Leveling Down

Metal Gear Solid Portable Ops continues the tale of Naked Snake, a.k.a. Big Boss

It’s been about a month and a half since I picked up the Big Boss PSP bundle, as I was so excited to play Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker. Of course, it was recommended that I play through Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops first, and so I’ve finally done so. Now Peace Walker is finally sitting in my PSP! In any case, I am ready to share a review on Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops. Is it still worth checking out today?

Some Background
Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops was not the first Metal Gear game released on the PSP. Prior to its release, Metal Gear Acid 1 and 2 had hit the PSP and while they contained Metal Gear characters, their gameplay was card-based and their storylines were in an alternate universe than the Metal Gear Solid universe. Fortunately, by the end of 2006, Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops was released, giving PSP owners a true Metal Gear Solid game. While the game was not directed by Hideo Kojima, the legendary creator of Metal Gear Solid, Portable Ops’ storyline is canon with Kojima’s Metal Gear Solid universe.

Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops reintroduces us to the role of Naked Snake, a.k.a. Big Boss. The storyline continues six years after Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, where [spoilers ahead] Naked Snake has killed his mentor, The Boss, and his former unit, FOX, has gone rogue. Naked Snake begins the game captured by the FOX unit and imprisoned in a cell. With assistance from a young Roy Campbell in the cell across from his, Naked Snake is able to free both himself and Roy Campbell so they make a break for it. As the storyline develops, we learn that Snake and Campbell are situated in Colombia, where a new army unit is being formed by a rebellion leader named Gene. Snake and Campbell both agree that the best way to stop the crazy Gene and his army is to begin creating their own army by capturing and recruiting Gene’s followers. The game’s cutscenes and storyline are presented through voiced, animated comic book scenes. They are amazing and I loved this style of storyline presentation.

Raising an Army
While the general Metal Gear Solid gameplay remains in tact with Portable Ops, the major difference in this particular game is the introduction of a new gameplay feature allowing you to capture enemy soldiers and persuade them to join your side. Unlike previous Metal Gear Solid games that all focus on Solid Snake (Naked Snake’s son) and how he makes his way through each game, Portable Ops is a more team-based affair. In general, any soldier you knock out can be dragged to the team’s truck or a hiding teammate (more on that later) and the soldier gets brought back to Snake’s base as a prisoner. After days of persuasion (uncontrolled by the player), each captured soldier eventually turns and joins your side. You can have a total of 100 soldiers in your army, and Portable Ops has certain functionality that takes advantage of being able to command various troops.

First off, there are three passive unit groups in your army: spies, tech and medical. With spies, you can deploy your soldiers onto the various stages/areas in the game, providing you with the ability to see items on the map, increasing the number of items on the map, reducing enemy health on the map, etc. Putting soldiers into the tech teams allow them to create more gadgets and equipment for you, and staffing the medical division increases the stamina and health regeneration of your field army between deployments. Each soldier you capture and recruit (even recognizable NPCs like Metal Gear Solid 3′s Raikov!) has their own statistics, abilities, and skills. Some have passive skills that allow them to function better in one role than another so it’s often very evident from their skills if a soldier should be placed in a spy squad, the tech division, or the medical division.

Finally, there’s the field army, which consists of soldiers you want to deploy in the field (dubbed the Sneaking Squads) for the stages themselves. Every stage allows for a 4-man squad to be deployed, along with 3 other backup squads. Personally, I didn’t find much use for the other 3 squads at all, so it’s best thought of when creating the field squad as having 4 members that will be deployed when you start a stage. Soldiers with Sneaking based skills have various abilities, such as being able to sneak faster, being able to drag unconscious enemy soldiers faster, and being able to immediately transport items they pick up back to base. This last ability is probably the most useful ability in the game, as each character can only carry a maximum of 4 items at a time (a very noticeable limitation when you play this game).

When you start a stage with your 4-man squad, 3 of them remain hidden in cardboard boxes near the entrance. At anytime on the stage, if the squad member you are controlling can find a place to hide on the map in a cardboard box (denoted on the map whenever you want to try to change squad members), you can hide there and switch to one of our other three squad members. This is useful when certain squad members have abilities that make them more adequate for the task at hand. However, it is possible for these soldiers that you have recruited to be killed and lost forever. Special NPCs will simply get injured and will recover with time, but randomly generated NPCs that you recruit can be killed in action. Fortunately, by the time I ended the game, I had maybe 30 or so army members on the bench so if I lost a soldier, I was able to have another one take his place on my sneaking squad. I know it sounds insensitive, but this is war!

General Gameplay Comments
The introduction of the army gameplay feature makes the game more interesting and I found it to be enjoyable. It almost felt like Pokemon or something, as I went around capturing various enemy soldiers looking for the ones with the best stats and abilities, etc. Combine that with the traditional stealth-based gameplay of past Metal Gear solid games and Portable Ops plays quite well. I’m usually too impatient to play stealth based games, but for some reason or another, I enjoy the stealth-baesd gameplay of the Metal Gear Solid games. Something about sneaking behind enemies and putting them in sleeper holds or shooting them with tranquilizer guns and stuffing them in a locker just doesn’t get old. I also think that I can enjoy Metal Gear Solid games because even if you get discovered, the game is not over and you can take action to handle the situation – unlike some other stealth games where it can prove to be frustrating when a simple detection means game over.

The controls for the game are also not as bad as I feared them to be. Initially, I had some trouble since there’s no analog stick on the right side of the PSP, so you had to use the left analog stick to move and the left d-pad to control the camera. This basically meant that you could not move and control the camera at the same time – a potential major issue for any 3D based game. But, for some reason or another, Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops was fine for me. Hitting the right trigger (I believe) would center the camera right on Snake, so if you’re moving and don’t have time to fiddle with the camera, you can quickly just bring it behind him and that is what I used when I was on the move. But also, because Portable Ops is a stealth-based game, you will be hiding and standing still probably more often than being on the move. This makes it so the limitation of not being able to freely control the camera while you’re moving not as big of a deal – because after all, you’re not moving that much right? When I started Peace Walker, I was almost inclined to go with the Portable Ops control scheme, just because I had already grown so used to it!

One of my main nigglings about the game (and maybe this is not as just specific to Portable Ops) is that I spend a good amount of time in the game collecting various weapons like assault rifles, sniper rifles, shotguns, and SMGs. However, I never used any of them throughout my entire game. The Metal Gear Solid games have always favored non-lethal methods to taking out enemy soldiers, and in Portable Ops, this is especially true with the fact that if you don’t kill the soldier, you can recruit him! So, while you find all sorts of new equipment to kill people, you may potentially never end up using any of them.

Portable Ops = Portability?
I believe that I read somewhere that Portable Ops was designed with the portable PSP in mind, and therefore each mission/operation was made short so that the game is portable. I still don’t think this game is portable friendly enough. There’s no quicksaving, so even if the scope of each mission is smaller than traditional Metal Gear Solid missions, each one still takes a good 15 minutes or so. And if you get stuck with a cutscene, that’s another several minutes that you can’t rewatch later. Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops is not a game that I could take with me to the mall to play while my wife moves from store to store. Fortunately for my case, I have a 40 minute subway ride, so I am able to play the game in a long sitting and this is what works best for it.

Final Thoughts
I enjoyed playing through Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops. I felt that the game’s new soldier recruiting gameplay mechanic added an enjoyable Pokemon “gotta catch em all” addictive quality to the series. The cutscenes were amazing, and the core Metal Gear Solid gameplay elements were still present and timeless. However, I also felt that the game was lacking overall depth – it was not an epic game. Considering it took me something like 12 hours to make it through the game, I think half of that time was spent being redeployed to the same small stages over and over to go back to find a special weapon or a new soldier to recruit. In a way, I think on a second playthrough, since I know I don’t even need all these fancy weapons, I could probably blow through the game in 3 hours or so. While the storyline was well presented, I also felt it was not as thrilling as past Metal Gear Solid games, and its overall scope was narrower than what I have come to expect out of a Metal Gear Solid game. The boss of the game was somewhat of a pushover too. Fortunately for me, Peace Walker looks to go back to being epic in scope once again, and I am curious now to see how much better Peace Walker is than Portable Ops.

Portable Ops is still quite an enjoyable game, and holds up well 4 years later. For Metal Gear Solid fans that do pick up a PSP for Peace Walker like I did, I definitely recommended playing through this prior to starting Peace Walker. For those new to Metal Gear Solid, I would recommend playing through some of the other Metal Gear Solid titles first. In fact, it may be worth waiting for the new Metal Gear Solid 3 remake on the Nintendo 3DS and then coming back to check out Portable Ops and Peace Walker for the complete Naked Snake storyline presented in a portable format.

Final Score: B+

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