Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater Review

When my Mum passed last year, I was given the choice to see her body before it was cremated. I opted not to. It’d been around eight years or so since I last saw her in person, and I decided I’d prefer to hold onto the memory of her as she existed at that time – a spectacularly flawed but deeply independent woman. I felt that, for me, this was better than creating a new, permanent legacy of her laid out on a table with no agency of her own, in how she looked or what was said about her.

With Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater, we’re invited to form one more lasting memory of a time in our lives. We can choose, if we wish, to remember Metal Gear Solid 3 as it was, or we can take this offer and see it as those tasked with its caretaking wish us to. Dressed up and laid out in beautiful celebration, but already passed and unable to partake in the present. Existing only in the context of its legacy, unable to share in its triumphs or atone for its mistakes.

Really nice rocks in this game

I’m not down on remasters or remakes of great games. Game preservation is a very important and ongoing issue, and this specific avenue of preservation deserves to be a part of the conversation. But in the context of everything surrounding this particular game – its importance to the medium, the history of its creator and IP holder – and the methodology in which it’s been produced, it’s hard to go in with anything but cynicism. It feels like digital taxidermy, a voiceless avatar stuffed with all of the knowledge and achievements of its former life but incapable of drawing breath to say anything new.

Metal Gear Solid Delta is a perfectly fine update to a 20-year-old classic. Toeing the line between remake and remaster, what we’ve got here is a full visual overhaul on top of the bones of the existing MGS 3. It’s a (mostly) beat-for-beat recreation of the game as it was in 2004, in both gameplay and cutscenes, but running in Unreal Engine 5 and with the option of trading the original’s fixed camera angles for a more contemporary camera and control setup.

Good trees, too

Dubbed “New Style,” this is far and away the major change to the fundamentals of the game, giving players a familiar over-the-shoulder view and remapping a majority of the inputs to bring it in line with modern action games. To give the project its due credit, the cadence of Snake Eater’s stealth action translates quite nicely. I tried switching back to “Legacy Style” (which you can do at any time for the small cost of a checkpoint reload) on a few occasions, and immediately appreciated how much patience I once had for playing with such a limited field of view.

And there are times when the uplift in fidelity and art does truly work in concert with the perspective shift in New Style. Crawling through tall thickets under the cover of night, self-assured in my sneaking abilities, only to feel a chill run over my spine as the blades of grass around me begin to shift subtly and the sounds of scales slithering through dirt encroach on my silence? That’s video games right there. The Krasnogorje Mountain in particular is exhilarating in a way that the original version just isn’t, and certain boss fights do reap the benefits of the heightened sense of presence. Equally, though, there are as many moments where the existing map design just doesn’t hold up to the new level of scrutiny.

Me and my manager after the work Christmas Party

A great deal of the original Snake Eater’s design carries an intentionality borne of the limitations of its time, such as the way that its Tselinoyarsk jungle locale is divided up into dozens of very small zones separated by screen transitions. You would expect a more ambitious modern reimagining of the game to make the change toward a more seamless environment, but that would require a significant rework of the bulk of the game’s design. So, because Delta is essentially a 1:1 recreation of the PS2 original, we instead get something that appears cutting-edge, but often feels distinctly antiquated.

That’s not to say there are entirely no changes here; when playing in New Style, there are some very minor but devious twists to some sequences. I won’t spoil anything, except to warn that falling back on old tricks won’t always help you here.

I’ll admit, too, that I’d forgotten how enjoyable Snake Eater’s story is as an alternate universe Cold War espionage tale about a procession of magical madmen and mech nerds mingling with real-world politicians against the backdrop of the Cold War. However confounding the wider MGS lore might be, Snake Eater’s immediate beats actually hold up nicely in a vacuum, so curious newcomers looking for the most accessible way to sort out some essential videogame reading shouldn’t feel out of their depth.

Inside you are two wolves

Once again, this being just about a carbon copy of the original text some 21 years later is an opportunity gained for recollection, but lost for reflection. Given that I was a teen when the original launched, a lot of nuance that I’d previously missed has emerged on this return journey, though it’s not as if I couldn’t find the same in the already-available HD version or numerous hours-long YouTube essays. What a release like this could have offered are its own new ideas, to add to the conversation rather than simply repeat it.

Kojima’s works are often searingly prescient, and Snake Eater’s take on geopolitics, in particular the frightening reach of the USA’s military and intelligence networks and its commodification of science and service, is uniquely deserving of further exploration in These Times. What I mourned when my Mum passed wasn’t the life she’d had or my memories of her, I mourned that there would be nothing left to learn from them. That there was nothing left to learn from her. For as long as we’re able to keep a piece of art alive, that doesn’t and shouldn’t have to be true.

Snaaa-aaa-aake Eaaaatt-eeerrrrrr!

After having played through this new form of Snake Eater in its entirety, I’m not convinced it’s possible to easily label this a “good” or “bad” re-release. Visually, it’s a treat, serving up sumptuous locales and razor-sharp character models that genuinely elevate the existing cutscene direction, but it’s all telling the same story. New Style remains at the mercy of some dated design, but it’s a definite improvement. If anything, it’s all just deeply odd and a little grubby, retreading old ground with little curiosity or care to look deeper than surface level.

Final Thoughts

For as much as Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater pays lip service to its original creator Hideo Kojima, it feels more imprisoned by his legacy than inspired by it. With every cutscene recreated beat-for-beat and nary a piece of set dressing out of place, it’s a work without the teeth of its namesake invertebrate, but equally as spineless. I wouldn’t even suggest it’s the case that Kojima himself is solely equipped to reinterpret the original art, but for as long as we tether the creative impulses and intentions of these things to purely commercial ends it will always leave them with nothing to say. For now, the only new perspective this game offers is tied to the right analogue stick

I am afraid that the Ape Escape minigame still rules, though.

Reviewed on PS5 // Review code supplied by publisher

Click here for more information on WellPlayed’s review policy and ethics