METAL GEAR SOLID 4: Guns of the Patriots - Master Collection Version

War... war has changed........ 18 years later and MGS4 has been freed from the PS3. Get some popcorn and some soda and get ready to watch cutscene after cutscene

Shamelessly self indulgent fan-service series swan song that feels both contrived, and honest in it's intentions. This is not a metal gear game for newcomers, which may be obvious with it being placed at the end of the series timeline but you need prior exposure for many of its riffs to land correctly or with enough depth. there are negatives, maybe more-so than MGS1, 2 or 3, or even some of the side-titles. The gameplay to cutscene ratio is way off, some of the achievements are downright sadistic, and sometimes you can feel a slight tint of spite writing from kojima, in the sense of him wanting to be done with the series and so writes away the mystery of every existing plot points in order to put a "capstone" on things. It relies on nanomachines way too much to explain things that might've been better off not explained. Drebin's shop exacerbates an existing design tension in the fact you have all these cool tools and yet, the game subtly incentivises you not to use them (or rather, to use non-lethal exclusively). The Beast Unit are beyond forgettable compared to Dead Cell and rogue FOXHOUND, and exist kind of as gooner-bait with generic tragic backstories stapled onto the side of them. They suffer from some of the same issues the Cobra's did, where kojima's writing goes "theme first, character second", which is how we end up with "Raging Raven is Angry", "The Fury is Furious", or more recently, "Heartman has a Heart problem", so they often come across as strangely two-dimensional compared to characters of an older era, which coincidentally hold together this entire game. There are also slight retcons if you care to look deeply enough into backstory to discover them, and it's 100% the king of the yellow filter visual era from the late 00s that we saw in the early PS3/360 generation and it also has the weakest replayability of any mainline MGS title. But then, negatives out of the way... It feels lovely to play, it runs like a charm. Where there is gameplay there's a tremendous amount of depth and attention to detail (like usual). Raiden usurps Grey Fox's title as coolest cyborg ninja, you really feel for Snake, and all of our favourites return for one grand finale. It rewards prior knowledge to a great extent, and act 4 is like being sucker punched by nostalgia. Over the shoulder aiming is a great QOL thing compared to old controls, octocamo is cool as hell, faction disguises also introduce a slight amount of Social Stealth which can change the flow of certain levels. Sound design is amazing. Easter eggs are fun to find. It's not without flaws, but it is a great game and I am very glad it managed to escape PS3 prison. Konami should get more props for that, considering we were told it was "impossible" for years. It's also faithful minus one codec call which they brought back the VA to revoice. My favourite MGS is probably 2, which I would give a 9.5/10. I give this a strong 7, or weak 8. Not the best overall MGS game, but for fans or people brought into the franchise already, you'd be doing yourself a disservice not to play it.