By Sean Ewing
A brand new system is little more than a conversation piece without the killer games for it. Fortunately, Sony has secured some great launch titles for their new handheld, the PSP. Forefront among these games is Konami’s own Metal Gear Ac!d.
Anyone who claims to be a gamer of any caliber is familiar with Hideo Kojima’s prolific Metal Gear series. This latest installation is a departure in many senses, which can be off-putting at first, but if you stick with it, you’ll find this is an enjoyable and unique action game.
The first thing that people will notice is the graphics. Namely, the fact they are gorgeous. Ac!d really flexes the PSP’s graphical might and shows what the system can do. The game puts the original. Impressively, the game looks far closer to Metal Gear Solid 2 than 1, which is certainly no mean feat. The environments are wonderfully detailed in 3-D, with plenty of detail and the characters look fleshed out.
In addition, portraits portray whomever is speaking during conversations. These portraits are drawn in the traditional art style, but have much more personality and flair to them than their polygonal counterparts. Instead of cutscenes in the traditional sense, we get text based events occurring against a wonderfully drawn backdrop. Gaming purists will find a lot to love with this new hand-drawn approach, while some newer gamers will be upset with the lack of amazing cutscenes found in the previous titles.
The next thing people will notice is the most likely thing to turn people off. The card based gameplay. No longer do you control Snake at will, running around snapping necks and hiding in real-time. In order to make any action, you have to have a corresponding card.
Between missions, you create a new deck to handle the upcoming enemies and obstacles. Instead of finding new weapons and items, exploring will reward Snake with booster packs of cards, where you can find weapons, items, even friends from old games to come and give you a hand. As you progress you will unlock more types of booster packs, awarding you access to different types of cards.
The card based game play definitely takes a walk off the beaten path, but it is surprisingly rewarding and intelligent. Instead of charging in guns blazing, you are forced to think out your actions, weigh possible enemy reactions and the turn based system actually punches up the tension.
In typical Metal Gear fashion, the story is all over the place and discovering what is going on is quite a task. It’s a political intrigue plot, but some additional elements make it feel new. A lot of effort has gone into making the story fresh and new and it is quite different from the previous iterations. Of course, a great deal of the fun is learning who’s playing for which side, so the game stays intentionally vague about certain characters.
The game offers plenty of replay by creating “Extra Missions.” These missions allow you to replay a previous mission, but with a new objective and with all of the cards you’ve earned since then. In addition, you can unlock the ever present extreme difficulty which is quite a challenge. In fact, the challenge in this game feels ramped up no matter what mode you are on. Killing guards, staying hidden and acquiring better cards just seems difficult. This will lead to the player replaying a lot of missions, simply to understand the guard’s patterns and reaction.
The more you play though, the more you can adapt your play style and understand the guards. It’s an awfully steep learning curve in the beginning, and in many ways, Ac!d bucks the trend set by its predecessors, but once you surmount it, Ac!d rewards you with an utterly unique and engrossing experience. It’s rare enough to see originality in gaming today, let alone originality done this exquisitely.
Final Grade: B+

Metal Gear Acid challenges the player with unique and original features.