Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker Review

November 6, 2022

The Metal Gear Solid series fans got very excited at the announcement of a new PlayStation Portable version of the game, partly because it continues the trend of putting the player in the role of Naked Snake, the protagonist from the last few games in the series. With lots of little adjustments making it as convenient as possible for mobile playing, Peace Walker quickly proved to be one of the best titles in the series so far.

Gameplay

If you've played any of the previous games, you may have to practice a little bit until you get adjusted to the new control scheme, as some of the buttons have been re-assigned. Overall, we can say that the changes are more than welcome though, as it feels much easier to perform some more advanced maneuvers now. However, if you find yourself missing the old controls too much, you can easily get them back via an option in the settings menu, which allows you to switch between the schemes of several previous titles.

You'll find the game's co-operative play to be a very thrilling experience, as lots of elements have been added to aid in the coordination between players as a team. There are various actions you can perform with your teammates specifically – for example, when one of you is using projectile weapons, the other can direct their aim to areas out of the first player's field of vision. Also, players can guide each other along tricky paths, while also providing cover between themselves.

There's also a good deathmatch mode as well, if you want to play a bit more competitively against your friends instead of along them – up to six players can engage in exhilarating battles on various maps, using equipment they've unlocked previously.

Graphics and System Requirements

Even though the game looks great and certainly on par with the other Metal Gear Solid titles, we should complain about the darkness of some areas – you'll have to turn up your PSP's brightness setting if you want to play this game properly, especially on some of the deathmatch maps (where being unable to see well is also a great disadvantage to you, let's not forget). Other than that, the art style is great and follows the tradition of the previous Metal Gear games just perfectly.

Also, on another negative note, at some points we noticed some slowdowns, though we can't really explain what could've caused them – considering the game is only available for one platform, its development cycle shouldn't have been so demanding on programmers.

Other

You may have a hard time finding the game in your local stores, depending on where you live. The reason for this is that it never saw true commercial success, at least not as much as its developers had hoped, and thus it wasn't distributed very widely after its initial launch.

Conclusion

Peace Walker is a true successor to the Metal Gear Solid series, and a perfect tool for killing some time as you're waiting for the next big release for the desktop-based consoles.