Metal Gear Solid 4 Sucks
June 30th, 2008 | by Daniel |After hooking up my new PS3 last night I spent a few hours playing Metal Gear Solid 4, one of the two games that I bought along with the console. I’ve always considered myself a fan of the MG franchise and have played them all with the exception of Snake Eater, but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a little frustrated with the series at this point.
The thing that gets me about Metal Gear is what I like to call the “wtf factor”. A few years back I could easily forgive the game for not making much sense, or for what seemed like translation errors in the dialog or the story. “Maybe this would make sense if I were Japanese”, I’d think to myself. Not anymore. Now I just get frustrated. The games are becoming more and more “cinematic”, literally, and when it takes 20 minutes worth of cutscenes before I can even really control my character I feel like I’m entitled to know what the hell is going on. Anyway, I’m getting off my point.
The game looks quite nice, and some of the features are pretty neat. I especially like the new OctoCamo and the Metal Gear Mk. II is pretty cool too. And unfortunately, that’s about all I like so far.
I played for about 2 hours and most of it was spent crawling around or in cutscenes, in an environment that made me feel like I was on the set of some movie. Enemies spawn endlessly at scripted locations, many routes are blocked (one of my biggest pet peeves in games - this totally kills the mood for me) and you constantly have to run through areas being riddled by bullets coming from non-existent guns.
I’ve gotten nowhere in the game, and I feel like I’m running through a rat maze. On the other hand, I played Call of Duty 4 and it was great. Non-stop action, very immersive, challenging and fun. I haven’t quite given up on MGS4 yet but I just might play through CoD first.
