I got this last night and dorked around with it for about 30 minutes.
- Wow, the controls are awful. MGS and MGS2 had awkward controls but it was OK - they were unique. But since MGS2 we’ve had the 2 Splinter Cell games - there is no excuse for MGS3 to have this awful control scheme.
Basically you are locked in a top down perspective, no camera control other than being able to pan it slight in each direction. Snake goes where you point the left analog stick. What’s really frustrating is that when shimmying it seems you are randomly locked into a first person view - the only way out of it is to stand up. This REALLY sucks as the FPS view is terribly restrictive - its useful for aiming guns, but when evaluating where a guard is in relation to you it sucks.
Case in point: I was trying to sneak past a guard by crawling through some low grass. Was doing fine until it randomly threw me into FPS mode - now I have no idea where the guard is. Inevitably he stumbles across me, I get caught.
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Camouflage. This is just stupid. OK, the premise is you have a menu where you can set the camouflage you’re using on your face and what you’re wearing. Different environments benefit from different camo. Supposedly this enhances the stealth aspects of the game - it really doesn’t. Mainly because you can see exactly the benefit any given type of camo gives you at any moment - it’s in the menu. So really camo is reduced to a chore - hit start, change camo, move through grass up to tree, lean against tree, hit start, change camo, wait for guard to pass, hit start, change camo… you get the point. It’s just an utterly obnoxious gameplay mechanic.
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CHRIST SHUT THE FUCK UP. I played this game for 20-30 minuts last night. I spent about an hour with it - most of it boring exposition on the radio about the nature of soldiers. Look, it’s hard to take Snake seriously as a Jack Bauer or Sam Fischer level badass when he spends ten minutes on the radio angsting about his former boss who left him. I was hoping that MGS3 would abandon the bullshit Jack-and-Rose style melodrama of MGS2, but that doesn’t seem to be in the cards.
So far, I’m regretting my purchase decision. I’ll play it some more tonight, see if I can’t get past the controls and find out if there’s a decent stealth game here. If not, I’ll just return it and wait for Splinter Cell 3.