Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker Review

Review by Eurogamer 8/10

“We love you, Snake. Don’t come back,” I wrote at the end of my review of 2008′s Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots. I felt that the mad, glorious indulgence of that so-called finale had left the series and its quixotic creator spent. Not all of you agreed.

Well, lucky for you, Hideo Kojima and his Konami paymasters have found a loophole. Snake’s not back – not that Snake, Solid Snake. Peace Walker, the PSP game that Hideo Kojima wants you to think of as Metal Gear Solid 5, stars his clone-daddy and sometime nemesis Big Boss, a.k.a. Naked Snake, in another Cold War adventure.

Its story, set in 1974, follows in the footsteps of Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater and PSP forebear Portable Ops, shading in the background detail on Kojima’s secret world of walking nukes and superspy soap opera. Those are the two games in the series Peace Walker shares the most with, too; the Central American jungle setting echoes Snake Eater’s moody, outdoorsy tone, and there’s a squad-recruitment system like Portable Ops’ – albeit completely changed, vastly refined and improved, and offering what must be the most absorbing framework for a Metal Gear game to date.

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Review by 1up (A-)

The essence of great design is making compromises without being compromised: Making pragmatic trade-offs without sacrificing creative vision or quality.

I’d love to be able to say that Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker achieves this lofty goal, but ultimately it falls just short. But then, it wouldn’t really be a Metal Gear game if it didn’t suffer from one or two glaring flaws, would it? To its credit, though, Peace Walker is the best thing to come from Hideo Kojima’s long-running series since Metal Gear Solid 3, despite a handful of compromising shortcomings.

That Peace Walker would have to make some compromises is a given; it is a PSP game, after all. No slight intended to the system, but the PSP lacks either the horsepower or range of controls of the PlayStation 3, which played host to the most recent entry in the series. Yet despite taking a technological step backward, Peace Walker does an admirable job of reproducing both the spirit of MGS3 and the control mechanics of MGS4 to the furthest extent possible.

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Review by IGN 9.5/10 Incredible

As of this moment — as I sit typing on my keyboard — I’m 35 hours into Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker, and the game only has more to show me. I beat the story at the 17-hour mark or so, but with more than 100 Extra Ops serving as mini-games/challenges, my own Metal Gear to mold and customize, a platoon of 350 soldiers, dozens of hands-off Outer Ops missions to send troops out on and so much more, I don’t know when I’ll put this game down.

Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker is probably the biggest game in the Metal Gear series, and it’s only on Sony’s smallest system.

Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker picks up the story of Naked Snake (AKA Big Boss) after the events of Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater and Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops. It’s 1974, and Snake’s a bit disenchanted. After killing his “traitorous” mentor the Boss in Metal Gear Solid 3, Snake left the United States and founded Militaires Sans Frontieres, or soldiers without borders, a militia of sorts that takes on causes and missions for those who need their help. Soon, a professor and student show up begging for assistance. It seems that the CIA has invaded Costa Rica, and seeing as how the country doesn’t have a military, the duo needs MSF to step in and set things right. Snake balks at the offer, but when the professor plays a tape that seemingly proves the Boss is alive, MSF takes the contract.

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