1/23/2006 12:07:04 AM
Metal Gear Acid PSP ReviewBy Mark Diller
Some things just go great together. Chocolate and peanut butter. Football and cheerleaders. Britney Spears and your television’s mute button. And now, with Konami’s “Metal Gear Acid,” we have a new pairing for the ages: 3rd-person stealth action and strategy card games.
Wha...?
It’s true, Konami has taken their venerable “Metal Gear” franchise and inaugurated it on the PSP by way of a strategy card game. When you heard that Snake was coming to your handheld, you might have imagined yourself sneaking up on enemies and exerting quiet but lethal force, and you are ... it’s just that you do it by way of playing cards from your hand. Strange? A little. But it’s also a strangely successful mix of two game genres that you might never have thought to put together.
The game does take some getting used to, particularly since the in-game tutorial is one of the first adversaries that you have to face down. I don’t know if it’s been badly translated from the Japanese or just wasn’t that great in the first place, but you’ll come through the tutorial with only the vaguest notion of how this game is supposed to be played, and it will take a few levels of trial and error before you really figure out what you’re supposed to be doing. There’s a lot going on with those playing cards, and the level objectives aren’t always as clear as they should have been, but if you stick with it you might find yourself quite engrossed in the game.
There’s a story involving terrorists, secret scientific installations, endangered politicians, and murderous dolls that’s told by way of static artwork and text-only dialog (Konami certainly didn’t go all out on the eye candy), but I’m not going to go into that--mostly because I’m not sure I really figured out what was going on with the story in the first place. You might get more into the story than I did, or you might play it like me, taking each level as a puzzle that you have to solve. You’ll find yourself at one side of a map with your objective on the other side, and guards, security cameras, and robots standing in your way. You have to get from here to there either without being seen or by killing everyone quickly enough that they don’t set off the alarm.
“Metal Gear Acid” is a turn-based strategy game, so you have all the time you need to figure out your next move, and that move will be defined by the cards you’ve drawn from the pile. Every card has basically two functions--move or act. You can move with nearly every card, or you can perform the action defined by that card (shoot a weapon, perform healing on yourself, evade an enemy’s weapons, or even call in an air strike)--but not both. Generally speaking you only get two moves per round, so you’re confronted by strategy choices on nearly every move: if there’s an enemy you need to take out, do you move first and then shoot him from close range (therefore leaving yourself out in the open at the end of the turn) or do you shoot and then move (ensuring that you’ll be able to hide, but also making it less likely that your shot will be fatal)? If you need to move and don’t have a movement card in your hand, which one do you use--that weapons card that you’ve been saving for when you need it, or the healing card that you might need if things don’t go according to plan, or maybe that grenade card that could be lethal but is likely to alert the other guards to your presence? Puzzling over your options like this accounts for a good 95% of the time you spend playing the game.
Is it fun? I thought so. It can certainly be frustrating when you’re stuck on a level and can’t figure how to get past it, but then when you do crack the code and move on the feeling of accomplishment is all the greater. But bear in mind that I enjoy strategy games, and I particularly enjoy games where I have time to think about my move before I make it. If you’re an adrenaline junkie who cut your teeth on twitch shooter games, you might not like this game nearly as much. And if you’re into instant gratification, “Metal Gear Acid” might ask for a little more patience than you care to offer--there are lots of levels and lots of twists in that curious little story before you’re finally done. But if you like the idea of spending hours or even days working your way through a series of strategic challenges, this could be the game for you.
Ratings (1-10):
Graphics: 5. In a word, the graphics are “cheap”--what’s there is fine, but Konami made very little effort in the graphics arena and it shows (particularly in the cut scenes).
Sound: 5. Same as with the graphics: dialog is expressed by text, and otherwise all the effects are straight off of an effects disk. It’s not that the sound or graphics are bad, it’s just they’re both severely limited in scope and effect.
Gameplay: 8. Adding randomly-drawn cards to a stealth action game works much better than you might think.
Story: 7. Both weird and interesting, as only a Japanese game can be.
Replayability: 7. I could see trying to play this game all the way through without killing anyone. I’m not sure it’s possible, but it would be interesting to try.
Overall: 8. An odd but interesting alternative for strategy addicts.
Metal Gear Acid PSP Review
