Metal Gear Solid – Peace Walker ROM Description
In 2010, one of the very best games to hit the PlayStation Portable was released: Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker. Unlike Portable Ops, Peace Walker was a Hideo Kojima production, meaning he directed the game, and essentially, it’s one of his babies. It takes so many elements from what made Portable Ops an excellent game and expands upon them. This really is one of the best Metal Gear games ever made.
Story and Setting
The game picks up after the events of Portable Ops and Snake Eater. This time the year is 1974, and Big Boss, or Snake, as he prefers to be called, has already set up his Soldiers Without Borders militia group. One day, a professor and a young girl come for a visit and try to solicit Snake and his team to take up a mission against the CIA and discover if his old mentor and target, The Boss, is still alive. What makes this story so powerful is that you can tell Snake loved The Boss, and he betrayed her loyalty for that of his country. The game doesn’t get bogged down in that classic Kojima Sons mythos; it’s a very simple story, but it’s extremely powerful, and of course there’s some twists and turns along the way.
Gameplay
After that one long cutscene, the game begins, and boy, what a game! The traditional third-person action and stealth combat are back from Portable Ops, although they’re even more refined. Close-quarters combat is better here than in any other Metal Gear game before it. You can easily chokehold enemies, flip them over into other enemies, or just flat-out knock them out. You still have all the nifty gadgets and weapons you’ve had in previous entries, but now the game doesn’t pause as you cycle through your gadgets, making it far more suspenseful since you have no idea when someone is going to come around a corner and spot you.
The radar from Portable Ops is back, so at least you’re not completely lying to your surroundings. And while there are three different control settings, the camera remains tricky, like in Portable Ops.
Recruiting Troops
In Portable Ops, you were tasked with recruiting troops to help fill out your roster, but here the system is so much more addicting thanks to a nifty gadget called a Fulton Recovery Balloon. You can knock an enemy out, attach the balloon to them, and they’ll go zipping up into the sky, where a plane will pick them up. It’s awesome, and you’ll be able to capture absolutely everyone because of it. And you’ll want to as well. I swear, you will spend hundreds of hours just trying to locate every single enemy troop to create the ultimate team.
As you improve your base of operations with more and more troops, you start to develop powerful new weapons and troops to use in missions and so much more. The incentive is real—every new troop I recruited would reward me with some useful item or weapon for the next mission. There are a variety of stats that each character has, and if you find them too dull or complex for you, you can simply tell the game to automatically take the best troops based on their stats and allocate them to research and development, intelligence, combat, etc.
Customization
Your suits or armor have a direct impact on the number of weapons and items you can carry, but the smart mission loadout system never puts you in a situation where you’re wearing something like the sneaking outfit and then hits you against a boss. You’ll always have a glimpse of the boss before the next mission, so you have the opportunity to switch back to your combat gear before tackling the boss.
While Peace Walker is incredibly deep, I never found it overbearing. Yes, I would have preferred a few more tutorials or something to ease you into the system, but it really isn’t that bad.
Co-Op Mode
I should also mention that you can do virtually everything in this game with a friend via the co-op mode. The mode is ad hoc only, which means grab a friend locally and play. It’s an absolute riot playing with a friend, and rewards are always shared between both players, meaning if you recruit six troops during a mission, at the end of the mission we both get those troops added to your base.
The biggest issue with the co-op mode is the fact that the game’s difficulty doesn’t really scale based on the number of players. This means bosses can be extremely challenging while playing by yourself, and other areas are sort of a cakewalk with two players. So ultimately, there’s a little bit of balancing at play here, but for the most part, that’s a minor complaint compared to everything else this game has to offer.
Conclusion
I should also mention that I didn’t even mention half of everything you will experience in this game. The game is also absolutely gorgeous and sounds great, and yes David Hayter is back too. If you like what you’re seeing here, pick this one up. An HD release hit the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 back in 2011, or you can pick up this PSP ROM via the links bellow. Don’t miss it – it’s a masterpiece!
