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

If it isn't already apparent, ever since beating the first Metal Gear Solid game for PsX I have gotten completely hooked into the Metal Gear series. Seriously love the franchise now, and I am going back to (hopefully) play and beat every one. This game really really has issues. It starts off well enough. In fact it starts off great! The gameplay feels like a natural progression from 4 put on PSP. The controls are snappy, and feel pretty much identical, aside from being able to crawl when in prone position. But the issues begin pretty quickly. My main gripe was the length of missions and how much they broke up the game. I give it total slack on this however because it was made as a portable game. So I can't exactly fault it because I think it was probably the correct way to do the whole game. But I found the breaking up of events to be disjointed and it left me much less interested and invested in the story and what was going on. Overall the story is a good continuation of 3. I actually by the end, quite enjoyed the send off they gave The Boss again. Mother Base is introduced and I like the way it functions for the most part. Capturing enemies and prisonners with the fulton system is pretty fun. And it's neat to assign people and develop weapons. HOWEVER, if you decide to engage with it minimally the final battle will be practically impossible. Having not known that, I didn't do a lot of GMP development, and therefore my weapons were pretty low level, and I could not take out the final boss with the amount of ammo it provided me, which will roll into my biggest problem with the game. To the point I think it literally ruins the entire game. Every boss you fight is some sort of armored vehicle, which I enjoy as a concept, but they fucked the execution on them sooooooo badly that it makes every fight awful. Every single boss is a horrid horrid damage sponge. You will pump round after round after round for 10 minutes with the boss not changing patterns up at all. And then because they take soooo many bullets you are going to inevitably run out. To compensate this you are now given supply markers that you place down, and call in supplies (more ammo, rations etc.) The boss fights turn into trying to evade while you wait for supplies to come and (hopefully) give you the right type of ammo and enough to keep fighting. Seriously this was sooo sooo unfun to manage during the fights it completely dragged thew game down. Everything about every boss was a frustrating dumpster fire. And often their attacks hit so hard you could end up using 2 rations to recover, and you're only allowed a max of 4. Therefore needing to use more supply markers. On the final boss I ran out off ammo and supply markers.. and I just had to.. lose.. and then go back for an hour capturing soldiers, assigning them to R&D and developing stronger weapons because I didn't have them. I know that was on me for ignoring it most of the game. But it made for such a sour end taste of the game in my mouth. One more thing I wanted to briefly mention is the side missions. For the most part you can finish them in 1 minute, but the idea of some were cool. I loved loved loved the one where after snake is captured you have to send a random soldier from your combat unit to gather his weapons and stuff. Great clever idea. They needed more side mission like that!