Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops (PSP)

Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops

Kojima Productions/Konami

Review by Lauren

I need to preface this review with the following: I am an MGS fan. I've played and loved the entire main series, even when it kicked my ass. I'm not fantastic at action games, nor do I generally care for war games, but MGS has a charm that drew me in instantly. The fact that the developers cater to the fans certainly helps, as well. As for Portable Ops, I will summarize it as a good game. ...A good game that I surprisingly did not have much fun with. Allow me to elaborate.

MGS: Portable Ops introduces a much different gameplay aspect than what MGS fans are used to. Rather than controlling our hero alone, many other soldiers can be recruited and utilized throughout the game. PO is mission-based, allowing you to select locations to investigate on a map screen, and then return to the map screen after your mission is completed or aborted. This screen also allows you to manage your units, view your inventory, or even wait for a few days or nights to recover your health or progress side missions along.

As an example of the soldier recruitment, you can send out three people along with Snake as part of the "Sneaking Unit." You can swap between them by choosing a nearby hiding spot (which isn't always available) for Snake and ducking inside of a trusty cardboard box. This will allow the next character to do his or her business while Snake is safely hidden from enemies.

There are a few reasons why you would want to bring along extra characters. Each soldier you recruit has her or her own skill levels in every fighting style (handgun, sniper rifle, traps, CQC, etc.), as well as medical and technical skills. On top of that, some soldiers have bonuses, such as the ability to run faster, drag bodies faster, or display all items on the map screen. I personally never chose to deal with enemies using anyone but Snake, but I did make ample use of the "drag bodies faster" guy.

The medical and technical recruits don't even have to be deployed to be useful. Simply having them in your medical or technical roster will result in them constantly creating and even inventing useful items, weapons, and ammunition. It was certainly a nice surprise to complete a mission and find that my technical unit had invented thermal goggles for me, or that my medical unit had produced a powerful medical kit. Sometimes I'd use the "Wait" option a few times between missions just to see if they'd come up with anything new for me.

You will also have to assemble a spy unit. In the menu screen, you can assign up to four units to each team, and teams may be deployed to every accessible area on your map. Thankfully, you don't have to do anything further - just leave the spies for a while and when you return from your next mission, they'll likely have a report for you. This is useful for learning the whereabouts of hidden weapons and items, and to unlock side missions. It is also required for advancing the story at times.

So, how do you get all of these soldiers? Well, you need to knock out your potential recruit with either CQC or your trusty Mk22, then haul him or her back to your starting point on the stage. You can also bring the soldier to a cardboard box containing another teammate, and then call a certain radio frequency to have him or her hauled away. The idea is that your group is taking the person away to have a "friendly" chat, eventually resulting in the soldier joining your cause. Some will take longer than others. Stat-wise, it's always a gamble when you haul back a new recruit, but it's generally worth the trouble unless you're in a dangerous area.

I was initially very concerned over the lack of inventory space in comparison to other MGS games. I'm used to hauling along a whole collection of weapons and items, and even the backpack of MGS3 wasn't too limiting. But get used to some serious limitations here - Snake is down to four inventory slots. Considering the fact that reserve ammo counts as an item, you'll often end up having to choose between offense and defense. And sometimes, you're just going to have to abort and restart (or have a guide handy) if you didn't happen to bring the right weapon along. I understand that this means you have to be strategic and bring the right weapons/items along (which would be of more benefit if I cared to use other team members than Snake), but I still simply didn't like it, especially when boss fights came around. A lot of missions require you to bring along an item that is of no use otherwise, and I didn't enjoy being handicapped because of that.

There is a nice variety of weapons available throughout the game, including some of my favourites like the Mosin-Nagant. Unfortunately, due to the aforementioned lack of inventory space, I just didn't get to use all the weapons I would have liked to. Sure, I could have brought them along on extra missions just for fun, but I unfortunately didn't have the drive to replay this game as compared to other MGS titles.

Despite the lack of inventory space, the gameplay itself was actually not that difficult, due to the setup of the missions. The goal of most missions is to reach an "X" on your map, which also appears as a shining red point in the stage itself. In other MGS games, you get used to the idea that if you start a ruckus, you're going to have to start some serious bloodshed or find an incredibly good hiding space if you want to escape alive. Portable Ops, in contrast, often lets you pretty much charge around recklessly and make a dash for the X with an entire army chasing you, yet everything is fine and the stage ends once you reach the checkpoint. It's not as realistic as it probably should be, though I admit that it saved my butt on a few clumsy occasions. I was also surprised that the cardboard box seems absolutely infallible in this game, when it's usually a risk in other MGS titles. If you're lucky enough to finding a spot for your box after starting a commotion, you're essentially guaranteed safety. You can also abort or restart your mission at any time, which is handy for stages entered solely for procurement purposes.

Boss fights were either very frustrating or absurdly easy, and it all depended on which weapon I brought with me. That element of the game was a little bit unsatisfying and imbalanced to me. And on the subject of imbalance, I was highly disappointed in discovering that special character passwords can be entered very early on in the game. The characters made available through the Password menu are completely "broken", all with incredibly good abilities. Recruiting all of them takes a couple of minutes, while recruiting a team of similar talent the "real" way would have taken many hours and a lot of luck. I understand that the classic use for passwords is for the purpose of an easy shortcut, but MGS games don't usually spoon-feed the player. I think this feature should have at least been disabled until the second playthrough.

My main complaint about MGS: Portable Ops is the controls. The default controls are difficult to get used to, since they have you moving with the analog nub and moving the camera with the arrow buttons directly above. Obviously, it can be tough to control both at once without a lot of practice, and the worst of this happened in boss fights. Granted, you can switch this arrangement, but I personally couldn't get used to any of the other combinations. It just doesn't feel right to me without two analog sticks. But of course, I understand that this is a result of the game being on the PSP, and not a problem with the design of the game itself. The word "portable" is right there in the title, so I can't fault the game too much for it. Besides, its prequel didn't even have a controllable camera. It's just disappointing that the controls never felt quite right, especially after getting used to the beautifully smooth controls of MGS4.

The radar in Portable Ops is a sound radar, similar to the one found in Snake Eater. It's certainly no Soliton or Solid Eye, but it sort of gives you an idea of where guards are. My problem with it was that it's difficult to tell if a guard is behind a wall or not, since all you see is the sound pattern. Often I'd have to open a door into a terrifyingly red sound wave and just cross my fingers that the guard wasn't waiting there to kill me, but usually he'd end up in a side room nowhere near where I had to go. Thankfully, a map feature on the pause menu will show indicators for guards that are very closeby, but it's a bit of a hassle to toggle between the two. Better than nothing, I suppose.

The graphics look fantastic for a portable system - not far removed from that of MGS3: Snake Eater. Character models look decent and backgrounds are nicely detailed. The real draw here is in the cutscenes - interestingly, they're presented in a gritty "comic book" style. It suited the game very nicely.

I can't say that I really noticed the music in this one. If the music kicks in, generally that means something bad or hectic is happening, so I was a bit distracted when it came to that. The voice acting, thankfully, is just as great as you'd expect for an MGS game. Even random guards were voiced by some pretty big names, and David Hayter is as excellent as always.

It's hard for me to judge the story. While it seemed to have all of the elements of an MGS plot, I just didn't find myself caring as much as I usually would. Perhaps the "mini-mission" format combined with mostly new characters made it hard for me to get really attached to this one. And because of where it fits into the timeline of the series, it's pretty easy to tell exactly where the story is going, making it fairly inconsequential overall. It was still decent, but without the impact that I'm used to feeling in MGS games. Similarly, I was surprised to see an MGS game in which there were very few quirks. Something was just missing, and I think it may have been Kojima's directing position.

Portable Ops lasted me about 17 hours total, including one full playthrough, many extra hours of recruiting, and some playing with the bonus content. My playtime was probably much longer than average, though, since I captured many more soldiers than I actually needed, in hopes of getting something similar to the ridiculous story characters attainable through passwords and/or assorted challenges. Subsequent playthroughs are very fast in comparison, since the game becomes more about memorizing guard positions and either taking them out or just making a break for the X point.

Although I was guarded about the squad-based element of Portable Ops, I ended up satisfied with how that aspect was pulled off. I appreciate that I was not forced to use anybody but Snake aside from a couple of short story missions, and that I could instead benefit from the additional recruits in ways that I personally found useful. Portable Ops is a mostly well-designed game that I'm sure I would have enjoyed much more on a Dual Shock controller.