Metal Gear Solid HD Collection review

Metal Gear Solid: HD Collection brings together three of Kojima’s classics and gives them a lick of paint for HD consoles. In the package you get MGS2 Sons of Liberty, MGS3 Snake Eater and MGS Peace Walker, the latter being a PSP only title and probably one of the best of the entire series.

I’ve always had a bit of a love/hate relationship with these games because whilst there are definitely classic moments in them which I’ll never forget, they also contain far too much exposition and not enough actual gameplay and revisiting 2 and 3 really hits this home. Playing Sons of Liberty also highlights how much the control system has changed for the better because going back to it after playing modern 3rd-person games is quite a shock to the system. The controls feel counter-intuitive and you will die plenty of times just because you tried to run from a crouch and end up crawling along the floor or sticking to a wall in the middle of a gunfight. Still, if you can get your head round the controls it’s definitely worth a look even though taking over as Raiden isn’t as good as playing as Snake during the opening mission.

Snake Eater makes things better in terms of control with a camera you can move about yourself and also a view that’s less top-down. It also has some superb boss battles and of course the ability to change your camouflage to suit your surroundings and feed on creatures you kill in the jungle. All that’s missing is Ant and Dec standing beside you holding cue cards and trying not to laugh. The best of the bunch, however, is Peace Walker and it really shines thanks to the use of a second analogue stick for looking and aiming which makes it even better than its native PSP version. Textures may be a bit bland from its PSP conversion but Big Boss’s older features, eye patch and free movement and aiming makes it a fantastic Metal Gear game. I almost wish these controls could be applied to the others to make sneaking more enjoyable so I’m not wrestling with how to control my character. The addition of using the Fulton recovery balloons to add to your troops and perform research for weapons also adds a nice strategy element to the game too, and of course you can play the game online as well, just as you could on the PSP.

Everything looks super-tasty in these HD remakes and there’s plenty of gameplay here for your money. If you’re coming to all these games for the first time, you may only really be able to play Peace Walker due to its slicker controls. If you played through Sons of Liberty and Snake Eater in the past as well, the nostalgia factor should just be enough to pull you through these ones again too.

In terms of value for money and quality of game, Metal Gear Solid: HD Collection gets an almost perfect 9 out of 10.

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