I bought a PS2 and a stack of games last February, and after two hours playing Metal Gear Solid 3 I decided to put it back in its box until I was on a long holiday. I wanted to be able to sit and play it for whole days, without having to deal with the usual distractions like going to work, putting clothes on, or washing myself. The opportunity finally came at Christmas, when I took two weeks off work to visit my parents. This game is brilliant and was absolutely worth the wait.

Snake Eater is basically two intertwined stories. The main plot is a Cold War story about a CIA agent on a covert mission to prevent a Russian colonel from using a prototype superweapon to stage a coup d’etat and trump the US in the nuclear arms race; along the way he fights a series of bosses with strange weapons and abilities, blows up a giant supertank, confronts the spirits of his victims in the afterlife, climbs a really long ladder and eats his weight in snakes. The sub-plot is basically about a young man growing up and crawling out from under his mother’s wing. On that note, the first six minutes of this video introduces The Boss, who in the space of the week became one of my favourite game characters of all time:

The Boss – not Snake’s mother, but a badass mother figure – gives you lots of helpful advice on jungle warfare and survival techniques during the prologue mission, but then shows up during your escape to kick your ass, throw you off a bridge, kidnap the scientist you were sent to rescue, and defect to the USSR. It puts a strain on your relationship, although she never comes across as being a real threat – at least, it’s clear that she could kill you whenever she felt like it, but she prefers to toss you out of the combat zone and warn you to stay away. The bulk of the game takes place one week later, as Snake returns to the jungle to clean up the mess and put an end to her schemes.

As The Boss says, surviving in the jungle is a lot different to infiltrating buildings. Adapting to these open, organic environments makes the game feel a lot more raw than previous Metal Gear Solid games, but also a lot less rigid. I really struggled to get into Metal Gear Solid 2, and a big part of that was due to the camera controls – in every new building you enter, the radar is unavailable until you download a floorplan from a computer console, so until you find the console you must rely on the fairly static camera angles to scout for patrolling guards and security drones. It’s hard work! Since MGS3 features no radar at all (although some partial radar-like equipment is available – motion detectors, heartbeat sensors, that kind of thing) I was expecting to spend half the game just hiding in tree stumps and looking over my shoulder, but it wasn’t like that at all. At least in the Subsistence version of the game, which comes with a free-floating camera that can be controlled by the right analogue stick, things seemed a lot easier.

Without a radar to monitor guards’ positions, it’s a lot harder to keep track of who is looking in your direction. The payoff is that MGS3 features a camoflage system which means it usually doesn’t matter much where people are looking – with the right concealment, guards won’t notice you even if you’re lying on the ground just a few feet away. Much of my game was spent crawling around in tall grass, where even the most experienced guards would react to me with mere mild curiosity – the five seconds or so it usually takes them to walk over and realise that you are not, in fact, a small shrubbery, gives you ample time to crawl under a rock, shoot them with a tranquiliser or spring to your feet and knock them out with a CQC technique.

More than that, once you’ve played for a few hours and learned a few little tricks, you really start to become one with the jungle. Over the course of the game, it transformed from a hostile environment to an extension of my inventory. It provides food and medical supplies, conceals you from enemies, and contains some surprisingly good weapons – it ALWAYS pays to keep a few live snakes in your bag, since you can use them to scare away guards and clear a difficult path without being seen. Since I was playing through the game without killing anyone, I found these non-lethal natural weapons to be far more useful than the assault rifles I was picking up in store rooms.

I would describe my experience of this game to be a series of boss fights interspersed with stealth puzzles. You usually fight a boss after every five or six sneaking areas, which keeps the action going even on a pacifist playthrough. And while the stealth side of the game was slow and strategic, the boss fights were all pretty amazing.  Mostly you are fighting against the Cobra Unit, a team of freaky super-soldiers led by The Boss, who (apparently) were responsible for winning World War 2… behind the scenes, of course.


The Cobra Unit – Click to englarge
L-R: The Fury, The End, The Boss, The Sorrow, The Fear, The Pain

The Pain is a fat man who can control hornets, and is fought in a cave with a large underground lake – obviously, the trick is to dive under the water to hide from his swarm, and swim around unseen to attack him from behind. The Fear is an agile, lizard-like man with a poisonous crossbow and an invisibility suit, fought in a jungle area full of tripwires and pit traps – his fight mostly revolves around the difficulty of tracking him through the treetops while avoiding the traps on the ground (also there’s a special trick to beating him where you fool him into eating poisonous frogs when he stops to hunt for food during the battle). The Fury’s battle takes place in a pitch-black sewer area, which is gradually transformed into a raging inferno by his flamethrower and jetpack – your aim is to hide in the (shrinking) dark areas while using your nightvision and infra-red goggles to track him as he paces around in search of you. The Sorrow is more of a set-piece than a boss fight… while being tortured, you pass through into the afterlife and must wade through a mangrove swamp while being attacked by the spirits of all the people you’ve killed so far (or not, if you haven’t killed anyone).

The real standout boss from the Cobra Unit is The End, who engages you in a sniper duel deep in the jungle. The fight is spread across three large areas, and is really intense! His camoflage, and the distances at which he will engage you, make him very difficult to see with the naked eye… you must use tools like your infra-red goggles, directional microphone, sonar detector and binoculars to locate him. And while you are peering through your binoculars from behind a tree stump, you are always aware that he is out there somewhere, sweeping his sights across the jungle floor and hunting you like an animal – it’s a shock when the camera suddenly jumps to the view from his sniper scope, with Snake sitting in the crosshairs. Pacifist players have an even harder time in this fight as their only available ranged weapon is their tranquiliser pistol, which means you have to try and sneak up on this expert marksman and attack him at close range. A lot of people think this is a monsterously difficult battle – there are numerous cheats built into the game to make this fight easier, and two ways to avoid it completely – but I really loved it! A real game of cat-and-mouse, putting your camoflage, stealth, hunting and survival skills to the test. I would happily play a game that was based entirely on the gameplay of this fight.

With the exception of The Sorrow, all of the Cobra Unit boss fights seem to share a ‘hunting’ theme – The Pain’s fight involves catching him off-guard while evading his swarm of hornets, defeating The Fear is like fighting off a predator, The Fury must be ambushed from behind, and The End is inteded to be engaged in a long, drawn-out hunting contest. It seems strange to see this same pattern of behaviour (hide, sneak behind and then attack) repeated in so many boss fights, but the different environments and attacks being used mean that each battle feels quite unique. Plus there are other bosses – a few duels against a young Revolver Ocelot, a fist fight against the insidious Colonel Volgin, and the inevitable scene where you face off against his giant tank – but those all feel like part of another game. The one member of the Cobras I haven’t really discussed is The Boss, who rightfully waits for a final showdown at the end of the game:

I loved the fight against The Boss because, for the first time in the game, you feel like you’re fighting an opponent as powerful as you. The final battle takes place in a field of white flowers and you are given ten minutes to defeat her before an airstrike arrives and kills you both, and all the time you are both trying to hunt each other while staying hidden, and using the same kind of CQC techniques to throw each other to the ground and break each other’s bones. It’s clear from the lengthy cutscenes before and after the fight that she doesn’t really want to fight you, and I certainly didn’t want to fight her, but – as she tells you in her introduction at the start of the game – soldiers don’t get to choose their enemies. Even after her defection, she helps you throughout the game – during the torture scene, she helps to spare your life and subtly assists your escape from Volgin’s prison by shooting you in the leg and slipping a fake death pill into the wound. She never seems intent on harming you beyond what is required to prove her loyalty to Volgin.

And yet this is where it ends up. The two of you must fight and one of you must die. Snake must kill The Boss to complete his mission, and she will not go down without a fight. And while all the other Cobras explode after being defeated, she collapses to the ground and demands that you finish her off yourself – that you take responsibility for your actions. There is a moment – 5:30 in that video – where the cut-scene borders disappear and the game waits for the player to press the ‘fire’ button. In the same kind of way that MGS2 is designed to feed you with misinformation until you feel as exploited as Raiden does, I think the intention of MGS3 is to make you so fond of The Boss that it really pains you to kill her, just like Snake. In my case it absolutely worked, again.

Afterwards, it is revealed that her whole defection was planned by the US government as a way to stop Volgin from destabilising the war, and her death at the hands of a US agent was seen as the only way to maintain deniability. Metal Gear canon goes that, about thirty years later, Snake (now known as Big Boss) turns against his masters and starts a war in Africa, trying to establish a country without a government where soldiers aren’t just used as political tools. Clearly, his fight against The Boss is supposed to be the root of that dissatisfaction, and it definitely made me feel a lot more sympathetic to his cause. And the thing is, none of this really has anything to do with the business of tanks and superweapons and the Cold War – for me, all that stuff was just a bit of background flavour, something to do while waiting for the next Cobra to attack. The story of Snake’s relationship with The Boss is much more interesting, and cemented Metal Gear Solid 3‘s status as the best game I’ve played all year. I’m not the kind of sap to start judging games based purely on their stories, but MGS3 is basically an excellent jungle-based stealth game and a series of intense boss fights and an affecting coming-of-age drama, all rolled into one.