At the start of Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, Naked Snake is deployed into the Soviet jungle for a straightforward stealth mission, codename Virtuous Mission. Snake’s a trained and competent soldier who’s more than capable to do the job, but in his ear is a full roster of personnel backing him up with intel and tips to get the job done.
It’s rather serendipitous that Konami has decided to bring back the most highly-regarded entry to its highly-regarded game series as a remake, called Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater, with a team consists of their own internal development team, with support by Virtuos, for this somewhat straightforward mission.
I personally would argue that the 2004 original still holds up today, a simple re-release of MGS3: Snake Eater would have have suffice to bring back the Tactical Espionage Action game to the gaming mainstream. In fact, Konami had done that. But the returning game publisher, which has lost a lot of goodwill among gamers from 10 years ago, is slowly clawing back goodwill with remake projects like this and last year’s Silent Hill 2 remake.
As a training exercise to rebuild its game development team and pipeline, as well as a show of effort to regain trust among gamers, Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater can be considered a success. A million copies sold on day-1 is, as Snake would say, pretty good.
But a faithful remake can only do so much when the source material is already an impeccably evergreen video game. This is no weapon to surpass Metal Gear, but a strong case can be made for the development team being able to live up to the meme in the near future.
Presentation
Suffice to say, Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater looks good in Unreal Engine 5. But if you didn’t tinker with any of the settings, and are fond of the original, you might notice it’s missing that little something something. That certain je ne se quois that defined the original’s aesthetic.
It’s missing, as it’s colloquially known today as, the piss filter by default.
But not to worry, as to those who would like to see through rose-tinted (greenish-yellow-tinted in this case) glasses, there’s an option to enable the “legacy” graphics filter to give that same warm, fuzzy nostalgic feel to this Cold War thriller.
And this is one of the many things Metal Gear Solid Delta lives up to the one symbol change to its name. Delta is what folks in certain industries would talk about tiny, minute differences. In motorsports, a time delta is measured in the tenths, even hundredths, of a second. And this symbolic naming choice, as per this interview by Famitsu, is as deliberate as the direction of this remake having marginal differences. As much as it is a remake, MGS Delta is a faithful remake, in that it painstakingly recreate all the quirks and features you’d expect from the 2004 original.
All the assets may be recreated from scratch for Unreal Engine, but it’s all used in the same way and place. The voice acting has been re-recorded retaining most if not all of voice cast as the original, but carries the specific charm and writing style that at the time seemed cutting edge (not many games have full voiceovers) but somewhat dated (Snake repeating keywords as a question during a long lore-dump spiel is what many MGS fans find endearing but for the uninitiated sounds cringe). The sound effects for the menus are just as you remember. That alert sound, that has since transcended into the mainstream consciousness that you can find it used even in some random Malaysian panel show, is still iconic and preserved.
Even the aspects that have retroactively feel questionable are retained. You can still press R1 in some cutscenes to experience the male gaze, which I understand will leave some people peeved, but left me howling—no way a modern game would have this feature without getting cancelled. It was peculiar back then to have big posters of contemporary Japanese models in skimpy outfits, and they still retain them here, with a more wholesome twist even (play in the New Style controls and the posters are updated to more current photos by the featured models, including one being a family portrait).
Everything is kept and brought forward to this remake to preserve the original vision. Even the credits of the original staff are kept and displayed. To say Hideo Kojima parted ways with Konami in bad terms is an understatement, but credit to Konami for not erasing history with this remake.
While those aspects are dated, but the cinematics are still top-notch today. Good cinema never ages, and those wild cutscenes featuring slick motion-captured action, tense drama, odd supernatural twists and intrigue still holds up today.
There is one thing to point out and that’s the imperfect performance. Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater can hit the 60 FPS gold standard like the original was, but not rock-solid. Engage in a little mayhem and even on performance mode on consoles, the framerate will dip really low. Anytime more than two guns are fired that smooth and silky performance goes bye bye. Not ideal.
Snake Eater was already perfect as it was as a PS2 game, and this modern 9th-gen-console remake, three generations apart, solidifies that fact further. Just about everything in the presentation aspect remains the bar for a modern AAA game.
But if almost everything about the game is the same as the original, wouldn’t that make this… a remaster?
Look, what constitutes a remake, a remaster, a reboot, a reimagining, or an enhanced/reimagined edition is just murky these days, as there’s no hard line that defines them. Funny how Virtuos also contributed to the new Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion release, which was dubbed a remaster, despite its graphics now powered by Unreal Engine. This is a conversation for another day, but we’re due to having one.
But as it stands, MGS Delta really can pass off as a remaster, but it’s a testament to how faithful the team was in recreating the same game with modern game development tools.
Gameplay
Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater, based on Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, follows the story of lone operative codenamed Naked Snake, as he enters into the Soviet Jungle during the height of the Cold War for a simple stealth mission. Things escalated from there as he and his support team discovers the US’s Cobra unit has defected, brought over nuclear weapons and now assisting an insurgent Soviet militia that aims to topple the current regime which may result in a new world war. Also, they’re developing mechs of mass destruction. The simple stealth mission has now become the one covert operation that can stop the Cold War escalating into nuclear annihilation.
If that sounds like a lot of fluff to set a stage for a video game, sit down. This is the series that pioneered the art of frontloading lore with long chat sessions and cutscenes. You will have to learn about this world where real history is interweaved with something that makes no sense but shut up they’re doing cool stuff. Even the opening hours, you’ll be sitting through at least half and hour worth of exposition. Hideo Kojima games have done a better job at lore-dumping since, now that I re-experienced how it was back then.
It is worth sitting through all the yapping, as the core gameplay of MGS Delta remains… solid. You sneak around, use various methods to avoid detection, and if detected, there are various methods with dealing with that too. Go prone and blend with the environment by equipping the right camouflage or just hide in a box. Distract them by throwing used-up gun magazines or well, actual magazines. Knock them out with CQC (close quarters combat), hit them with a tranquilizer gun where they just sloop or lure them into traps where they’ll fall into their demise. Or just go guns blazing and engage in bloody murder, but expect reinforcements and consequences. The choice is yours, and you have freedom in what method you’d approach this mission. It’s possible to complete the game as a pacifist, or the total, grim opposite of that.
Essentially, MGS Delta, like the rest of the MGS series, are honorary immersive sims. It’s awesome.
The game is linear, with only a few branching paths to scour for secrets or optional gear. But there are enough sequences where you’re able to tackle objectives like it’s a sandbox full of opportunities. Don’t expect MGS V levels of freedom, though. But it’s definitely more than MGS2 had back then, which is a welcome improvement.
It’s fun to revisit the area where you have to find your way inside a warehouse, overlooking a body of water, with soldiers crawling on standby. I vividly remember having trouble approaching this bit stealthily, and attempting to do it again, with varying results every quick-load, is exactly what I expected a faithful remake would do.
There is one big change to MGS Delta, and that’s the option to play with New Style controls. This turns MGS Delta into a third-person game with camera controls on the right stick. MGS 3: Subsistence, the enhanced version of Snake Eater released a year after, already experimented with this control scheme which later evolved in MGS4, but New Style isn’t a recreation of that. Rather, it adopts the controls to modern video game conventions. If you never play MGS 3, the new controls would feel natural.
But you can play it old school, Legacy Style. This option lets you experience MGS Delta like it’s 2004. Top-down camera. Button-sensitive gun trigger (modern controllers don’t have analog buttons anymore, so it’s now mapped to the shoulder triggers instead), and a bird’s eye view of your surroundings.
I switched back and forth between the two, but I find that I can’t really get back to the Legacy Style controls, not while I’m hopping in-between playing other games. But New Style has its new challenges. Third-person view limits how much you see of the area compared to the Legacy Style, which makes some of the sneaking missions more challenging than expected. And being able to stick to walls and cover just don’t feel as good and slick as they are in Legacy Style. I have to change the way I play between the two styles, which is fascinating. At least this solution allows the diehards with better muscle memory of the original than I had and the new players who only seen their VTuber oshis play this to experience this game in their own unique ways. And both of them valid.
The core gameplay is solid, but it’s not without faults. I still think melee is clunky despite all they hype about CQC. It’s easy for you to get thrown into a shield bash loop, stuck prone, can’t get up in time before the enemy shield bashes you again until your untimely demise. Shooting feels good still, thanks to one simple trick of seeing enemies react to what part of the body they are being shot at. So many games can be improved by rewarding players doing crotch shots, as in shooting enemies in the family jewels.
And what is a Metal Gear Solid game without its memorable boss encounters. Snake faces against the infamous Cobra unit, including The Boss, and each fight will test his mettle in different ways. These bosses have mind-bogglingly brilliant, 4th-wall-breaking gimmicks, some are legendary enough to be mainstream trivia fit for a comedy panel podcast. And yes, such gimmicks are still retained here. I waited a whole week to see The End meet his natural end, and he did. This is a faithful remake, after all.
Metal Gear Solid Delta provides a new way to experience Snake Eater with a modern control scheme, while still retaining the original. Both ways of play have its quirks, but more importantly, the breadth of options available in the stealth-action game, where your ingenuity is often rewarded, is still fresh and fun two decades later. And the boss fights are just as thrilling.
Content
It surprised me that Snake Eater isn’t a very long game. Especially for modern standards, where 30 hours is considered ample playtime while 60 hours and above reserved tor long, epix RPGs. Metal Gear Solid Delta can be beaten within 15 hours.
But the length is just nice. There’s enough sneaking and action opportunities as well as set-pieces to leave you entertained. And those long lore-dumps don’t feel way too long as there’s enough gameplay moments to balance it out.
Metal Gear Solid Delta offers incentives for doing multiple playthroughs via earnable titles. Think you got what it takes to beat the game under 5 hours? With minimal alerts caused? On European Extreme difficulty? Then you’ll be busy for longer than a playthrough’s length if you decide to hunt them all
The story is still fantastic. Snake Eater is canonically the earliest title in the Metal Gear timeline, and the narrative thread it spins can be experienced without entangling yourself with the rest of the MGS lore beforehand. It’s a self-contained story, with many, many hints and foreshadowing of future events. New fans shouldn’t worry about not getting all the references. Trying to untangle this spy thriller of a story is already a lot to take in. In a fun way. There may not be a James Bond here, and the setting isn’t as glamorous, but it has all the twists and turns of a spy flick. That theme song at the start is a sign of intention, not just homage.
Fascinatingly, Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater retains the silly mini-games the original MGS3 had. Including that one dream sequence that has been fleshed out by… PlatinumGames. The Savage Guy sequence was a nice surprise change of pace for those who accidentally stumbled on it. But here, Konami essentially asks Platinum to create a vertical slice for a horror-themed character action game. This little sequence got juice, man. Hold-down button combos, launchers, hit-stop hit confirms. If this is the first domino to fall that leads to PlatinumGames working with Konami again for a new game since Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance, I’m in. They had no business of going this far as contracting another external developer for a mini-game, but they did. And I hope it leads to something bigger down the line.
And for those playing on PlayStation, the Snake VS Monkey mini-game featuring Ape Escape is well alive.
This isn’t the end of content drops, either. Metal Gear Solid Delta will also have a multiplayer mode, Metal Gear Online. This remake really isn’t just bringing back all the features from Snake Eater, but also from Subsistence as well.
All in all, Metal Gear Solid Delta’s content offering is fine. It’s not a girthy game, and it has no business to be so. It’s just as long as you remember the original game, and in a few months time, should have all the features that this title and subsequent re-releases has had.
Personal Enjoyment
Here’s a funny story about my relationship with the Metal Gear Solid series. My first entry was Metal Gear Solid 2, I played that when I was still in primary school. Imagine the confusion of the kid, who shouldn’t be playing it, attempted to parse that madness. I did play Metal Gear Solid 3 when it was released back then, a little older and while I never finished it, I find it much more enjoyable.
I never really got to play more of MGS afterwards and my life choices have made me inoculated from the parasocial cult in praise of Hideo Kojima. So I’m no diehard fan of either.
And somehow life finds a way of forcing me to experience to body of works which has the illustrious game designer’s name on it. If I have a nickel for every Kojima-associated game I played this year, it would be two.
That being said, I utterly enjoyed playing through Snake Eater again, and seeing it till the end and not just until The End boss. The intricate stealth action gameplay still holds up today. The various little, immersive details that you can use to your advantage, like disabling a soldier’s radio, remains sublime. At no point I feel the core gameplay feel dated. This 20-year-old game, with some tweaks to the control scheme, feels like a modern stealth-action game would play today if they were in abundance. A cover system, crouch and prone, multiple ways to dispatch and sneak around enemies.
The little dings and chimes the menu makes evoke good nostalgia of that era’s menu and audio design.
Having to sit through the long talks and cutscenes, however, has become a challenge. My attention span for long conversations has decreased over the years. I know that’s not the game’s fault, but too often I feel checked out. I would’ve have skimmed through the conversations if it was some other game, but Snake Eater’s charming English voice cast stops me. So it has that going for it.
I find this faithful remake to be perfect. I’d prefer remakes that go about things like this, being faithful to the source material but present it to fit modern standards. If that means questionable content has to be there, so be it.
But when the source material is already a masterpiece, there’s really not much you can do to wow new players or reel back old ones who may be sceptical, who might look at this as a cheap, safe cash-grab. And I have no way of a rebuttal against these strawmen I invented for argument’s sake, but I won’t be surprised if that’s a legit sentiment. Hey, some folks may hold resentment to what the publisher did 10 years ago, I don’t blame them. But like The Boss once said, “enemies can change along with the times.”
Verdict
Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater is a remake so faithful that it could pass as a mere remaster. When the original source material is nigh-on perfection, having a much-welcomed modern control scheme doesn’t feel like that much of a game-changer, even if it is much-needed for more new gamers to experience this masterpiece.
From the standpoint of the consumer, Metal Gear Solid Delta offers nothing new, and that’s by design. This is Snake Eater again, touched-up to be presentable for 2025, but not altered in any major way. Everything you remember from the 2004 original, for better or worse, is preserved.
But from the standpoint of the developers and publisher, I hope that having to recreate this classic teached the them a thing or two of what Metal Gear Solid, and Metal Gear, stands for. They have disassembled the gun that is MGS3, and created every part of it with modern techniques and material and assembled it as MGS Delta. If they can use the learnings from this to bold create a new Metal Gear Solid game, it may be all worth revisiting this classic. They can’t possibly make something worse than Metal Gear Survive, right?
Played on base PS5. Review copy provided by Soft Source, distributor of the game in Asia.
Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater
Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater is a remake so faithful that it could pass as a mere remaster. When the original source material is nigh-on perfection, having a much-welcomed modern control scheme doesn't feel like that much of a game-changer, even if it is much-needed for more new gamers to experience this masterpiece
- Presentation 9
- Gameplay 9
- Content 9
- Personal Enjoyment 9