There’s only one thing most reviewers of Metal Gear Solid: Master Collection Vol. 2 care about, and that’s the return to playability of Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots. Perhaps the strangest, most personal, and most divisive game Hideo Kojima has made, the 2008 epic has been stuck on PlayStation 3 with no compatibility with modern consoles, unlike the rest of the Solid Snake saga.
Although reviewers find plenty to criticize in the game, including its self-indulgence and overreliance on extremely long cutscenes, they agree that it’s a fascinating and prescient title that’s well worth revisiting — and that the 4K, 60 frames per second presentation of the new remaster is a big improvement on the original. These factors, and just the pleasure of having the game available to play again, contribute to a strong rating of 85 on Metacritic and 84 on OpenCritic.
Polygon’s Giovanni Colantonio highlights the historical importance of Metal Gear Solid 4, and how increasingly rare it is to find any game, let alone a big-budget one, that will reckon with video games’ complicated and complicit relationship with war. “Metal Gear Solid Master Collection: Vol. 2 is the year’s most necessary game release,” Colantonio writes. “It’s a rebuttal to the myth that video games have become more outwardly progressive in recent years; its long admonishments about countries that profit off of war are fiercer than anything you’ll find in a big-budget game this year. […] As deeply imperfect as Metal Gear Solid 4 is today, it’s a reminder of how much ground video game publishers have ceded to the war machine. It’s an anti-war protest marching into captured territory.”
“I’m immensely grateful to have experienced it, and I will probably never play it again,” writes Kotaku’s Cole Kronman in his critical deep dive. For Kronman, the game is most interesting as Kojima’s metafictional and somewhat ambivalent reckoning with the series he created. “To play it is to see a frustrated artist’s messy contention with his own work and audience unfold in real time. It is, among everything else, deeply, jarringly human.”
PC Gamer’s Morgan Park focuses on Metal Gear Solid 4‘s mechanics and where it sits in the evolution of stealth games, as a once vital genre was being subsumed by straight-up action gaming. “Playing it today, the particular way it mixes mercurial stealth and heavy weaponry is anything but routine,” Park writes. “OId Snake skulks through active battlefields, bewildered by the growing mundanity of war, as Kojima grapples with the undeniable appeal of getting in the shit. This is a stealth game that doesn’t mind if you try to play it like Call of Duty, but going loud comes at the cost of stressing Snake the fuck out.”
But Guns of the Patriots isn’t the only game in this collection, as VGC’s Jordan Middler reminds us. “Come for Metal Gear Solid 4, stay for two handheld classics,” Middler says, referring to the PSP game Metal Gear Solid 4: Peace Walker and the Game Boy’s Metal Gear: Ghost Babel, an alternate-history retelling of the first Metal Gear Solid. “[Ghost Babel] received huge critical praise when it was first released, though it’s an entry that many may have missed,” MIddler writes. “This collection marks the first time it’s ever been rereleased. Similar to Peace Walker, if you’re a player who only ever delved into the console side of the Metal Gear franchise, you’re missing the entire picture.”
Reviewers note that Konami’s remastering work on the collection is simple but effective, and the games play well. Other than that, they don’t spend a lot of time on the collection itself, perhaps because its presentation is so bare-bones. “It feels like this side of the collection could really have done with a little more care and attention,” writes Push Square’s John Cal McCormick. “Yes, the main draw here is Metal Gear Solid 4 on PS5, and once you get into the games the presentation of the collection is long forgotten, but it would still have been nice to see something that felt a little less thrown together.”
But almost every review agrees that the return of Metal Gear Solid 4 is, as Kronman says, a “historic moment for game preservation.” You can celebrate it yourself when Metal Gear Solid: Master Collection Vol. 2 is released on Aug. 27.
