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Peace Walker Promises More Interesting Game Play

Kojima Productions means business with a much more interesting PSP Metal Gear adventure. We have the report from the English version.

May 4, 2010
Metal Gear Solid Peace Walker Preview
Credit: Konami

It seems to be par for the course for Konami: Give a group of folks from the media a couple of days to play through the new Metal Gear game before anyone else. It happened with MGS3, MGS4, and this year, it happened with Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker. Myself and several others played through almost all of Peace Walker ("almost," you ask? Well, read on) over a couple of weeks ago. It was a nice opportunity, no doubt, but by the time this article goes up, Peace Walker will have already been released in Japan, and there's no doubt fans of the MGS series will already have a grasp of the new game's story and gameplay as info pours out from import players. I can't promise to give you brand new insight on the game, but given what information out there, I can certainly supplement it.

Setting the stage for Peace Walker is Costa Rica in 1974, where Snake (Big Boss) and his small band of mercenaries, Militaires Sans Frontieres (MSF), are asked to help the nation (or what appears to be) stand up against a military force that's taken root and is developing devastating new weapons. What those weapons turn out to be are moving nuclear-capable vehicles; the next generation(s) of the Metal Gear, but these ones are entirely autonomous -- controlled by A.I. pods. "Peace Walker" is the centerpiece of the group: a fully bipedal tank that Snake must, of course, eventually destroy. But before that, he must trek through Costa Rica to seek out and destroy the A.I. weapons and their masterminds, all the while meeting new friends and enemies.

Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops. MPO wasn't a terrible game, but was kept from true greatness by iffy control schemes and gameplay that sometimes felt like busywork. The control has been improved; a more natural (by comparison) default scheme with the PSP's face buttons used as a second analog stick (along with MPO and Monster Hunter-style schemes for those who can't let go). The mission-based structure returns in Peace Walker, where you walk through an area, reach a building or other goal point, end the mission, and then go back out to the menus to select the next one and/or get yourself situated. Even boss fights are broken up into separate missions, and every mission can be replayed as much as you like after they're completed. It's practical for a portable game, and helps in growing MSF and more easily getting co-op help, both of which I'll touch on later.

Other things in Peace Walker are improvements not just beyond MPO, but for the MGS series in general. Melee combat has been smoothed over a bit -- specifically the close-quarters combat (CQC) moves that were first introduced in MGS3. There was an extra layer of learning one had to do to expertly use CQC in that game, but I was never too big on using such moves. However, in Peace Walker, CQC has been boiled down to a simple throw move activated once a button prompt appears on the screen; if you're getting ganged up on enemies and throw one down with another two-or-three close by, successive button prompts will let you constantly grab nearby enemies, throw them down, and instantly knock them out. In past games, I shunned CQC, but in Peace Walker, I used it whenever possible to take out enemies, because it was one less tranquilizer dart I had to fire, and hell, it was pretty satisfying to pull off four- or five-man knockout combos in the middle of a fight.

Click the image above to check out all Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker screens.

Just as notable as any of those gameplay improvements, though, is that Peace Walker has a much tighter link to the story of MGS3 than Portable Ops did. From the first screens in the intro, there's a reference to Naked Snake's mission in Russia, and this carries on throughout the rest of the game, when key characters bring it all back for Snake and bring some extra weight to his greater mission. To add insult to injury, the events of MPO are (from what I could catch) only mentioned once in passing from Snake's right-hand man Kaz. So, fans who consider Snake Eater the best of the series might be delighted that Peace Walker is the "real" follow-up, but should they expect a story as emotionally involving as Snake Eater's? Probably not. With relatively fast motion-comic cut-scenes and characters that don't get a lot of screen time in those scenes, it's the action, the combat, the being-in-the-moment-ness of Peace Walker that ends up standing out much more. If you do want more story, you can listen to reams of "briefing tapes" in between missions, where characters who don't show up often (like Amanda and Chico) talk to Snake more often and give more insight. Konami's ideal situation for the briefings is for the player to tuck their PSP in their pocket and simply listen to them on their commute.

Click the image above to check out all Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker screens.

The extra features in Peace Walker's campaign are also much more streamlined from Portable Ops. Take the Mother Base, the offshore rig that MSF moves into during Snake's mission, and where new recruits can be sent when Snake "finds" them on the field. In Portable Ops, you had to knock out an enemy, then grab them and drag them all the way back to the truck where they'd be added to your ranks -- a real drain on enjoyment. But now, in Peace Walker, a neutralized enemy can have a Fulton recovery balloon attached to them and rocketed up to a helicopter that takes them to Mother Base. It's undeniably more efficient, and more entertaining, too, as captured bad guys will sometimes yell as they get sent up on a high-speed balloon ride (a humorous touch that's used in certain cut-scenes, too).

Recruits in the Mother Base are added to various teams -- R&D, Medical, Intel, etc. -- and raise their stats and money for the entire MSF, which in turn unlocks new weapons and items to develop and use in the field. Developing equipment becomes super important in Peace Walker, as the average player can't quite survive on basic rations and a tranq gun alone. Obsessive players may want to go back to earlier missions or try something else for a while to raise extra money for items that might give them a leg up in the story later.

One thing that I suspect will become a big point of contention with the public perception of Peace Walker is its difficulty, especially during the first several hours of the game. There are no separate difficulty levels in the game; another clear encouragement of multiplayer play, where everybody is kept on the same level. And it's not the regular sneaking missions that might raise the ire of players, but the boss fights. Metal Gear Solid bosses are never not-a-challenge, often requiring the player to grok some sort of gimmick related to the boss character to defeat them more quickly, but Peace Walker mixes gimmicks with sheer length.

Monster Hunter, so it's possible Peace Walker could gain enough mindshare to become a big-deal multiplayer game. How many times can you say co-op actually hurt a game, anyway?

you may have noticed over the past few weeks, very heavily inspired by Capcom's Monster Hunter series. But beyond the co-op play and those special monster-fighting missions, it's the stuff outside the story that bears more than a passing resemblance to Capcom's action-RPG juggernaut. "Extra Ops" missions are a large selection of miscellaneous short-form quests that extend the game beyond the story mode, and, like in Monster Hunter, can start to contribute to the growth of MSF as a whole. The aforementioned tanks and choppers that Snake goes up against in the story mode pop up in greater numbers in Extra Ops missions, and these are, basically, the Metal Gear versions of Monster Hunter's deadliest catches. Take down these huge vehicles in a coordinated attack, kill their commanders when they pop out of the cockpits, and you can keep the vehicles for yourself. And though you can't take Snake or another recruit out in the field and mow down fools with a tank, you can assign a group of soldiers, plus vehicles, to "Outer Ops" missions, which are passive scouting missions where teams go up against enemy groups on their own and report back their victory or failure, and likely some extra cash alongside.

Somewhat related to the Monster Hunter stuff: The English version of Peace Walker has nearly none of the absurd product placement tie-ins as the Japanese version. Doritos in the Japanese version are just "tortilla chips" here, and Coke Zero is also simply "zero-calorie soda" when it appears in your inventory. The only tie-in I caught was the Sony Walkman cameo, but that barely counts, as it's part of an early cut-scene, and it's supposed to be the first-ever Walkman from the '70s.

Click the image above to check out all Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker screens.

I'm sure many gamers felt a little burned out by Metal Gear games after the milestone that was Metal Gear Solid 4, and I kind of felt that way too -- I was, you might say, only mildly excited for Peace Walker. But after playing it, it made me feel more at home with the series. MGS4's near-futuristic presentation left me somewhat disconnected from the game at times, as if the whole thing was too glossy, or at least too full of grotesque semi-sentient walking tanks for my liking (I still liked it). Peace Walker strikes a fine balance between the limited technology of Snake Eater's '60s setting with the future warfare of the later MGS games. There's no Soliton radar to tell you where every enemy is, but it's in a time when computer-controlled military machines were en vogue, and a little bit of mid-'70s-style sci-fi fits into the picture naturally. Like Snake himself, this might be time for jaded fans to come back out of retirement.

Originally published on 1UP.com.

See More: Metal Gear Solid Peace Walker | Konami | Metal Gear Solid | Snake | Stealth