Metal Gear Solid: Master Collection Vol. 2 review: Come for Metal Gear Solid 4, stay for two handheld classics

You’re buying this for Metal Gear Solid 4, and that’s fine.

There are some for whom Metal Gear Solid: Master Collection Vol. 2 would have been worth the price purely for the return of MGS 4, a game legendary for being landlocked on the PS3. But by grouping the game with Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker and Metal Gear Solid: Ghost Babel, the Metal Gear Solid: Master Collection Vol. 2 ends up being, pound for pound, one of the highest-quality collections of games ever.

I’ll start with Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, as most fans likely will when booting up the collection. It is incredibly novel to see the game on another platform. Like so many PlayStation 3 games so hamstrung by the Cell processor that they’re doomed to live on that machine forever, it felt like Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots would never be set free.

Due to it being relatively annoying to play compared to every other mainline entry in the series, the game has enjoyed a mystical reputation among fans. While it blew players and critics away at launch, and perhaps represents the most concentrated dunt of Hideo Kojima eccentricity in a Metal Gear game, does it hold up? Largely, yes.

There’s still a frightening number of cutscenes, and while I understand that Kojima was trying to land a 25-year-long plane journey of lore with MGS 4, new players will find themselves astonished at just how long some of these epics circle the runway. From a gameplay perspective, MGS 4 feels dated when compared to Metal Gear Solid 5, and latterly, Metal Gear Solid Delta.

There’s a very clear before and after moment in the MGS franchise with 5, when the series stepped away from bizarre input layouts and mimicked more western popular fare. You can change the controller settings in MGS 4, but it won’t ever feel quite as snappy as MGS 5, or Delta.

That is, perhaps, the only let-down of what otherwise is a port of the game that’s been cleaned up and runs well, while retaining seemingly all of the weirdness. The era-specific collaborations with Apple and the like are all still in the game, perhaps predicated on just how much of a rerelease this is, rather than a remake.

There will be players who have heard about MGS 4 and never got the chance to play it, or for whom this is their first MGS game. 4 is perhaps the worst possible and most convoluted starting point from a story perspective, but gameplay-wise it’s still a lot of fun and some of its quirks and emergent gameplay which blew minds in the late 2000s still haven’t really been bettered. It’s been long overdue.

The co-headliner in Metal Gear Solid: Master Collection Vol. 2 is Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker. Peace Walker, essentially a sequel to Metal Gear Solid 3, sees players take on bite-sized missions that distil the Metal Gear experience down to its best parts.

While the main campaign features more traditional (if smaller) MGS missions, dozens of smaller side missions see Boss build Mother Base, his personal army. In these missions, players can recruit enemies via the Fulton system, which sees Boss tie balloons to their backs and launch them into the air.

Peace Walker is portable Metal Gear at its best because it was so clearly designed for commutes. It’s totally snackable, and even in those short bursts you feel like you’re making progress, be that via Mother Base or continuing the main story.

As I mentioned at the start, you rarely get a collection of rereleases where every single game is a top 10 most critically praised title on its respective platform. In that sense, Metal Gear Solid: Master Collection Vol. 2 is a triumph. While the games themselves haven’t been touched much (likely to leave room for true remakes down the line), the goal of having almost all of Metal Gear on one platform has almost been achieved.

For fans who loathe the idea of dragging out their PS3 or checking if their PSP battery has turned into a bomb, it’s the perfect set of games to pair together. Total newcomers to the series might find MGS 4 somewhat intimidating, but there’s an entire Metal Gear Solid: Master Collection Vol. 1 to get you up to speed.

A Metal Gear Solid: Master Collection Vol. 3 could only really feature a coat of paint on Metal Gear Solid 5, Metal Gear Survive (or not), and the much-loved  Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance, even if the latter would be a tricky prospect. Saying that, Metal Gear Solid 4 also seemed like an impossibility, and I’m so glad it’s back. Konami kept us waiting long enough.