Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops

January 18,2007 - Until now, the PSP has been a mixed bag in terms of the quality of its games. There are plenty of solid games out there, but the sub-par ports and crap original titles tend to outweigh them. There just hasn’t been a game yet that has taken advantage of what the PSP has to offer and set a bar for what should be expected of a PSP game. Hideo Kojima decided it was time to make that game and give Metal Gear Solid fans a game that continues the Metal Gear Solid legacy of excellent games that pushes the hardware to its limits.

Portable Ops takes place six years after the events of Metal Gear Solid 3. The Foxhound unit that Snake had lead years before and then imprisoned in a South American compound has captured him. This is where Snake first meets Roy Campbell, a man Metal Gear Solid fans should be very familiar with, and they work together to find out who is behind an upcoming nuclear attack and stop them before it’s too late. Snake finds himself on his own after the US government disowns him as a scapegoat for the actions of his ex-Foxhound unit. This sets up the recruiting portion of the game quite nicely as described below, and gives the game’s story a running start. The story weaves an intriguing tale that pulls you in and makes the game seem less like a series of small bits of Metal Gear history and more like another epic story in the legend of Snake. The cutscenes are presented wonderfully by Digital Graphic Novel artist Ashley Wood’s great artwork with full voice work from the game’s cast.

In terms of control, it might take a few missions to get used to the tweaked-for-handheld control scheme, but after that nothing stops you from sneaking around like the legendary Snake himself. There are some other notable changes, such as being able to move while in first-person view, or being able to stand straight up from the crawling position. These are welcome additions, making the game feel less stilted and robotic as it’s previous incarnations. Movement is done primarily with the analog nub, while camera control is assigned to the d-pad. This works fine, although first-person shooting is a little tougher without a proper analog stick. That being said, it’s not an issue that noticeably hampers gameplay.

Kojima must have studied the PSP’s spec sheet in detail, found exactly what it could do, and built the game backwards from there. The missions are never really longer than five to ten minutes, depending on your gameplay style, and load times are minimal, with maybe a few seconds between the mission select screen and when the level loads up. Most of the missions are simple enough, with a few that continue on after the initial goal is completed.

Before playing each mission, a visit the manage screen allows you to organize your recruited troops. Choose which soldiers will be in the field, which will be spies, and which will develop new weapons or medical items. Spies return reports that add sub-missions, which grant new items or further develop in the ongoing story.

When you’re not completing missions, you’re recruiting new soldiers through various means. Soldiers are captured within missions by knocking out enemies and dragging them back the truck, or to your other comrades in the field. Trading with friends is another option, but the most intriguing method is through the WiFi scanner, and it’s surprisingly addictive. The WiFi scanner tool senses real-world wireless hotspots, and when in them you can play what is essentially a really simple fishing game for new soldiers. When you feel the nibbles of wireless signals, keep pressing the circle button to reel them in, until you’re prize gets past the line of success. In the future, players will be able to use the PSP GPS receiver to hook unique soldiers in specific locations across the globe.  

The multiplayer is easily one of the best online experiences you can find on the PSP. Featuring several gameplay modes for up to six players at a time, it’s another addictive feature of Portable Ops. This is where those hard-earned soldiers can be put to the test in either of two modes. Real Combat, where soldiers can be won or lost depending on your success, or Virtual Reality, where you’re free to play without fear of losing soldiers. For some strange reason, stats are only kept for the Real Combat games, which may turn away players that are just starting out and only have a few soldiers. Another quirk is that inventories have to be changed before entering the online mode, and it’s easy to forget to ditch that tranq gun before jumping online. Besides those two small issues, it’s great to have the addictive online mode from Subsistence in portable form.

Portable Ops’ visuals are where the game shines. It’s almost on par with Metal Gear Solid 3, with a few compromises. The levels are smaller than their console counterparts, as there’s no transitioning between levels outside of the mission select screen. Each level is nicely detailed and works well in both offline and online modes. You may feel some longing for the full 3D cutscenes of the Metal Gear Solid tradition, but the new Ashley Wood comic-style cutscenes do a great job of telling the story in their place.

Just like the visuals, the audio of Portable Ops is nearly on the same level as that of the console versions of the series. Cutscenes are fully voiced by the cast of voice actors, and game is filled with sound effects to round out the package. Enemies tell and grunt with the best of them when they catch a whiff of Snake’s presence, and just like its console cousins, the music is great to just listen to in the menus.

What Kojima Productions has done here is set the bar for what PSP owners should expect of PSP games of the future. With a great story, fun gameplay, a dearth of modes to keep you busy for months, and an overall package that’s reminiscent of what you’d expect from a console Metal Gear Solid title, there’s just so much here that other developers need to pay attention to in order to compete on this level. Anybody that wants to see their PSP utilized to the max should pick up this game, if you haven’t already.

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