“War has changed.”

These are the first words we hear in Hideo Kojima’s highly anticipated Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots. They come from the familiar gravelly voice of David Hayter, the man behind our hero Solid Snake. This is not a mere statement of fact. This is a recognition by Snake that his time has ended; that he no longer has a place.

You see, Snake is not the same person he was the last time we saw him. He’s old. He’s beat down. He’s grown into that weary voice of his. He is still a lethal fighting machine but things aren’t as easy as they were before. Even with the aid of his new high tech muscle suit, we see Snake grunt, breath heavy, and rub his back. We see the added effort to do what used to come easily.

Snake is following in the tradition of our other great action heroes in his fourth outing (yes, I know that technically there are more than four). Indiana Jones, John McLane, and John Rambo have all returned recently with their own part fours. They all returned as old men facing new worlds. However, those films tried their best to show that these guys were not quite dinosaurs yet, that they could still hold their own and kick ass with the best of them. Metal Gear doesn’t attempt this. Sure, Snake does his fair share of ass kicking but you know from the outset that he has reached the end of his road. It’s kind of the whole point.

You see, war has changed. The battles waged by Snake, his contemporaries, and his mentors were battles fought with purpose and meaning. They were battles of ideologies, of good and evil, but they started a chain of events that has led to perpetual war. In this new world, war is the basis of all economy and it’s a self perpetuating machine. Wars are not fought with purpose. They are fought because, well, that’s what you do. The game makes a strong case that war needs to end, and as a result so does Snake. He is like the embodiment of war.

You may notice that this is a video game review, yet I’m five paragraphs in and have yet to mention any actual gameplay. Anyone familiar with the Metal Gear series should find this of no surprise. The series blurs the line between video games and movies. The story and themes of the game are just as, if not more, important than the game itself. The first Metal Gear Solid on the original Playstation brought a cinematic quality that had not been seen in video games before. This, along with its unique blend of philosophy, social commentary, melodrama, and low brow humor, really set the series apart and earned it a rabid fan base. Metal Gear 4 certainly comes through in this regard.

To try to summarize the story of Metal Gear would be a fruitless endeavor. To call the plot labyrinthine would be to give too much credit to labyrinths. I’m sure Jennifer Connelly had a much easier time making her way to David Bowie than I did trying to understand exactly what was going on, and I’m someone who has beaten all the previous Metal Gear games multiple times. Even a thorough scouring of Wikipedia did little to help.

However, that’s not to say the story is bad. This is billed as the last Metal Gear game (although there are hints in the cutscenes that more games are in development) and as such does a fairly good job of tying up the enormous amount of loose ends left by its predecessors. It also does a great job of infusing a sense of history and nostalgia into the proceedings. The games have always been self referential but this one is more reflective, more reverent. At one point it really hit me that, wow, I’ve been following this story for a decade now. It brought back memories of me as a high school freshmen, sitting in my best friend’s living room trying to figure out how the hell to beat Psycho Mantis. There is one chapter in particular that will really be a treat to long time fans. Does everything make sense? No. There have been too many twists and turns throughout the series for everything to come together neatly. So there are some plot holes, some questionable character moves, but overall the story here is wholly satisfying.

This is good because you are going to be spending a lot of time experiencing this story… a whole lot. There have been many rumors about the length of the cutscenes in the game, with some reports saying that some reach ninety minutes in length. It’s hard to give a specific length here because the game uses different methods to get the story across. You have non-interactive cutscenes, codec conversations, mission briefings, etc. However, if you count a “cutscene” as the period of time in between areas where you are fully in control then I can say that yes, there are a few cutscenes that exceed the hour mark. I would say that at least half of the game, probably more, consists of these story segments. Which, since this is a twenty hour game, means that you’ll be watching the game for over ten hours. If this sounds torturous to you then this is not your game.

So what about that other ten hours? You know, the actual game part. Well, it’s good, but maybe not as good as the story. Metal Gear has always been a somewhat clunky game. You often times feel like you are battling the controls just as much as you are battling the crazy bosses. The game is nowhere near unplayable, just a little unintuitive.

It also borders on giving you too much to do. Particularly given that you have so little time to actually do any of it.

The trademark gameplay aspect of the Metal Gear series has always been stealth. This became more difficult in the previous entry, Snake Eater, due to the lack of a radar displaying the line of sight of the enemies. Metal Gear 4 follows suit and eschews the traditional radar for something that just shows the location and general awareness of the enemies around you. This, coupled with the fact that enemies no longer follow a set pattern of movement, make it much harder to sneak around unnoticed. This is alleviated somewhat by the inclusion of a new camo suit that allows you to hide in plain site by blending your surroundings. However, this didn’t help me out much and I ended up in a lot of gunfights. Luckily, this tactic has become easier as guns and ammo are more plentiful than ever before.

The amount of weapons that you can pick up is astonishing and blows away any FPS you could think of. You are also able to modify these weapons by adding things like silencers, laser sights, or grenade launchers. This is all done using a new addition to the series, which is a weapons shop that you can visit at any time. Picking up weapons on the battlefield earns you point that you can use to buy new weapons, upgrade current ones, or just buy ammo. All of this weapon variety is nice but the reality of the situation is that you will find a few weapons that you are comfortable with and stick with those throughout. I never touched a large number of the weapons at my disposal.

You are also given some new toys to play with, like a little robot friend given to you by a whiny as ever Otacon. This robot can be camouflaged and sent to scope out an area before you make your way through. It can also be used to safely recover items from fallen enemies and can even incapacitate guards with a nice little electric tentacle to the nuts (did I mention the low brow humor? There is also a hairless monkey addicted to soda and cigarettes, yeah). This guy got very little use from me however.

Then of course there are the various ways to deal with guards. Take them in hand to hand combat, stick them up and rob them, use them as human shields, knock them out, tranquilize them, sneak by them undetected, distract them with porno magazines, or just shoot them in the head (my preferred method).

The point is, you have a lot of options on how you play the game and while it’s great to have this at your disposal I think a more streamlined approach might have been more satisfying and less unwieldy.

I can’t finish this review without talking about the graphics. Metal Gear Solid 4 is an absolutely stunning technical achievement. I used to be a big fan of pre-rendered cutscenes (something we see less and less of these days). One of the reasons I played through games like Final Fantasy and Resident Evil was to get to the next cutscene. I dreamed of a day when the game I was playing looked as good as those cutscenes did, and now we’re there. All the cutscenes in MGS4 are done with the in-game engine and they look every bit as good as the pre-rendered scenes of old, only this time the game doesn’t switch to an inferior looking game after the scene is over. The transitions from cutscene to gameplay are absolutely seamless here. So much so that you’ll sometimes not even realize that the game has started. It’s a wonderful effect, especially during some intense chases that turn into incredible on rails shooters. The motorcycle chase through eastern Europe is one of the coolest looking action scenes I’ve ever seen… and I got to play it.

The production values of the game are top notch all around. Everything works together as a seamless whole. Everything from install screens (yes the game does have a few short install periods) to the amazing score is polished to a ridiculous extent. It’s a very impressive package.

At the end of the day, Metal Gear Solid 4 is an experience more than it is a game. It tells a thought provoking story, it wows you with its technical achievements, it plays on your emotions with powerful nostalgia, and it provides a pretty good game as well. Which is cool, I guess.

So if this sounds at all appealing then you would be doing yourself a disservice to not experience it. In my personal opinion this trumps other recent giant franchise games (GTA, Halo). Now excuse me while I start playing through it a second time.