It’s been ten years since the events of Metal Gear Solid: Snake Eater. Naked Snake, now known as Big Boss, left the United States military due to the events from Snake Eater and is now hiding out with the Militaries Sans Frontières (Soldiers without Borders) in Costa Rica. War has a habit of finding Snake and Peace Walker begins with a conflict knocking on Snake’s door.
I spent two whole days with Peace Walker and I’ll be bringing you coverage split up into three parts. Read on after the break for a look at the basic plot, controls and gamplay of Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker.
Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker (PSP)
Developer: Kojima Productions
Publisher: Konami
To be released: June 8, 2010
Peace Walker begins with an in-game cutscene of Snake making his way towards a beach full of sparring masked soldier. Once the overly dramatic cutscene ends, a tutorial begins running you through the controls and the Closed Quarters Combat system.
You’ll move with the directional stick, adjust the camera with the face buttons, punch/shoot with R and take aim with L. Up on the d-pad is the action button that lets you interact with objects, left button selects your items and right on the d-pad lets you select your weapons. Pressing the down arrow once will have Snake crouch and holding that button down will have Snake lie all the way down. You won’t be able to move when in the prone position but you will recover health this way.
Holding down the attack button near an enemy will have Snake grab them and give a choke hold. From here you can either continue to hold the choke until the enemy passes out, press the action button to interrogate the soldier or move the directional stick to body slam the soldier. Choking out a bad guy takes an absurd amount of a time and I never saw it serve any sort of real purpose. Your best bet is to body slam your foes in order to knock them out as fast as possible and it’s a good way to take out multiple enemies when surrounded. After you’ve thrown down the first guy, you’ll be thrown into a little QTE where you’ll be able to take out everyone around you in one successive swift move after the other so long as you hit the button prompts on time.
Once the tutorial ends, Snake’s partner and main contact in Peace Walker, Kazuhira Miller, informs Snake of a couple of visitors. Snake is then introduced to Ramón Gálvez Mena, a teacher at the Costa Rica University, and his student, Paz Ortega Andrade. The two of are seeking the help of the Soldiers without Borders to help deal with the aggressive military force that has appeared in Costa Rica. The Costa Rica government itself isn’t able to act due to its constitution, so it’s up to Snake and his crew to intervene, after some serious convincing and bartering of course.
This is a Metal Gear Solid game after all, so the story is nowhere near as cut and dry as described above. Expect plot twists, backstabbing and everything else you’ve come to expect with Hideo Kojima’s long running military espionage saga.
All of Peace Walker’s cutscenes are presented in animated comic form by artist Ashley Wood. The art style is as gorgeous as ever and the presentation gives the story an extra element of coolness. Some parts of the comic scenes will let you zoom in on women to see through their clothing while other parts will have full blown QTEs that need to be completed in order to progress the scene.
Peace Walker is a third-person shooter and looks fantastic considering that this is a PSP game. The character models look good and the environments have a nice level of detail going for them. You’ll be moving through every level in a section-by-section basis as you either clear out an area or sneak your way through. Enemies patrol areas and in classic Metal Gear fashion, act pretty dumb. If you do get spotted, soldiers will call in for reinforcement and your best bet is to hide until the alert meter resets. Enemy soldiers play an important part to the Peace Walker experience, which you can read about here.
After you’ve cleared a mission, you’ll be given various stats and a grade ranking. You’re then taken to Outer Heaven, also known as Mother Base. Mother Base is a beast of its own and you can read all about that right here. Before jumping into another mission, you’ll be able to outfit Snake with items and weapons at the base. Snake will be able to gain different outfits and his standard one allows him to hold seven items and six weapons.
On the items side, you can have food for health, shields, boxes, binoculars and gadgets for dealing with enemies. With the weapons, you can only hold two guns at a time with the standard outfit and you’ll have your choices between pistols, shotguns, automatics, rocket launchers and snipers. You’ll also be able to carry grenades, C4, supply drop markers and more. Supply markers are very handy as you won’t be able to recover ammo or weapons on the battlefield. Instead, you have to use a supply marker to call in for more ammo. You only have a number of supply markers too, so you better make your shots count. There is a chance you can run out of ammo completely, but you do have your trusty fists as well as a taser to fall back on.
Once you’re geared up, you can jump to the next mission. Kaz and other characters you meet throughout the game will brief you before the next mission giving info on objectives and goals. You can also communicate with your allies on the field through the Codec system.
Konami had me out at a private function to play Peace Walker for two whole days. I spent at least 16 hours on the new Metal Gear Solid and I still wasn’t even able to beat the game. There’s a ton on offer here with a lot replayability value and everything about Peace Walker really does feel like it’s Metal Gear Solid 5.
