3/5 ★ – RawMetal's review of Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker.

System: PlayStation 3 (Metal Gear Solid HD Collection) Started: November 27, 2015 Ended: December 19, 2015 Flashback Review My friends advised me to play Peace Walker before I start with Metal Gear Solid V, as I have both copies of Ground Zeroes and The Phantom Pain for PlayStation 4. Peace Walker has new characters that were introduced and returned in Metal Gear Solid V, so I have to play it to avoid confusion about who the characters are when I play the fifth game. Peace Walker is originally an exclusive PSP game released in 2010. Then, when the HD collection came out, Konami included Peace Walker in a full HD remaster, which was the reason many fans wanted to get that version, as you can now play it on the big screen TV. My thoughts on Peace Walker are that it's a fun entry, but it's far from a decent Metal Gear game in the catalog, even though people highly praised this game for what it is. Peace Walker was different. Most Metal Gear games at the time had linear stealth/action gameplay with cutscenes that lasted for hours and somewhat of a sandbox feel due to letting you backtrack to retrieve key items. But in Peace Walker, you play as Big Boss after the events of Metal Gear Solid 3 and decide to run his own private military faction called M.S.F.: Militaires Sans Frontières, doing story missions in Costa Rica. Its main selling point is building up an army using the first-ever Fulton Recovery System and constructing your own Mother Base, resulting in a hybrid game design genre that adds simulation. Eventually, you even build your own Metal Gear, which is cool, and new characters are introduced, like Huey, Paz, Dr. Strangelove, and Kaz. I have not played Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops, but fans of the series say that Peace Walker was a step up from it. It plays like Metal Gear with its gameplay, and the story is more fleshed out as it's canon to the Metal Gear timeline before the events of Metal Gear Solid V. I do like the comic book-style art during cutscenes since there are no full 3D animations in this game, and this game even threw in Quick Time Event segments. The graphics look way better in HD than the original PSP version, so that is a major plus. There are even bonus modes and easter eggs, such as literally fighting the Monster Hunter beast Rathalos, and Snake even performs the Assassin’s Creed’s Leap of Faith jump at one point in the mission. Peace Walker even has online cooperative play, allowing you to bring in a friend to play this game and complete missions together as long as they have their own system and copy of the game. The whole Mother Base building simulator is new and interesting. You recruit soldiers and manufacture new weapons for the R&D department and even build Metal Gear ZEKE. However, you have to maintain both soldiers and heavy vehicles by sending them out on missions so they can scavenge for even more weapons and unlock new blueprints, allowing you to create your own special tools to use. As much as you progress, you get to see how big the Mother Base looks. On the downside, the missions felt more like a chore to me and took out the story elements typical of the Metal Gear series. You have to grind to recruit more soldiers and make more tanks by replaying some of the old missions, and it does get old really fast. You have to keep doing it to progress in the story. Even the bosses are nothing special in this game. You mainly fight giant vehicles and Metal Gears, which take a long time to defeat; this is why playing this game in co-op is recommended and a reason why this game was pushed for the cooperative experience. The story overall is good, but it did not completely grab me compared to the other Metal Gear games in the series. What is really worse is unveiling most of the exposition story through only audio recordings. I had to sit and listen to all the audio recordings about the characters, the story, and even the economics of Central America concerning bananas, as well as hear about Chico and his obsession with dinosaurs. You also have to play hide-and-seek with escapee Zordonov by looking for him somewhere in the missions and even inside Mother Base. This is by far my least favorite Metal Gear game in the franchise, but it's still mandatory to play this before playing Metal Gear Solid V for story purposes. I don’t hate Peace Walker, but I appreciate it's time for being a bite-sized Metal Gear game for the PlayStation Portable, and it's actually fun to play if you have friends who also possess a copy of the game. A surprise is that you can only play the Peace Walker HD version on the PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, and Vita. There is no official PC version of this game yet, and there should be for cooperative play.