After waiting three and a half years for the next entry in the Metal Gear Solid franchise, and nearly seven years to find out what happened after MGS2, Konami has finally released Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots for the PlayStation 3. Does it live up to the series standard? Oh yes, and then some.

Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots picks up five years after the events of Metal Gear Solid 2, known in the game (and to die hard fans) as “Big Shell”. We see that Solid Snake has aged many decades, a result of his cloning. Disillusioned by his past and his seemingly short future, Snake is recruited for one final mission that takes him from a nameless middle eastern city, to Eastern Europe, to a couple of locations from Snake’s past. That’s about all I can tell about the plot without revealing some spoilers that long-time fans who haven’t played MGS4 yet (hey, some people haven’t been paid yet) would rip me a new ass for, so I’ll save revealing any plot points. I will say, however, that Metal Gear Solid 4’s story, for however convoluted and confusing it may be, is one of the best written stories I have ever played through. The story works well to tie up almost every loose end you can think of, with just about everybody who hadn’t died in either MGS or MGS2 making an appearance in one form or another.

Any veteran of the MGS franchise will feel right at home with MGS4. All the stealth mechanics return, practically unchanged with one major exception: The OctoCamo. The OctoCamo, much like a chameleon, will change in physical appearance to best imitate whatever you happen to be pressed against. If you’re lying on a tile floor, it will imitate the tile. If you’re pressed against a wooden crate, you’ll turn brown with likes separating the planks of wood. This suit, combined with a mask you obtain during the game, allow Snake to hide in plain sight. That doesn’t make it easier to hide, however. For every advancement that has been made in Snake’s camouflage, the enemy AI matches it. Enemy soldiers in MGS4 are highly intelligent, utilizing the environment around them as they try to outflank you and come up from behind. When you have to fight, you’ll be pleased to know that the gun play mechanics have been tweaked, and the over-the-shoulder camera works flawlessly. However, if you need that one perfect shot, you can always zoom into first-person mode and get that ideal head shot.

Kojima and Co. have done an excellent job in keeping the gameplay varied, throwing in sequences on the back of a motorcycle, manning a MK 19 on the back of a mobile transport, and (SPOILER ALERT!) you even get to pilot a freaking Metal Gear in an epic battle between REX and RAY! However, the majority of the game is your standard sneak/shoot gameplay, which as mentioned above, have been fine-tuned to the point of perfection.

Two new aspects of the otherwise classic gameplay featured in MGS4 includes “Drebin’s Shop” and the Psyche and Stress meters. Drebin’s Shop becomes available early on in the game, and acts as a store where you can buy new weapons, ammo, or even Playboy magazines whenever you’re low on firepower, or want to modify your weapons. The Psyche and Stress meters replace the Stamina meter from MGS3, and I found that they really have little bearing on the game. When your Stress meter is high, you’ll go into a kind of berserker mode where you’ll be able to aim easier and you’ll take less damage, but you’ll pass out for a brief period afterwards. When your Psyche meter is low, it becomes harder to aim your weapon in First-Person mode. That’s about it for the Psyche meter. Maybe I missed something by keeping my meter up.

The presentation is nothing short of astonishing, with both the visuals and audio design being among the best to be found in any game. Every piece of recorded audio, from the sounds of glass breaking and aluminum cans bouncing off gravel, to the excellent voiceover work done by David Hayter (Snake, duh), Christopher Randolph (Otacon) and Paul Eiding (Campbell) and the rest of the impressive cast, is given great care and precision to make sure that every line of dialogue, bullet ricochet, rolling bottle and footstep sounds perfect. The musical score is also handled with great care, with every piece of music, whether it be a recording of a track from a previous game or a brand new piece such as the one that plays at the opening menu and in scenes throughout the game, are excellent and help the player feel the true weight of what Snake is fighting for.

Graphically, the game is simply without fault. In the 20+ hours I spent playing through the single-player campaign and the few hours spent playing MGO (Metal Gear Online), I could not find a single instance of slowdown, pop-in or flat textures. Everything you see in the cutscenes are rendered with the in-game engine, and it’s all mind blowing. MGS4 is more than a beautiful looking game; it’s a jaw dropping technical achievement that pushes the PS3’s hardware to the absolute limit, and delivers with minimal loading and no hiccups along the way. It is, without a doubt, the single most aesthetically flawless game ever made.

After you’ve beaten the single-player campaign (and played through the single-player campaign a second time), you’ll probably want to try the completed Metal Gear Online. I am happy to say that the finished version of MGO is far superior than the suckfest that was the BETA, but it’s not perfect. Some of the maps are horribly unbalanced, and the inclusion of spawn points (a relic from a dead age) leads to many instances of spawn camping that essentially makes the game terribly unbalanced. But I’ll be touching on that later in the week in what I can only hope will be a severely NSFW piece.

Now, for all the praise there are some faults. At times the story gets weighed down and suffocated by its own convolution, and can be terribly long-winded with characters going into overly long diatribes. However, these diatribes are so well acted and look so beautiful that you’ll more than likely refrain from skipping them the first couple of times through the game. Another complaint… um… hmm… actually, that’s it, as far as the single-player game goes. As for multiplayer, if you don’t already have a Konami ID, setting up your account to play online will be nothing short of a freaking nightmare. Those are the only two gripes I have with the game from a reviewer’s perspective. (SPOILER ALERT!) On a personal level, I felt like the game suffered from “Lord of the Rings” syndrome, when the story has no fewer than nineteen different endings. Ultimately, this spoils the true ending of the game because, deep down, you kind of felt it was coming.

All in all, Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots is easily the best game in the long-running Metal Gear franchise, the best game on the PS3 and, one could argue, the best game of this decade. Of course, you don’t need me to tell you that. If you own a PlayStation 3 you’re probably playing the game right now, and if not I’m sure you will be soon enough. If you don’t own a PlayStation 3, you now have a reason to.

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