Everyone loves spy flicks. They’re sleek, they’re sexy, and they’re always much larger than life. Everyone always knows the right thing to say and the right person to punch. Being a spy sounds pretty awesome. But there’s also the unglamorous side of the job. The killings, the fragile alliances, the isolation. This hidden and ugly aspect of the job is what the movies have always tried to gloss over. But if you’ve ever wanted to live the highs and lows of such a life, a little PS2 title back in 2004 has you covered. Enter Metal Gear Solid 3.
Metal Gear Solid 3 is an action adventure game with a huge emphasis on stealth. While Metal Gear has traditionally been a series all about sneaking around, this entry shakes it up a little. While you can crawl through missions, stealthily taking out guards with tranquilizers and hiding bodies, that’s only one way to get through this game. You can also run through it with the trigger held down the whole time, racking up bodies and triggering alarms. This usually ends up lowering your overall score but sometimes after a rough day at work, it just feels right, you know? There’s options for all different play styles and skill levels here.
Bring Your Own Box
Though it’s not an overly long game, Metal Gear Solid 3 is an absolutely packed title. There is a stupid amount of detail in almost every action and environment. If you kill an animal and let it rot, you can feed it to the enemy and give them food poisoning. If you stay in a darkened cave long enough, your eyes will gradually adapt over the course of minutes, letting you see more clearly. You can even shoot an old man in the head early in the game, negating his later boss battle entirely. This game is so dense that if you can think it up, you can probably do it and the game will have an answer for it. Not only do these details allow for plenty of creativity in gameplay but repeat playthroughs can see you utilizing completely different tactics and seeing different outcomes. You get back what you give in this game and it’s a joy to experience.
If Metal Gear Solid 3 has one flaw, it’s in the controls. Simply put, there are too many actions you can perform and too few buttons. The game also pulls some egregious stuff in order to pack it all in. Insanely, many important actions require you to press buttons softly, because too much pressure will have you doing something completely different. Before launching into a session, it’s recommended to spend a good twenty or so minutes to familiarize yourself with the tutorials. Otherwise, be prepared to get frustrated wondering why you end up slitting the throat of every guard that you meant to interrogate. These problems are exacerbated whenever you’re under pressure to do something quickly. And let’s just say a common scenario. Although you can get used to it, saying that Metal Gear Solid 3’s control scheme is convoluted is probably the nicest thing anyone’s ever said about it.
Let Me Tell You About The Indian Gavial…
Your espionage adventure takes place almost entirely within the jungles of Russia. How are there Amazonian jungles in the middle of Russia? You’re asking a lot of questions for someone who should be swinging from trees right now. That’s not an answer that Metal Gear decides needs answering. In lieu of reason, the game just giving you more interesting places to sneak around in. You’ll find yourself crawling through caves, mountains, and a handful of military bases before your journey’s end. The environments are pretty densely packed with flora and fauna that gives every area its own identity. You’re not going to find crocodiles in many areas in the game but when you do see them, you’ll remember where.
In keeping with its jungle setting, Metal Gear Solid 3 also goes pretty hard on the survival aspect. You’ll have to hunt for food and supplies as you’re trying to carry out your mission. The aforementioned flora and fauna end up becoming essential to your livelihood once your stamina starts to drop. You’ll also have to put on camouflage in order to blend in with your surroundings. Changing your camo to suit the surrounding area will let you hide a lot easier and it becomes essential as you go through the game. And on top of all that, you also have to watch your condition and perform impromptu surgery on yourself whenever you sustain a serious injury. Leeches may be able to just be burned off with a cigar, but a bullet is going to take a whole cabinet of liquids and tools to fix up. There are a lot of mechanics in this game and they’re all meant to establish you as a survivor of the wilds. Even though it’s not exactly fun to babysit your stamina or illnesses, it’s all necessary to immerse you deep within hostile territory. And for the most part, it does its job well.
No Such Thing As Luck
We’ve gotten this far without even mentioning the story. Compared to most Metal Gear titles, this is a pretty simple story. You play as Naked Snake, an experienced military operator fresh from the Green Berets, and are sent into mid-1960’s Russia. You’re tasked with escorting a defecting scientist out to the other side of the Iron Curtain and everything is going smoothly for a while. But then your old mentor, The Boss, shows up to block your path. It turns out that she’s defecting to Russia and she’s given them some nuclear weapons as a gift and, oh yeah, she’s gonna need that scientist back. So she kicks your ass and leaves you for dead. After you lick your wounds and pop your shoulder back in place, you’re sent back with a new mission; to take out The Boss and her new comrades. It’s a classic spy take that draws on Cold War tension to raise the stakes but it’s still pretty fun. It’s a simple tale but it’s filled with enough twists and intrigue along the way to keep the player engaged.
To those who know their Metal Gear lore, the protagonist of this game is kind of a big deal. I brushed over it before but Naked Snake is known by a different name throughout the rest of the series: Big Boss. This is the big bad that’s responsible for pretty much the whole rest of the series. And with how imposing and scheming he appears in other titles, there’s not a whole lot of that here. In fact, he’s kind of a nerd. He’s still a highly trained killer, but he’s not really “cool” in the classic sense. Snake has issues being intimate with others, practically creams himself over any piece of weaponry he gets his hands on, and seriously doesn’t know how to read a room before speaking. But his faults only serve to make him a more compelling character. Despite his action-hero actions, he’s pretty down-to-earth and relatable. The fact that he’s so likeable creates a bitter sense of narrative irony since many players will already know about his heel turn later on in the timeline. All the characters in Metal Gear Solid 3 are nuanced and complex. Snake’s mentor, The Boss, is one of the most complicated characters in the game, with second place going to the femme fatale of the title, EVA. Although the story of Metal Gear Solid 3 is simple, the characters it introduces along the way are anything but.
What A Thrill
Originally releasing under the title of Snake Eater, Metal Gear Solid 3 was later re-released as Subsistence. This is the definitive version and is the one that’s been ported to all the HD remasters. The biggest addition comes in an adjustable camera that ends up making the bird’s-eye view of old hard to go back to. Though you can instantly shift to the classic camera, you really shouldn’t do that. Fixed cameras just don’t work for Metal Gear Solid 3. The open areas and greater enemy awareness really call for a camera you can swing around at any moment. There’s also some other goodies in the package like an expansive theater mode and a mode called Snake vs. Monkey. In this mode, you have to find and capture the primates from Ape Escape in a variety of maps. Yup. It’s so dumb and I love it so so much.
Metal Gear Solid 3 is a great game. There are explosive set-pieces, a likable cast, an immersive environment, and replay value to spare. And that’s all it needed. The game was able to play around with its world without getting caught up in the staggering amount of loose ends later games had to contend with. You fight a crab-walking soldier who turns invisible and explodes into a flurry of crossbow bolts when he’s defeated. You fight an ex-cosmonaut who flies around with a flame-thrower and explodes into a giant flaming face when he’s defeated. Everything in this game explodes when it dies. Metal Gear Solid 3 knows how dumb it is. But it embraces that stupidity with genuine love, never ridiculing its own camp tone. Pair that with some of the most engaging gameplay of the PS2 era, and you’ve got a classic on your hands.
If you want to see how a Tsuchinoko tastes, grab Subsistence here for PS2. You can also get the HD collections, but I don’t believe they have the Snake vs. Monkey minigame included. It’s up to you but I’m not going to enable your bad habits.