Within the first few hours, I was completely entranced and mesmerized by MGS4’s production quality. It’s several steps higher than anything I’ve ever played. Even if you find the game to be complete drivel, it’s arguably the best looking and sounding game of this generation thus far. Despite being natively rendered in 1024 x 768 resolution (with a dash of anti-aliasing), Kojima casts aside its relevance and somehow manages to pull off jaw dropping visuals. The screen captures don’t do the game justice at all. Keeping to MGS tradition, the cutscenes were rendered beautifully in-engine. Crafting each of the Beauty and the Beast Corps members after real-life models yielded astounding results. Similar level of quality model work made its way across to Old Snake, Otacon, the adorable Sunny and just about everything else in the game world. The entire MGS4 visage just seemed right to me. It was never overwhelming or foreboding and yet somehow manages to “wow” me. The subtle and well thought out use of filters and motion blur also did wonders for the overall image. The framerate floats between 30 and 60 frames per second and the textures do come off as a bit hideous up close, but as a whole: MGS4 is a pleasure to look at. I would go as far as saying it’s the best looking next-gen game simply for its great sense of artistic direction.

It may not be the most attractive rendition of Snake’s voice, but I was sold on David Hayter’s old man vocal work. He and all the voice actors of previous Metal Gear games reprised their roles. Some of their voices were altered slightly to accompany age, while others were inexplicably changed. I liked Naomi’s original rendition in Metal Gear Solid a bit more than her accent-less one now. However, it’s not the voice work which I wish to highlight; it’s the ambience, the positioning and the accuracy of the sound work. Kojima put that Dolby Digital 5.1 to great use. Like the visuals, it’s never in your face, or in this case in your ears, trying to make itself known. It’s most impressive when it naturally blends itself into overall atmosphere. And the soundtrack? It’s definitely up to snuff. Harry-Gregson Williams, Nobuko Toda and the other talented folks in charge of the soundtrack knew exactly how to punctuate the tense situations and tug at heart strings for the emotional ones.

When the credits rolled, I felt that Kojima completed the saga, tied up the loose ends and wrapped up everything in a bow. You’re committing some gaming sin if you take on MGS4 without experiencing its past. Hell, even Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops for the PSP has some relevance in MGS4. If the MGS storyline hasn’t piqued your interest in the past, I’d consider passing on this. The narrative is an integral part to the Metal Gear experience. Even the excellent GameTrailer retrospectives cannot properly prepare you for the musical cues, the gameplay references and all the other nostalgic bits that can only be experienced firsthand.

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This entry was posted on Monday, June 30th, 2008 at 2:00 pm and is filed under PS3 Reviews, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.