Maybe it’s sacrilege to say so, but MGS Peace Walker looks kind of lame. I have yet to see a single gameplay video that’s made me excited to play it. That’s not to say the story doesn’t look awesome. I love the Big Boss storyline, and if there’s any reason for me to play Peace Walker it’s the story. But the gameplay… Well, let me just give some examples of why I’m not impressed.
Mainly it’s the repetition. OH GODS, THE REPETITION! Any good MGS player knows that non lethal takedowns are always the most profitable. They land you special items and prizes, or, in the case of Portable Ops and Peace Walker, the opportunity to recruit soldiers into your ranks. Unfortunately, non-lethal takedowns in the MGS series consist of only a handful of options, such as shooting a tranq dart at a guy or running up to a soldier and throwing him to the ground, knocking him out. There are some variations on this, but these are the two easiest options and they’re not all that exhilarating to perform. So far, nearly every gameplay video I’ve seen for Peace Walker shows Snake running up to a guy, knocking him down, recruiting him, and then moving on to the next area. It looks like incredibly monotonous trial and error gameplay. Everything moves at a snail’s pace. I know we’ve been doing this since MGS 2 (MGS didn’t have tranq guns or dogtags), but, seriously, it’s gettin’ old.
Obviously you don’t HAVE to play the game like this, but it’s the encouraged form of play since it yields the greatest rewards. Yet there are clearly more enjoyable ways to perform non lethal KO’s in games. In Arkham Asylum, fifty percent of combat consisted of non-lethal takedowns without being spotted, and the other half was non-lethal takedowns while being assaulted by a large group of enemies. Snake, on the other hand, can only handle one enemy at a time when unarmed (unless it’s a cutscene, of course). Considering all the crap he has to go through to save the world from nuclear holocaust, doesn’t Snake deserve to be at least half as awesome as Batman? Heck, even Sam Fisher, whose stealth games were MORE monotonous than Snake’s, is now a lethal, fast paced action hero in Splinter Cell: Conviction. I love the stealth game genre, but these newer stealth games are making Snake’s older gameplay mechanics look very unappealing.
Boss battles are usually the most adrenaline pumping action segments of an MGS game, but I watched a couple videos of Snake fighting Peace Walker bosses, and they either show Snake just kind of standing there and shooting at the boss, or circle strafing the boss and trying not to get run over. Maybe this is because every boss encounter I’ve seen has either been a helicopter or some sort of tank, but they all seem to have impossibly huge health bars and no obvious weak points. I’m probably wrong on this, but all the videos make it look like there’s virtually no strategy to the bosses other than hoarding enough health items and ammo to stay alive long enough to chip-damage a boss to death. I mean, I’m PROBABLY wrong. There may be far more to the boss fights than I realize, but I see little fun to be had thus far.
I think I’m being overly critical of a yet unreleased game because I really want a reason to justify buying a PSP, but nothing has presented itself yet. Portable Ops almost had me, but I ended up playing it on a friend’s PSP, and found I didn’t like it nearly enough to buy a system for it. Now here comes Peace Walker, supposedly a console level MGS experience overseen by Kojima himself, and it really doesn’t look any more enjoyable to play than the rather dull Portable Ops. Maybe I should continue to wait for the elusive and ever speculated twin joystick PSP, or maybe Kingdom Hearts: Birth By Sleep will win me over. Come on, Sony, give me a reason to buy your stupid portable gaming device!!
