Three years after Sons of Liberty took the world by storm and becamethe best selling stealth game of all time and being one of thebiggest PS2 system sellers Hideo Kojima released his next Metal Gearoffering in the form of Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater. A prequel toall Metal Gear games and a starting point for the franchise. Playingvery differently to all Metal Gear games before it, though SnakeEater is still a stealth game, it's a very different breed of stealthgame.
Set during the Cold War in 1964, Snake eater follows Naked Snake onhis journey to becoming Big Boss, the man who would later become thefather to Liquid, Solid and Solidus Snake. When he is sent on amission to rescue a defecting Soviet scientist, he comes to therealisation that his own mentor, The Boss, has defected from the U.Sto the Soviet Union. His mission then changes to not only rescuingthe scientist but also destroying the weapon he has been making forthe Russians thereby ceasing their plans to start nuclear war andeliminating The Boss.
The story is a lot less convoluted in Snake Eater than the previousMetal Gear games. From the beginning you know what you are there todo and there are no major deviations from that original task. In away its a very campy Metal Gear game in the sense of it doesn't takeitself too seriously without making fun of itself like Sons ofLiberty did. It has some pretty awful dialogue as well as somedownright bizarre characters but the game just glosses over these andexpects you to roll with it, take that as a good or bad it's up toyou but it certainly puts Snake Eater in a different kind of positionto the previous two games. Don't let this camp humour fool youthough, Snake Eater has some fairly dramatic moments and wants to betaken seriously during intense story moments and it does do a goodjob of balancing the humour with being serious.
That being said Snake Eater has very few surprises up it's sleeve.Yes it's not a story we have heard mentioned before in the Metal Gearuniverse, but we all know how it's going to end. We all know thatSnake will become Big Boss and Big Boss will later go on to becomeone of the most important antagonists in the series. It's a story ofbetrayal after betrayal and of not being sure of who you can trust,which in the world of Metal Gear is nothing new which is why SnakeEater doesn't have the upper hand on you in terms of the story thistime around. In fact beyond needing to know how Snake became Big Bossyou could be forgiven for skipping this game entirely.
The characters, besides The Boss and Eva are also extremely boringand two dimensional. To the point that Ocelot is just a whiny gruntthat has little importance to the overall plot despite being a mainvillain as well as Naked Snake having an almost identical personalityto Solid Snake which I consider lazy character writing. I came to seethe guy who becomes Big Boss, one of the most powerful and feared menon the planet, not Solid Snake.
There are also fewer cinematics in Snake Eater with a lot more timespent in gameplay, which does make a nice change from being pulledout of the action every five minutes in Sons of Liberty, but at thesame time does detrimentally effect how much story is given to youover the course of the game, with the majority of it coming thick andfast at the end instead of being spread evenly throughout.
Snake Eater is a big departure from the previous two Metal Gear Solidtitles in regards to gameplay. Whilst it's still a stealth/actiongame, more emphasis is placed on stealth in Snake Eater than in theprevious two entries. With the entire game being set in a jungle, youare given access to a wealth of camouflage options to help yourselfblend into the environment. This is one of Snake Eaters mostinteresting new mechanics. Allowing yourself to wear the correctcolours in an area filled with enemies can allow yourself to sneakpast their noses without them ever seeing you. Combat almost becomesan afterthought in Snake Eater at times thanks to how good thecamouflage system is.
