I didn’t have to pause the video to take this screengrab – this is the whole first five minutes.
My relationship to Metal Gear is equal parts love and hate – I expect that goes for a lot of you, too. Maybe it’s cliche nowadays to slink around as a genetically engineered super-spy in rubber pajamas and karate-chop Spetsnaz chaps – but Metal Gear essentially created that genre. When it’s at its karate-chopping best, Metal Gear is a blast.
Pity then that every successive Metal Gear title seems to move further away from its karate-chopping roots and towards a bizarre science-fiction soap opera exposited through interminable, unskippable cutscenes full of mind-blowingly earnest dialogue.
With the console series on a bit of a hiatus, Konami have released a new iOS game featuring Solid Snake and his chatty compatriots: Metal Gear Solid Social Ops. Currently only available in Japan, Social Ops will presumably get an English localization at some point.
I don’t want to make a habit of writing about a game just to have a laugh about it – but you have to see this gameplay video. It is everything that is terrible about Metal Gear, concentrated into a toxic slurry. With Social Ops, Konami appear to have finally made a Metal Gear that dispenses entirely with all of that bothersome “espionage action” and delivered all codec conversations, all the time.
