Review: Metal Gear Solid 4

At the outset of Metal Gear Solid 4, director Hideo Kojima can't help but respond to the aphorism that launched Tim Cain's legendary Fallout. "War...war never changes," growls Ron Perlman as the latter?s ironic intro rolls. But in Metal Gear Solid 4, the opening line runs exactly the opposite: "War...? rasps Snake as he crouches in the back of a transport motoring onto a desiccated battlefield. ?War...has changed."

Boy has it. In MGS4's dystopian rendition of our near-future, a cabal of synthetic intellects purveys war as a series of proxy battles to sustain a global algorithm that enhances battlefield predictability at the expense of free will. Humans are colonized by nano-machines and weapons are biometrically keyed to each soldier's DNA, relegating the ability to fire guns and launch rockets to remote-control overlords. Private military contractors or PMCs fight proxy wars without ideological liabilities and dictate the world economy. The world economy becomes a war economy, and war becomes pitilessly routine.

Everyone get all that?

Of course this series has always been a tad highfalutin. Even its protagonist tends to focus more on his personal demons than the ones lining the other sides of walls with guns and rocket launchers. Speaking of Solid Snake, in MGS4 you actually play as the prematurely grizzled ?Old? Snake, a reference to the mystery condition that's accelerated our hero?s aging process and rendered him precipitously frail, save for the use of a muscle-suit that allows him to channel combat skills without the limitations imposed by senescence.

Not to worry. When he?s under your command, he's spry as the icon he's modeled after (that?d be Snake Plissken from John Carpenter's Escape From New York). He hunkers and crawls with ease across deadly free-fire battlefields, slides flush along walls or through cramped spaces, leaps onto crates and over windowsills and rails, and dangles from ledges to avoid being spotted as ably as Matt Damon in the first of the Bourne flicks. He even gets a snazzy new OctoCamo body suit that lets him blend chameleon-like with any surface he presses against, adding "blending" to a list of stealth tactics that includes his stance, proximity to enemies, noise, motion, and line of sight. Oh, and it looks pretty cool too.

When you?re not skulking, the new over-the-shoulder shooting view is nearly as liberating here as when Shinji Mikami added it to Resident Evil 4. You?ll probably want to kick up the tracking sensitivity (the defaults felt a little sluggish to me), otherwise it?s competent enough to let you battle with precision, if you opt to battle at all. The only trouble is that your standard third-person view?s typically out of whack with the shoulder-cam, resulting in a second or two of adjustment when you trigger into position. That means you?ll typically want to find cover during firefights first, then stick behind it, and stay in shoulder-cam mode to mitigate the disorientation you?ll experience if you try to run and roll and circle-strafe. This was never intended to be a shooter, and you?ll only get frustrated if you try to play it like one.

The most controversial new mechanic involves a weapons launderer named Drebin who shows up early on and offers access to just about any projectile or incendiary weapon in the game from the START menu. As in anywhere, anytime, including right in the middle of major battles. Realistic? Of course not. But what else is about this series? It?s simply Kojima?s way of giving you what you need, when you need it, to avoid interruptions and keep the narrative flowing. It?s also an invitation to sneak rather than shoot your way through an anti-gun, anti-war, anti-violence polemic. Oh yeah, steer clear if a game that takes issue with everything from PMCs to WMDs rubs you wrong.

But let?s get to the question you?re really wondering about: Is it a movie or is it a game?

Both, of course, just like the last three, and while you're allowed the freedom to sneak and gunfight as you like between cut scene triggers in modestly branching areas, this story was never entirely ours to tell. It's the final movement of a faintly postmodern tetralogy suffused with themes ranging from fratricide and patricide to social fractiousness, existentialism, eugenics, and the validity of old saws like free will. A remarkable third of MGS4 is in fact spent not playing at all, but simply watching those themes resolve. For all the game's sermonizing about self-determination, MGS4 is a largely predetermined study in the harrowing physical and psychological dissolution of a guy who?s been horribly misused.

There's also no getting around the fact that Kojima's final thundering opus assumes you know a lot about its characters and their byzantine backgrounds. Call it ponderous, call it insular, just don?t call it much of a surprise. No one?s ever accused Hideo Kojima of being pithy, and after all, this is the final chapter in a decade-old saga, so the stops have been pulled out so far they've snapped off entirely.

That doesn?t mean MGS4 ever lumbers into chaotic or aimless territory, and the good news is that Kojima and team have managed to fashion one of the most socio-politically nuanced narratives this side of BioShock. The bad is that you?ll miss a lot of the depth layered in if this is your first tango with a Metal Gear Solid. If that?s the case, consider picking up the first three MGS games and playing through them beforehand. They're available right now in a budget-priced "essentials" collection. You'll need a PS2-compatible PS3 (or an actual PS2) but as long as that's not an obstacle and you can look past the first game's primitive visuals, you're in for a treat.

When you do finally get to MGS4, don't let the way it looks seduce you, though it does comes close to pulling off in real-time what Square Enix only managed a few years ago through advanced pre-rendering in the CGI film Final Fantasy: Advent Children. Never mind the cool effects, like bombs that periodically heat-scramble your radar or debris clouds that eerily choke off the sunlight and dissipate gradually. And don?t get too caught up fiddling with the metric ton of Bond-like tech or the large militia's worth of projectile and incendiary weaponry Snake somehow carts around like a two-legged TARDIS.

Instead, pay attention to the way Kojima manufactures a kind of queasy anxiety throughout with the camera, moments like the intro where it prowls the battlefield like a paranoid scavenger, lingering over corpses with the crows as trucks filled with PMC reinforcements roar onto the battlefield. Keep an eye on indices like the psyche and stress meters that adjoin Snake's health, compromising his aim when they drop, and dropping when he's under all sorts of duress (including, tellingly, when he?s standing near dead bodies). And think about what Kojima?s really up to when he shows you a knot of soldiers hashing out tactics and nervously pep-talking each other into action, about to charge a sniper lined corridor, only to get picked off, one at a time, lunging and flailing and scared witless.