on the finer points of Peace Walker’s weaponry, tactics, and the best use of Mother Base’s assets might have been cut from the product with the rationale that adhoc-only players will help each other out in person. This is nothing that a little time and experimentation can’t fix, to be sure, but it makes the game a little trickier to get used to than it probably should be. It’s also not clear what, if anything earning higher ranks on missions gets you. I imagine new research items could be in there, but the game doesn’t say. A little bit of a teaser goes a long way, especially with already so many incentives to play missions again.

As for replayability, while I haven’t finished the game, conversations with other players online indicate that you can continue playing once you’ve beaten the main plot of the game to try and get the most out of every mission and upgrade for the MSF.

Is it worth it?

Peace Walker is a remarkable game that feels like more than the sum of its parts. The controls and user interface work well. The music, voicework, story, and graphics give you an unmistakably Metal Gear Solid adventure. The story fills in an interesting portion of the Metal Gear timeline while making not-so-subtle nods to themes and plot twists coming in earlier (yet later in the timeline) games. These features all stand atop a surprisingly satisfying base building gameplay system. All of this on the PSP! Multiplayer is likewise woven into the game and presents special opportunities, as well as problems.

Online infrastructure play isn’t a foreign concept for Konami on consoles, so this omission seems like more laziness than anything else, and it really wouldn’t sting so much if the full-on combat missions didn’t feel so difficult and if the co-op multiplayer wasn’t so much fun.

If you are a Metal Gear fan you owe it to yourself to play this game and try not to get discouraged if you can’t pull together enough friends or maybe grind your way to more powerful weapons to make it past tough stretches of the game. Those new to Metal Gear would enjoy this game most if they had someone with them to tutor them on the finer points of what Metal Gear is all about – the game doesn’t do much handholding along the way for those unfamiliar with the long story and quirky themes that pervade the franchise.

The depth and strength of the game keep the adhoc-only multiplayer issue from dragging it down any farther than 4.5 out of 5.