Off the Shelf Media

Well, my most anticipated game of 2025 is finally here. I wish I had more exciting news to report, but METAL GEAR SOLID Δ: SNAKE EATER ends up being a bit of a mixed bag.

Unfortunately, this remake is less of a giant next-gen overhaul a la Resident Evil 4`s Remake or Konami’s own Silent Hill 2 Remake. Rather, this game is more akin to Bethesda’s The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Next-Gen Remaster. In essence, you’re playing the same original game with a huge graphical overhaul and some gameplay tweaks.

Even with all these adjustments, the same great game you remember is here. It’s almost exactly as you remember it, just with a massive facelift. 

Let’s sink our teeth into the good and the bad as if it were a king cobra we just sniped with a tranquillizer pistol. 

Gameplay: 2

For those unfamiliar, the Metal Gear Solid series bills itself with the subheading “Tactical Espionage Action.” Players control a lone soldier on an against-all-odds infiltration mission. The mission is typically an effort to thwart the usage of the titular Metal Gear, a nuclear-equipped giant tank, by nefarious forces. 

In all entries, stealth and non-lethal combat are encouraged, but not required. Players can acquire numerous weapons and items over the course of their adventure, offering a great deal of freedom with how to approach each specific situation. Snake Eater is no different.

Players can use only their fists and tranquilizer darts and deftly maneuver their way through the mountains of Tselenoyarsk. Or, they can acquire a small arsenal of various firearms and explosives and lay waste to everything that moves. The choice is ultimately the player’s.

I played the original Snake Eater quite a bit and enjoyed my many years playing it. As the years have gone by, many aspects of the 2004 PS2 title make it a slog to go through in 2025. Most of the greatest changes you’ll see are simply in the removal and refinement of the parts that made the original a slog. 

For starters, the time spent artificially pausing the game to change camos or make a codec call has been minimized almost entirely. Players can now tune their radio or adapt their camouflage pattern to a new environment with the press of a button. 

Additionally, contextual button prompts will appear on the screen when the player has acquired a new item, weapon or camo pattern, making it a breeze to keep track of one’s inventory while playing.

Another pain with the original Snake Eater is the lack of autosave. Players needed to save manually upon entering every new zone if they wanted their progress to stay fully up to date with their playthrough. Now, the game autosaves for you when you change areas, meaning the player spends less time in menus and loading screens and more time actually playing this great game. 

Shooting looks and feels great. Bullets have a realistic trajectory and behavior. Projectiles will drop, deflect, and ricochet. All kinds of pieces of the environment can be shot or otherwise hit, and add new variables to combat or stealth. For instance, players can shoot the radio that rests on an enemy soldier’s shoulders, disabling it and that soldier’s ability to call for backup. Hornets’ nests can also be shot to a very humorous yet beneficial effect in many different points in the game.

Another great slew of changes were made in how Snake can traverse and further interact with this beautiful, living environment. One of the most necessary changes made is the addition of crouch walking. In every entry in the series until Metal Gear Solid 4, players could crouch but were unable to move while crouched. Moving triggered a shift to a prone position that would prompt Snake to army crawl. This original movement scheme always felt clunky and awkward, and the freedom of movement provided in later entries in the series makes them a lot more attractive to replay. Now, Snake Eater gets this same treatment. Snake can now move and shoot simultaneously, crouch walk, dive roll, and shoot from his backside. Players can also seamlessly toggle between these different traversal options with little to no delay. 

These key gameplay additions take an already great game to some new highs at certain points. The modernized movement and control schemes make all the existing tools the game provides the player with just that much more fun and easy to use. All in all, the gameplay tweaks greatly enhance the experience for both newcomers and veterans alike.

If, however, you want to play the game as you originally played it, that option is there. Credit to Konami for going forth with the effort to cater to the new gen, while also keeping an option for the OGs. You can even use the original button mappings for the radio and survival viewer if you’re not a fan of these new-fangled quality of life improvements. Adding to this, the game offers a “legacy” mode, which preserves the original 2004 entry’s camera angles and controls.

Story: 2

Since we’ve already mentioned how the gameplay tweaks make it easier to fall in love with this story, let’s dive in: What about Hideo Kojima’s smash hit prequel makes it so compelling?

Players control a CIA Agent named John, codenamed Naked Snake. During the height of the Cold War, Snake is tasked with rescuing a defecting Russian weapons scientist from within the Soviet Union. His mission quickly devolves into a brutal, unpredictable tale of love, betrayal, pain, and triumph. 

After Snake is double-crossed by a former comrade during his rescue mission, he receives new orders in addition to his original mission. These orders cause Snake to question everything he’s ever known, loved, and fought for as an American soldier. 

From the leading man, Naked Snake, to his various HQ contacts Zero, Para-Medic and SIGINT; to villains like Volgin and the Cobra Unit. All of these wonderful characters come together to form an amazing cast of vibrant, powerful characters. The voices, character design, movements and animations are all simply beautiful and painstakingly crafted.

Huge credit to the original Snake Eater team at Konami who made so many great conscious choices to create a true Hollywood movie atmosphere within the game. There are so many amazing moments throughout the story that scream ‘80’s hard-boiled action flick.’ These moments scream so loud, you will be instantly transported to the old movie theatre back home that used to let you leave during the movie to go out and smoke. We’ve got brutal bullet time headshots, slow-mo martial art gun disassemblage, slick poses, explosions, giant robots…Do I need to add more?

In short, the game is worth your money based on the merit of its story alone. I want to tell you more and get into the meat and potatoes of this story, but I would never tarnish Kojima-san’s hard work by spoiling it for the purposes of a simple review. 

While the canon of the Metal Gear Series is a convoluted one, newcomers won’t necessarily be in the dark since Snake Eater is the genesis of many of the key characters and plot points of the franchise. 

If the team that was involved in this remake did anything right, it was leaving well enough alone. In the words of Lil Wayne: “If it ain’t broke, don’t break it”. The entire story former players will remember remains intact, ‘outdated’ themes and all. 

Seriously, in terms of the story, this ‘remake’ is shot-for-shot, beat-for-beat. For some, this may come with a sigh of relief. Others, perhaps those expecting a unique while faithful recreation like with Silent Hill 2, will be disappointed. Regardless, any gamer who loves a good story to go with brutal, challenging and fun stealth/survival gameplay will absolutely enjoy this adventure over and over again. 

Atmosphere: 1

Being a game made within the Unreal Engine, Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater looks great while simultaneously giving a very familiar-seeming bunch of set pieces. Don’t get me wrong, the original environments and set pieces are what the remake devs were referencing, but there’s just something about that Unreal Engine. When a game with such a distinct art style like Snake Eater is run through the uncanny valley photo-realism-ificator that is Unreal Engine, some of the pieces come out looking a little off. That’s not to say that it is not a good-looking game throughout the experience, but photorealistic textures and resource-intensive lighting and shading effects aren’t everything. Game’s still gotta have some soul.

Some of the characters look a little off, namely Snake’s rival, the young Revolver Ocelot, voiced by Josh Keaton. Other characters, however, namely Snake, undercover lover EVA and the big bad Colonel Volgin all look amazing in their own ways. The Cobra Unit, the former special forces unit that stands in the way of Snake on his mission, all have unique and memorable gameplay segments in the form of their boss fights. These moments do a great job of providing the player with a gameplay shakeup, a new challenge, and a surprising, perhaps jarring change of atmosphere as well. 

All in all, while the game looks great, the Unreal Engine and that god awful default bright golden remake-slop filter do kind of sap the soul from the original a bit and kind of reduce its art style to just another Unreal Engine game.     

Value: 1

With the holidays just around the corner, the game will undoubtedly be on sale on most online marketplaces. At $69.99 base price, that can seem a steep cost for a game that might be little more than an Unreal Engine facelift with a few quality of life improvements for some. As both an appreciator of the original and this remake, I say wait for it to go on sale, I kind of wish I had, looking back. 

You can probably emulate the original or its HD remaster on a decent PC and get the same experience for a fraction of the price. If you’re a diehard MGS enjoyer, though, I say buy it. Who knows what the future holds for the franchise and if we’ll get any more attempts at updating and preserving it?  

Duration: 1

Without knowing what you’re doing, a first playthrough of Snake Eater could take you anywhere from twelve to twenty or more hours. The various in-game “titles” players can acquire upon completing the game offer a vast amount of replayability. 

Additionally, the game world is full of nooks and crannies, which many players will often miss at first. Many times, the aforementioned nooks and crannies contain a cache of ammo, another helpful item or a fun new weapon to try out. The amount of time you’ll spend with the game is well worth it if you’re truly a fan of this game and this series. More casual gamers or those less familiar with the series might find a harder time justifying spending their hard-earned dollars and their decreasingly available free time with this one.

Final Score: 7/10

All in all, Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater is not at all a bad game, not even close. I truly was anticipating something like that Silent Hill 2 Remake. I was totally blindsided (in a good way, mind you) of just how faithful the game was to the original. 

After playing titles like the already mentioned Silent Hill 2, Resident Evil, and other remakes of recent years, I’ve grown accustomed to devs taking chances and making new choices in an effort to set the remake apart from its progenitor in some way. While it’s safer to go the route Konami did with this title, the end result is a game that simply looks good, is fun to play, but is a bit forgettable.