Metal Gear is one of the longest running game series that has had its fair share of up’s and down’s through the years. Starting off on the classic NES back in 1988 it has come along way in the past 16 years. After the acclaimed hit of Metal Gear Solid for the original PlayStation 6 years ago, it struck a sour note with Snakeheads with the release of Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty in 2001, the first offering for the PlayStation 2. Now years later, Snake returns to the PS2 with a new take on the Metal Gear series which occurs just after the Cuban missile crisis was averted in 1961. The latest installment of Metal Gear takes you back before there was a FOXHOUND, Big Boss and someone screaming “Snaaaaaaaaaake!!”.

Dropping you in the heart of a Russian jungle with nothing but your wits and a few primitive gadgets to get you through, it’s up to you to track down and hunt your mentor and defector, The Boss, who has gone over to the Soviet side and taken some nasty weapons with her. As you get farther into the twisted and convoluted storyline of the game, you meet up with some allies in the form of a defecting weapons designer named Sokolov and a saucy spy named Eva as well as your back up team that stays in contact with you as per usual on your radio. As you hunt for the Boss and her gang of circus sideshow-esque henchmen called Cobra (there are so many snake references, it’s mind numbing), you will make your way through many different and yet all very convincing areas of environments. You will venture through jungles, swamps, mountain tops, and even a weapons labs and military installations to make you feel more at home.

Snake Eater does set itself apart from the previous Metal Gear games with the addition of needing to heal and camouflage yourself to blend into your surroundings. When you enter a different area of jungle or swamp or wherever you find yourself, there is a percentage meter in the corner of the screen that tells you how visible you are. Changing your uniform and face camo will alter that score for better or worse. You can also find new face camo and uniforms throughout the game, some of which are very useful and some of which are merely for laughs. When you find yourself in battle, by alerting the guards or in an unavoidable confrontation, Snake will take damage when hit and his life bar will have a section of red appear. The cure screen allows you to fix this damage before it becomes detrimental and wears you down.

On the cure screen, which you can oddly access at anytime through out the game, whether you are in a battle surrounded by 10 enemies or underwater, there are different techniques for each type of wound. Some will require you to pry out the bullet from your body, then disinfect it, then stitch it and bandage it where as others will require a poison serum for a snake bite, or ointment for a burn. Although you really don’t take a lot of damage at all in this game and your life bar gradually heals on its own, there is a stamina bar that you need to keep an eye on as well. When it starts to get low, you will need to eat and bring it back up. You can hunt any one of the many animals and plants found in your surroundings including birds, tree frogs, alligators and yes, even snakes, hence the game’s title. When you do run low on stamina, you will get the shakes and not aim properly, you will not heal as quickly and if it gets low enough, you will pass out.

When you are sneaking through the jungles and other environments, the animation of Snake seems to be less on par then what it was with MGS2. It seems less fluid and jerkier. The far distance that you view Snake from most of the time, doesn’t give you that up close movement that the previous games had. The camera angle that is used feels so frustrating when playing. The previous Metal Gear games didn’t feel as awkward as Snake Eater does. Maybe it’s the lack of a radar to tell you where the enemies are and where they are looking but I felt it had a lot more to do with the camera angle and the restrictiveness of it. In Snake Eater, as you run through a jungle with the same overhead view constantly, you have to crawl and crouch and use the first person view way too often to see in the distance if there are enemies there and continually check on their position this way.

You can use gadgets like motion sensors and sonar to help locate enemies, but they are more inefficient than helpful at any given time. The enemies off the screen can see you before you see them depending on the noise you make and camo you wear, but to get them on screen without them seeing you first takes a long while. Seeing as how you are to be the tactical sneaky Snake, it does make the mission all that much more difficult without being spotted. Sneaking up on enemies, you still have the Close Quarter Combat (CQC) to take them down. With this you can perform the nifty moves on enemies from behind like a choke hold and using their bodies as shields. As well there are many weapons to pick up and gather throughout the course of the game including an AK-47, SAA pistol, the lovely Dragunov Sniper rifle, and of course, the RPG.

With all the action that you can find in the game, which granted, mostly comes in the form of boss battles, the cut scenes in the game are exceedingly long. After finishing the game, I was clocked in at over 18 hours and I would seriously be interested to see how many of those hours were cut scenes. When you reached the end of a mission, it seemed as though the scene that followed was longer than the mission itself. Don’t get me wrong, cut scenes are great and for a lot of people that’s the reward for ending a mission, but when you have to sit and listen to Snake and his cohorts yammer on incessantly on the radio every time you save while actually playing the mission and then have to sit through the cut scenes, it does remove you from the action of the game too much and makes the time you are actually playing and controlling Snake, seem very minimal.

With Snake Eater’s few flaws, awkward camera and ludicrously long cut scenes, the new features added to this chapter of the series with the camouflage and the need to eat does give the game a little more depth to help make up for the shortcomings. It’s pretty safe to say that any game that Hideo Kojima is involved with will be a spectacular feast for the eyes. While the storyline and plot will be more than enough to satisfy anyone that has a problem with the mechanics of the game. Metal Gear Solid 3 may not be the best game of the Metal Gear series but even the worst Metal Gear game would be a pretty damn good game compared to most games on the shelves these days.