Log Eater – Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker HD

I’ve been getting into Metal Gear again recently, having played through MGS 1-3, and since 4 still isn’t available outside the PS3 I watched the Metal Gear Scanlon playthrough of it (is it just me or does that game look really bad based on current standards?). I wanted to play MGS 5 for a long time (and then to Death Stranding), but some part of my brain won’t allow me to play those when there’s a game in the middle called Peace Walker. Had it stayed on the PSP I probably wouldn’t have messed with an emulator to play it, but the bastards ported it to the Xbox 360 and then made it backwards compatible with the Series S/X so after putting it off for maybe about a year, I was all out of excuses. Not even the fact that there is a Metal Gear Scanlon video of the story on the site could stop be, because have I really experienced the game if I just watched the cutscenes, even with Dan filling in the blanks? If you’re in the same boat I can tell you that you’re probably okay watching the video, but here goes a sort-of a review and a sort-of a cry for help.

The game takes place in 1974, 10 years after the events of MGS 3 and focuses heavily on its aftermath (if you haven’t played MGS 3 then you are truly insane to play this game). Snake (he still goes by the name Snake despite having attained the title of Big Boss) has grown disillusioned with his government and has started what the game presents as the world’s first private military company (which is probably not historically accurate AT ALL) in Central America, together with Kazuhiro “Master” Miller. One day they get a visit from two mysterious figures claiming to be from Costa Rica, asking for Snake to get rid of invaders to their country since Costa Rica does not itself have an army.

Snake identifies one of the visitors as a KGB agent (him having a CCCP-branded cigarette lighter for an arm may have tipped him off), but he takes the job regardless. This sets up an interesting dynamic because Snake is now working for the Russians and against US interests in Central America. The invaders then are CIA who wanted to store nukes there. The game doesn’t have too much to say about America’s controversial adventures south of the border, since the CIA operatives led by Hot Coldman and Dr. Strangelove have gone rogue and aren’t just content to store nukes there, but to launch them using an AI-controlled Metal Gear called Peace Walker. The part about artificial intelligence is a weird one in the context of 1970s computers when we know how realistic the series otherwise is, I’m guessing Kojima had read a book about the subject and just had to have it in the game. Snake’s affiliation with neither the East nor the West no longer matters as he is out to prevent nukes from destroying the world. To be honest I still have some questions about what happens next so I won’t go deeper into the story (seriously, just watch the video available on this site).

The gameplay is where the PSP roots are visible. Many of the mechanics of the previous games are either missing or don’t matter. The levels are small and short, typically your objective is simply to reach the end, either stealthily or shootily. The game is not much of a challenge, I still found myself enjoying just playing another Metal Gear game, just constantly wishing that there was more to it. The real let down are the bosses that are just different types of armored vehicles that you shoot until they explode without any personality. At least the Peace Walker design is pretty cool, even if the fight itself isn’t that interesting. Graphically the game reminds me of early 3D-accelerated PC games, it’s sharp and smooth but lacks detail everywhere. Neither is there a whole lot of variety in the environments.

The other side of the gameplay is a simple base management sim for your private military company. You recruit people into it by fultoning (which weirdly makes no sound and works even indoors, very useful in cleaning up bodies so that they won't be found by patrolling enemies) them during the missions. You then put them to work on either developing new weapons or doing missions that earn money. There is a surprisingly deep development tree for many different guns in the game, but I stuck with a few guns that I liked. The silenced pistol, either with bullets or tranquilizers is your best friend throughout the campaign, and then you want something heavy for the bosses. A lot of the weapons are wasted on this game, and it even punishes you for using them. You can’t get a rank better than B in any mission if you kill a single enemy in it, this is true even on levels that force you to fight. You improve the guns on two levels, by research and by using them, but every time you research a new level for the gun your usage resets, so again you want to stick to one or two guns that you like throughout the game.

You also send your troops on their own missions, which gives you a turn-based view of the battle with at most 8vs8 soldiers and vehicles. You won’t have any control of your troops here so you are forced to watch as they use heavy weapons on infantry and light weapons on armored vehicles, and refuse to shoot the final bullet on an enemy that is one hit away from dying. If you want to bring armored vehicles of your own, the only way to get them is to keep replaying the same level in the campaign over and over again. Nevertheless, something about this reminded me of Jagged Alliance games on the PC and I found myself stupidly invested in it.

You can complete the 4 chapters in a little over 10 hours and roll the credits if you ignore most the base-building stuff. But there is a fifth chapters that is critical to the story, and to complete that you need to do the base building management anyway so I recommend you do some of that during the campaign so you won’t have too much left in the end. Depending on how well you do, this may take well over 10 hours to get to the real final boss of the game. The only way to advance time for the base building sim is to do missions, and there are 128 optional missions (many of which are locked until certain conditions are met) in addition to the campaign missions which you can also replay. These missions all have some gimmick like shooting targets or taking a picture of a certain enemy, and can often completed in less than a minute. The story doesn’t really advance during this time and many missions are played for laughs. Once you’ve done enough of these, the final boss unlocks… you just have to find it. It can be anywhere in the game so I recommend to just look at a walkthrough if you don’t want to lose your mind completely. I can say at least that the final boss isn’t bad and finally puts an end to the story.

I think it was 4 weeks ago that I was nearing the end of this game, was looking forward to putting it to bed and moving on to bigger and better games. But it was only yesterday that I stopped playing it for good. There was always some milestone or achievement just within reach that I kept playing. I initially laughed at the achievement for getting an S rank on every level, then I went and did it (reminder here that S rank means absolutely no killing). Slowly I made my base better and better, researched new weapons and took on more challenging missions, while replaying actual missions over and over again. Once you do get more advanced weapons, some of these missions become a cakewalk to get the S rank. The fully upgraded Soliton radar for example tells you where the enemies are and the sneaking suit makes no sound even when running.

The real stinkers are extra missions 69 to 111, basically one third of all extra missions. These are just incrementally harder versions of the APC, tank and helicopter boss fights from the game. Even with advanced weaponry at this stage of the game, they have a ridiculous amount of health and firepower. At first you fight a lot of soldiers until they stop spawning (reminder, no killing!) and then you just lay into the APC, the tank or the helicopter for 10-15 minutes. You will run out of ammo many times, but you can always have more delivered to you with a couple of button presses. Their attacks are easy to avoid (especially the tanks you can just circle-strafe around because they always shoot where you are, not where you’re going to be) but they do a lot of damage, and some 20 minutes for a fight is a long time to not make some silly mistake that suddenly results in a Game Over screen when you felt that you weren’t in any kind of danger. You do end up capturing the vehicle in the end which helps your troops on their missions, but that also means replaying these a lot of times because one or two tanks isn’t going to cut it in some of the harder ones. And if your troops lose a mission, you also lose your entire army that went there. So have fun playing the tank mission 8 times again to get another battalion ready and hope they do better. You also get a Metal Gear of your own to help in these simulation battles, but it can also be destroyed and rebuilding it means replaying many more missions.

There are also harder version of the Metal Gear fights but at least these are only missions 112 to 120. The last one took so much damage that I was in genuine danger of running out of ammo because even the supply drops have a limit to them. Anyway, I died before I could find out, and went to spend time researching more powerful weapons before trying it again.

Finally, there is a hidden Monster Hunter crossover at the very end where you fight dragons, leading into the final FINAL boss which was pretty tough to S rank in. Even if the Monster Hunter stuff (with talking cats of course) probably isn’t canon, completing the actually final mission does unlock a final audio file that has one pretty significant revelation to the main story.

Speaking of audio files, there are no codec conversations in this game. This is weird because some characters tell you to call them if you need help, but you can’t actually do that. Codec calls in the field typically just result in Miller briefly reminding you of your objective. Instead there are audio tapes that you can listen to in between missions. I didn’t know about them until the end, and ended up listening to them back-to-back in what probably took some 5 hours altogether. In typical Metal Gear fashion, people ramble on about the weirdest topics. You get some history of the world, some Metal Gear lore, general pondering on war and nukes, and here you have to remind yourself that we are in 1974 so conversations are adjusted to that. Several times I had to check Wikipedia to see if an event they referenced actually happened, or if Kojima made it up, so I ended up learning something. Then there are long-running conversation threads about the weirdest things, like different species of birds, general history, geography, art and philosophy, Santa Clause, football, food and wine, and so on. The pretty good voice acting keeps them interesting and this was of course David Hayter’s last appearance as Snake. There were also a few jokes in there that got a laugh out of me. I appreciate how they really didn’t have to go to such extra lengths with these tapes, and they did anyway. As a criticism though, the French character doesn’t seem to be relevant as a story and is mostly played off as a caricature. I don’t know if I needed to listen to all of it, but if you ever attend a Metal Gear themed trivia night, you now know that Hal Emmerich was named after HAL in 2001: Space Odyssey, and Dr. Strangelove’s name in the game isn’t as dumb as it first appears (no such redemption for Hot Coldman though).

I didn’t even mention that this game has 4-player support in all its missions, obviously good luck trying to find anyone playing this game in 2023. But that piece of context does put some of the missions in a different light, maybe the stealth is more challenging if you have to get 4 people to the exit zone instead of one, and maybe the extra bosses are more manageable with 4 people firing on them instead of one.

I estimate that I put some 20 hours into the game even after the end credits. I got all the achievements except the multiplayer ones, so a full completion was never in the cards for me anyway. I can see how this game was received well when it originally appeared on PSP, and even today I wouldn’t say that it’s a bad game. I do believe that many of the base-building elements come back in MGS 5 so maybe this sets me up for it. But as I said in the first paragraph, you’re probably fine just watching the video. Me, I'm tired and may not play another game for a good while.

Addendum

Here are the full 6 hours and 24 minutes of cassette tapes in the game on Youtube: https://youtu.be/kxGaBzuSxD4

And here’s the part that you need to hear: https://youtu.be/kxGaBzuSxD4?t=13948