The story begins when a terrorist group called FOXHOUND takes over a nuclear storehouse in Alaska. FOXHOUND has declared that if the American government doesn’t meet their demands (which are unknown to you at this time) within 24 hours, they will commence a nuclear strike. This is where you come in. Playing as Solid Snake, your mission is to infiltrate the nuclear storehouse and stop the terrorists. Pretty simple, eh? Not so fast. As mentioned, the game revolves around a stealthy approach. Luckily, Snake is equipped with a couple of nifty gadgets to help him out. One is a radar that is extremely important: it keeps track of the enemies around you, as well as the security cameras’ line of sight, represented by coloured cones. The radar is crucial because, with the game’s three-quarter overhead perspective, you can’t see much of your vicinity on screen. The other nifty gadget is the Codec, which is how you communicate with your superiors during the mission. Getting information, saving your game and hearing interesting little tidbits of politics are all just a Codec call away. Snake is also hooked up with a plethora of weapons and items to make his life easier, including the SOCOM, a reliable pistol; the FA-MAS, an assault rifle; Nikita missiles, which are controlled after they’re launched; the PSG-1, a sniper rifle; and others too numerous to name. The odd thing is that even with all these weapons, avoiding the enemy is still the best policy: anytime an enemy sees you, your radar is knocked out and all of his friends join the party. This is what makes MGS so interesting. You feel like Bond out there, clutched against the wall until an unsuspecting trooper walks by, and then you slip off behind him until you have to avoid another enemy. Luckily, if you are killed, the game has unlimited continues and you can save at any point. While the gameplay is superb in itself, where MGS really shines is in the story. Metal Gear Solid contains the deepest characters and best overall plot of any game on the PlayStation market. All of the dialogue is done by actors, which really adds to the reality of the game, and the story progresses by the minute, with new plot updates every few minutes via the Codec. It’s hard to get into the story without spoiling it, but expect conspiracies up and down the board, as well as a description of the Metal Gear project itself, and you’ll get a detailed look at the current status of the nuclear crisis facing the world. Metal Gear Solid also shines in a part of video gaming that often goes unnoticed: force feedback. MGS really shows off what the DualShock can do, with vibrations as subtle as a helicopter in the distance and as rigorous as being five feet from a missile blast; it even goes as far as letting you feel Snake’s own heartbeat when trying to fire the sniper rifle. The force feedback adds to the experience more so than any other game released. All in all, Metal Gear Solid is where it’s at, with an engrossing storyline that fits right into the great action-adventure gameplay.
If there’s a downfall to Metal Gear Solid, it’s the control. Aiming the guns is sometimes a pain, especially with the FA-MAS; you’ll end up wasting as many as 15 bullets trying to hit one guy. The Nikita missiles also seem to speed up and slow down awkwardly while you’re controlling them, which means they smash into walls more often than the target you were trying to hit. Still, for the most part the control gets better as you get used to it, and nothing in the controls is bad enough to take away from the exquisite gameplay.
Metal Gear Solid shines in the graphics department as well. A great amount of detail was paid to each character and to the environments. All of the scenarios are detailed to the utmost, with things like cracks in the concrete walls and sparks flying when you shoot a bullet off a wall. The character movements are very fluid, from Snake’s running to Meryl’s strut, and the game features no slowdown whatsoever, despite the great detail.
The sound for Metal Gear Solid should be off the charts, simply because of the great dialogue. All of it is spoken, which lets emotion play more of a role in the game; hearing someone scream is a lot more convincing than seeing a few added exclamation marks on text (listening, Square?). The music is there, but mostly off in the background as it should be, and the sound effects are your basic gunshots and missile explosions. As an added bonus, the song played over the credits at the end is also very good, a la Tekken 2.
Metal Gear Solid is the game to beat for action-adventure, if not the entire PlayStation. MGS shows that you don’t need to be an RPG to have a killer story, and that it’s the seemingly little things, voiced dialogue and force feedback, that make this game the gem it is. Not only does Metal Gear Solid live up to the hype, it surpasses it by a long, long way.
