Metal Gear Solid HD Collection Review

After impressing us a few months back with its stunning remaster of Ico and Shadow Of The Colossus, BluePoint Games is back with another superb collection of games.

The Metal Gear Solid HD Collection contains loving remasters of Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons Of Liberty, Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater and Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker.

In addition, it also features the MSX versions of the original Metal Gear and Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake. While it’s disappointing that Metal Gear Solid or Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns Of The Patriots weren’t included – making it a truly definitive collection – you’re still getting a hell of a lot of gameplay for your money, so it’s difficult to complain.

Interestingly, both Metal Gear Solid 2 and 3 are the later enhanced versions of the game, although it’s worth noting that you won’t be getting everything that appeared in the original versions of the games.

This is most notable in the case of Metal Gear Solid 3: Subsistence, which no longer features Secret Theatre, Metal Gear Online, the Snake Vs Monkey mini-game, or the Existence disc, which boasted the three and a half hour cut of Metal Gear Solid 3’s ludicrously over-the-top cinematics.

Fortunately, even with these disappointing omissions, this is still a stunning collection of games, primarily because of the excellent job BluePoint Games has done with the remaster.

Before we go into the actual remaster, here’s a quick lowdown on the actual games, for those who may not have played the originals. Metal Gear Solid 2 is an utterly barmy and disappointing follow-up to Metal Gear Solid, which is let down by its bizarre plot, clunky controls, overlong codec scenes and some truly appalling dialogue.

Peace Walker is designed for handheld, but still works well for console.

The stealth is still well handled, and there are some satisfying bosses to battle, but its fixed cameras now make it feel a little tired. It also bravely puts you in control of a new protagonist, Raiden, which irked many fans on its original release.

Metal Gear 3: Snake Eater on the other hand is a far better game, possibly the best in the series. It builds brilliantly on the boss battles found in part two, and while its over-the-top cutscenes are no less silly, they work far better, as if Kojima is finally in on the joke and has stopped listening to his own hype.

It also benefits from the new Subsistence camera, allowing you to pan around Snake’s jungle environments, which in turn makes the stealth sections far less frustrating to play.

Add in new mechanics like fixing up Snake when he takes damage, and surviving off the jungle itself and Snake Eater is an excellent addition to the genre that still plays like a dream.

The final main game is Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker, which originally started life on the PSP. Due to the nature of the device the main structure of the game is mission-based, with levels split into small, linear, bite-sized chunks of gameplay and catered towards 4 players (which this version still supports).

Despite the handheld approach, it remains a truly absorbing game, even if the singing Metal Gears it features are no real substitute for the stunning boss encounters found in Snake Eater.

In terms of actual treatment, the three games look absolutely stunning remastered. It’s worth noting the word remaster, because it’s a completely different process to a remake like the recent Halo Anniversary Collection.

The HD collection highlights the poor camera-placement in Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons Of Liberty.

BluePoint never had any intention of giving the releases a next generation makeover with brand new high-definition textures; it just wanted to ensure that the original treatments looked as good as possible in high-definition.

In this way, BluePoint Games acts more like Criterion, who restore the original film print as much as possible for its Blu-Ray releases. BluePoint has managed this restoration by having a team of over 30 people redrawing the original textures to ensure that the remasters look as close as possible to the original games when viewed from a high-definition source.

The end results look truly superb with vibrant detailed textures that make the games look better than you remember them to. Snake Eater and Peace Walker look particularly smart, and while high-definition highlights the sparseness of Metal Gear Solid 2’s locations, it still looks incredibly slick, particularly during cutscenes.

The biggest game to benefit is easily Peace Walker, which now has a proper way of rotating Snake’s viewpoint, but all three games are definitely worth revisiting, even if you have played them many times before.

Konami has two more collections in the pipeline (Zone Of The Enders and Silent Hill) it’s going to be interesting to see if they’ve been given the same loving treatment as this compilation.