Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker – HD Edition (PS3)
In the stealth action series Metal Gear Solid, players are encouraged to utilize stealth and non-lethal takedowns to avoid trouble, but if they do get detected, the player can often make it out alive even if it can sometimes be difficult or costly. If the player is able to avoid trouble and chooses to knock out enemy guards and even bosses with nonlethal means like tranquilizer darts, stuns, and melee take downs, the game often rewards them with a higher overall ranking or little bonuses. Appropriately enough for a game with Peace in its title, Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker – HD Edition takes the incentive not to kill your enemies a step further, each enemy soldier a potential recruit for your base and better rankings on missions earned by being stealthy letting you further develop your growing militia.
In Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker you play as Snake, also known as Big Boss, fresh off his life-changing mission in Russia that Metal Gear Solid 3 focused on. This game is very much a direct sequel to those events so playing it first will certainly enhance the experience, this story picking up in Costa Rica as he tries to build up an army without any national affiliation. The Militaires Sans Frontières, or Soldiers Without Borders, are a mercenary group for hire run by Snake and his close associate Miller, Miller being the one who recognizes the realistic costs and business decisions the group must make with Snake being the idealist. For this reason, Snake at first turns down an offer made to MSF to investigate unusual CIA activitiy in Costa Rica, but when an audio recording of his dead mentor suggests she somehow might be alive, Snake is compelled to take the mission so he can find out the truth behind such an anomalous occurrence.
Like many games in the Metal Gear Solid series, a heavy political subject is at the heart of Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker that is examined seriously even when you have large robotic weapons and characters with odd codenames like Hot Coldman. The particular focus here is on the concept of nuclear deterrence and whether it truly is the solution to peace in a post-WWII world. Ideas like whether humans can even execute mutually assured destruction, if such a process would be better off automated, what kind of shakeups can be introduced by an unaffiliated terrorist group acquiring such weaponry, and if peace even is possible for humans as a species all end up under the microscope during the game’s events. The differing viewpoints manifest as the different antagonists and protagonists backing up their opinions with weapons and military action, but there are scenes containing longer conversations with heavily stylized motion art, some even containing mild interactivity via timed button prompts. You’ll also get a surprisingly large collection of audio tapes to listen to as you progress where Snake converses with characters on plot relevant subjects and general information, all of them voiced. This can include things like the child soldier Chico fawning over mythical creatures, the enemy scientist Strangelove discussing AI development, Miller talking about the MSF, and the girl who helped recruit Snake for the Costa Rica mission Paz explaining the country. Many of the main characters are developed strongly in the story even if some like the scientist Huey come off a little pathetic from what you see of them, but the audio tapes allow for deeper dives into both exposition and character histories for people looking for deeper explorations on the many topics addressed in this Cold War narrative.
The differing ideologies and the characters who hold them as well as mysteries surrounding Snake’s mentor and the new nuclear technology being developed propel the story forward, developments working up a crescendo to a tense climax where all of it comes to a head. The game does technically have more missions after its first end credits to wrap up more of the story, this postscript not quite as strong due to its disconnect from the main plot, but the first four chapters and their story missions can hit emotional beats with its core cast while trying to explore the political overtones that color their actions.
Compared to other political thrillers in the Metal Gear Solid series, Peace Walker actually has the protagonist play a bigger role than an unaffiliated observer or a man on a mission from some government body. Snake’s new mercenary group raises some of the concerns about whether a military group should be allowed to operate outside the will of a people, the dangers they can pose and the benefits they serve both brought up around the core idea of peace and nuclear deterrence. MSF do have a nation of sorts though, the group developing an off-shore plant called Mother Base where they train soldiers, develop new technology, and deploy from. The importance of it extends beyond the political narrative though, as your work developing Mother Base pays off constantly throughout the adventure, is crucial to unlocking new missions, and even determines the kind of equipment you’ll be able to bring with you for your actual stealth missions and what you can bring to bear if you are forced to fight.
Most of the Mother Base development centers around Fulton Recovery, a system where enemy soldiers who are knocked out can have a balloon attached to their body so they’re yanked away and recruited to your side. Soldiers have different stats determining their usefulness on Mother Base, some might die when you send them out on missions, and getting the best gear requires a truly superb crew on your off-shore platform, so when you’re out on a mission you’ll often find yourself thinking not just about the objectives at hand but about the opportunities with your unusual recruiting method. Soldiers can be assigned to R&D, combat roles, medical, Intel collection, and the mess hall, the balance important so vital tasks are getting done while you also develop new items or get the spoils of deploying your men across the globe. This management aspect doesn’t require heavy involvement if you wish to get right back in the action and the basics of it can be pushed through with things like an auto-assign function, but getting the most out of your base can pay dividends, especially when you start going for bigger prey like trying to incapacitate enemy tanks, choppers, and armored vehicles so you can send them on away missions for your army.
Because the reward for incapacitating enemy troops is so great and avoiding detection will lead to bonus rewards for a mission, Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker really incentivizes intelligent stealth and nonlethal takedowns. You can still pull out the guns if a mission is too difficult, and since some bosses are machines guided by AI, you can choose to damage these robotic tanks and flying machines with your heavy artillery in battles that are more action oriented but the right approach can still grant you extra tools. Many normal missions are actually rather small in scope when it comes to number of enemies or the amount of ground you need to cover, so retrying if you slipped up is pretty feasible as well, and while the mission structure does lead to some starting and stopping in terms of story progression, it makes the nonlethal approach more feasible and you can even go back to retry a mission later with new tools from Mother Base if you did resort to violence in your first go through.
Beyond the story missions, Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker – HD Edition includes many Extra Ops, these often lacking any sort of story but providing special missions with their own rewards. Beyond obvious things like potential soldiers for Fulton Recovery and more chances to grab vehicles, these can also provide wholly unique gameplay experiences so they’re not just a way to earn extra resources. Missions can feature supernatural concepts like avoiding ghostly soldiers, tributes to other video games like some based on the old arcade game Pooyan, and new objective types like destroying vital items, protecting areas, and claymore defusal. However, the reuse of relatively simple jungle and military base environments even during the main story does sometimes mean the more typical mission concepts can sometimes provide very little, occasionally possible to wrap up in a minute or two without much thought or novelty to experience. With over 100 Extra Ops available too you’ll find the game resorting to very minor variations on things like the vehicle battles rather than attempting to always introduce new mission structures.
One of the most interesting aspects of these missions though is how many are explicitly built around cooperative play online, and at the time of writing the PS3 servers for the game are still up and operating. More difficult missions like the battles against the AI machines are practically designed for two or more players to tackle, and you can actually play through almost the whole story with a friend if you like. Cooperative play can trivialize some missions or weaken the need for stealth but others can be grueling without extra players on hand to help, and in a game where developing a personal army is a huge focus, it feels fitting that sometimes you’ll go into the mission with more than just one character.
THE VERDICT: The stealth action of Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker – HD Edition has more complex considerations to make than if you’ll try to get around enemies or face them head on. Developing Mother Base incentivizes the less lethal approach with a rewarding management experience that adds greater depth to the outcome of your missions. Missions feel like they provide a gameplay challenge while potentially granting resources that pay off in tangible ways. The political drama over nuclear deterrence and a cast of memorable characters are fleshed out in story and in an impressive array of audio tapes, the story’s strengths making it easier to forgive the sometimes unambitious mission concepts or the shifting skew towards difficulty based on if you’re playing with others or not. Peace Walker is definitely a Metal Gear Solid game that will leave you thinking, both about its characters, its heavy concepts, and how you can get the most out of building Mother Base.
And so, I give Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker – HD Edition for PlayStation 3…
A GREAT rating. If all it had to work with was its approach to stealth and action, Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker – HD Edition would probably be decent but not too exceptional, this most apparent in missions that don’t offer up much beyond quick and simple tasks to complete. However, the game heaps extra layers on top of its action that really make this an impressive iteration on the series’s usual gameplay. Sneaking around now makes it easier to gather new members for your private military, the management side’s systems doled out at a good pace so you can absorb the importance of new tasks for your troops. Mother Base never gets overcomplicated and the results of your work building up the best base you can are directly shown by way of Snake’s equipment or even the option to play as a better troop to handle the Extra Ops. Your more lethal weapon options can feel a little unnecessary if you do commit to the base building aspect but still exist as an easy way to overcome tougher trials and still benefit the troops you deploy for their own missions. The AI weapons definitely ask for the big guns to come out too while regular vehicles instead can be a test of whether the reward is worth the effort in taking it intact.
While there are some rudimentary graphics kept from its past as a PSP game, Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker – HD Edition feels like a game so rich in content it’s hard to believe it was once on the weaker handheld system. Some of the drawbacks of that past do likely manifest as reusing some areas and mission concepts, but beyond some odd difficulty balancing around the co-op system you’ll mostly find the game incentivizes playing more of it quite well both in how satisfying it is to manage Mother Base and the impact your specific actions have on your success. The story definitely plays a big part in keeping your investment high before Mother Base sneaks in with its compelling management system, the concepts addressed and how different personalities try to approach it leading to moments that are tense, contemplative, and even oddly beautiful. Considering this is a story sequel to my current favorite game of all time Metal Gear Solid 3: Subsistence I was hesitant to see where it was going with some of the elements like the mystery involving Snake’s mentor, and while it can sometimes be overly reverent to her, I was pleased to find it had its own subjects to explore, a mostly new and intriguing cast to develop, and even a captivating new gameplay approach that made it distinct from its spectacular predecessor.