With the final chapter of the Metal Gear Solid Saga staring a ripe old Solid Snake, be prepared for tons of back history and linking things together in order to bring the whole story/series together.  By this point of time, any Metal Gear Solid fan will have already bought the game, and more than likely beaten it. So what’s the point of even writing a review in the first place? Easy, for the fun of it, and for the few of you out there that have been holding off on getting their PS3 and have been debating due to the MGS4: Bundle. (I’m looking at you Mike K.!)

I’m not going to go into graphics or how awesome the sound was, it was made by the team that’s done the other Metal Gear Solids, and you know they can deliver. (For those of you that don’t know, just know this, I think I need to write a whole paragraph just bragging about those two things, trust me, the man filled a Blu-Ray disc)

I will however comment on the controls, and they were quite different from other games from the series. Not necessarily in a bad way, but in a way where it will take you a bit to get use to the new controls. For the most part, they play much like the older ones, except now you need to hold down L2 to aim (which takes you into an over the shoulder style aiming) then you can press triangle which will pull you into a first person perspective for aiming. This is where it was a little tricky for me, although pretty much the entire game I used the FPS mode, however I had to tweak the sensitivity a little.

One of the few minor announances is the inital eight minute long install the game requires you to take in order to do what it does. Then after every chapter, there is another, one to three minute long install for the mission briefing cut scenes. Which including cut scenes, the entire game took me roughly 20 hours to play through. Although I felt like a complete newb, since the first five minutes I was unsure what to do and I died to some giant machine walking around on two legs that decided to do a sweeping kick at me.

As far as the Online game goes (Yes, for those of you that didn’t know, MGS4 comes with Metal Gear Online) I haven’t really broke into it yet. I played it back when it was beta, and wasn’t a big enthuthiest of it.  Not because it was in beta, trust me, I’ve done enough beta’s in my day to understand the workings of them and what to expect as far as game performance. No my issue with the game was… well it takes team work for the game to be tons of fun. Sure you can have some fun going around shooting people, but it’s sort of a tactical game, much like the real game.  So if you have a team full of fuck-tards, the game game just seems like any other game where  you mindlessly run around with a gun or a knife and try to murder people where a team with better skill than you will just kill you. (much like that shitty ass Counter-Strike) So I think the game might have potential, if you are able to play with some friends and work together, but if you go in there as the stand alone, lone wolf, screw everyone else kind of player.  I just don’t see this one being the one for you.

For the over all of the game (can you write an over-all when you never really reviewed it in the first place? yes… yes I can!) I agree with the high scores this game has been given. If you’re a fan of the series, you will enjoy this one to finish up everything. Anyone that has been debating on the PS3, but still unsure and MGS was one of your factors you wanted to weigh in, let this one push that scale down to “Lets go buy a PS3!” You’ll enjoy it.

I leave you with two things, one final image, and the Zero Puncuation of Metal Gear Solid 4