Metal Gear Solid Delta is Metal Gear Solid 3. “What a revelation,” you’re thinking, “I can’t believe this remake is a lot like the game it’s remaking.”
But no, really, listen to me. Delta isn’t MGS3 the way that the Silent Hill 2 remake is Silent Hill 2, or the way Final Fantasy 7 Remake is FF7. Having spent an hour and a half with it, I can say this thing is a shot-for-shot, not-a-hair-out-of-place recreation of the original PS2 masterpiece that I regard as one of the greatest videogames ever made. Konami seems to have taken zero liberties with the classic.
Close your eyes and imagine MGS3 in scintillating Unreal Engine 5 and you’re 95% of the way to experiencing what I saw in my hands-on demo. Aside from a dusting of mechanics from MGS5 and a couple of quality of life features, this is the game as it was in a sparkly new package. With Hideo Kojima long-since absconded from Konami and trust in the company in short supply, I think that’s exactly what fans are looking for, even if I have a few philosophical questions about the value of a remake that hews so single-mindedly to the original.
And scene
My demo consisted of the entire Virtuous Mission—MGS3’s prologue that sets up the stakes of the story to come, introducing us to characters like Naked Snake, The Boss, Ocelot, and Volgin. It is—I’m going to have to find lots of different ways to say this throughout this preview—exactly as you remember it.
Except, of course, that it all looks a lot nicer. Konami’s taken advantage of the last two decades of technological progress to make MGS Delta look sharp as hell in Unreal Engine 5. The foliage is luscious; the jungle feels hot, looming and oppressive; and all those characters now have detailed faces and expressions to go along with their voice acting, which is taken directly from the original game—no re-recordings here.
There’s no denying it looks great. Konami and Virtuos have done an excellent job translating the feel of the original game to a slick modern package, so much so that I didn’t even miss the yellow-y piss filter that was a trademark of OG MGS3 (and which Konami says will be an option in the remake’s full release).
There was something a little odd about hearing those voices come from characters so exhaustively detailed, though. To be honest, it could just be that I’m much too used to the original game, but I felt something of an uncanny valley effect from hearing David Hayter and Josh Keaton’s over-the-top, anime-style voice acting come from models that otherwise looked so naturalistic and human. It’s a very minor qualm with what was otherwise an impressive polish job, though, and I suspect I’d settle into it over the course of longer playthrough.
What a thrill
Picking favourites
There is one new thing that long-time fans will immediately notice in Delta: New MGS games to choose as your favourite. Back in the day, the original MGS3 asked players which game in the series was best when they started a new game: 1, 2, or (in Subsistence) 3, as well as an option to say it was your first time playing an MGS, with some of those options unlocking bonuses or easter eggs. In Delta, you can now select other games like Peace Walker or MGS4 and 5, too. Alas, the bonuses for picking them weren’t in the build I played.
The outline of the Virtuous Mission is, say it with me, just as you remember it: Snake’s being dispatched to sneak through the jungle and secure a defecting Soviet scientist named Sokolov, he’s undertaking the “world’s first HALO jump” to do it, some guy on the plane calls him a “pantywaist” in a turn-of-phrase no human has used before or since, and so on. I’m almost certain the historical archive footage—video of Nikita Khrushchev and the like used to illustrate the game’s ’60s Cold War context—is exactly the same that was used back in the day. Even the R1-prompts, those opportunities to switch perspective mid-cutscene to see exactly what Snake is looking at, are all where they were on the PS2.
After about 15 minutes of cutscenes and codec calls (oh yes, this is still Metal Gear), I was in. Snake’s gear is caught on a tree and I had to movement tutorial my way over to it. The area, like every area I moved through in my demo, is a recreation of its original counterpart.
Konami hasn’t transitioned MGS Delta to an MGS5-style open world. I was still moving between areas—Dremuchij South, Dremuchij Swampland, Dolinovodno, Rassvet—separated by loading screens. Items like the SVD Sniper, XM16E1 assault rifle, and M37 shotgun were exactly where I remembered them, as were the enemies and their patrol routes. The only difference I could identify was the addition of a new collectible alongside the original game’s kerotan frogs: Little orange GA-KO ducks I could shoot to, presumably, unlock items later on down the line.
It does make me wonder, just a tad, what a version of Delta that took more creative liberties would look like. You’ll think I’m mad, probably justifiably. After all, do I really trust modern-day, Kojima-less Konami to do something interesting and new with the classic? Not really, but the fact is that I have MGS3 sitting on my SSD right now, easy to access and ready to play. It’s not a perfect version—though Konami seems relatively dedicated to fixing it up—but it’s still an excellent game. Do I really need a dolled-up but otherwise almost identical version? I do not, though I’m certain it’s what most people who aren’t me want.
Besides, parts of my demo were a joy even if they were very familiar. That Metal Gear sense of playful experimentation is intact. You can still hold enemies up and—by the magic of pointing your weapon at their head or their junk—force them to do a little dance that produces loot, and you can still drop hornets on foes’ heads or deploy tranquilised jungle creatures in combat.
That Metal Gear sense of playful experimentation is intact.
After finishing the demo once, I even went back in to try shooting out the ropes on the bridge across Dolinovodno. Yes, it works, and yes, it makes the damn thing hilariously impossible for enemies—and Snake—to cross. Tragically, my attempt to spark a time paradox by assassinating a young Revolver Ocelot didn’t work (the damn boy was invincible to my shotgun blasts), but I’m almost certain that’s a product of this being an early build of the game.
Kuwabara, kuwabara
So it’s still the Metal Gear you love in play, but it’s also in gameplay where the remake’s slight mechanical differences from its ancestor make themselves known. Despite not using the FOX Engine, it’s all a bit more MGS5. Snake can crouch-walk now, rather than having to shift fully between belly-crawling and sprinting around, and I could aim over Snake’s shoulder with the left trigger rather than being forced to use iron sights to get off more precise shots.
It never quite felt as fluid as MGS5 to me, but it’s certainly smoother to play than the PS2 game. I never found myself having to contort my hand into bizarre shapes to, as I did in the older games, stand on my tippy-toes while aiming down iron sights, nor did I ever get my close-quarters combat buttons mixed up and accidentally slit a hostage’s throat like I did in days of yore. The game now helpfully flashes up prompts to tell you which buttons are interrogate, knock out, and kill when you grab a bad guy from behind.
Other systems, like the survival viewer, are—hang on, let me get out the thesaurus—analogous and parallel to their appearance in the original game. The same. They’re the same, I mean. You still have to decide which weapons and items go in your quick-select and which stay in your backpack (and the more you have easily available, the quicker your stamina goes down), and you can still pop into the camouflage section to change your clothing and face paint to blend into the jungle.
The only difference I could spot was the addition of a couple of quality-of-life features: You can now hold up on the D-pad to quickly flick between a list of camo/face paint presets, or hold a different button to get quick-access to codec frequencies, and you can equip a compass in the left item menu to function as a quest marker, pointing you where to go to progress the story. The only bit of the survival viewer I didn’t have access to was the injury/cure system, but I’d be surprised if it was markedly different from the PS2 era.
So there are some slight changes, but it’s still very, very much MGS3 mechanically, so much so that I regularly found my muscle memory defaulting to the old game’s controller inputs with disastrous results. The full release of MGS Delta will let players use either the old gamepad control scheme or a new one, but my demo restricted me to the new one only. Does this mean I accidentally stood up when I wanted to lie down, or did a dashing roll when I meant to switch to first-person view mode? Did that then trigger an enemy alert and force me to go on a hand-to-hand tear through the jungle putting like a hundred KGB troops to sleep? The answers to these questions are sadly lost to time.
Okay, yes it did. Right in front of the devs, too. Mortifying.
You’re pretty good
So I think Metal Gear Solid Delta is shaping up to be exactly what fans want from it: A ludicrously faithful retelling of one of the greatest games of all time, with all the latest graphical bells and whistles and only the lightest of touches to make it feel a bit more playable for the Zoomers and Gen Alphas out there, who might balk at the zanier elements of the classic control scheme.
Of course, my own personal opinion is that I’ve never really gotten the point of remakes like that. With MGS3 Cool Original now playable on PC and Konami slowly tinkering away at it to make it an actually decent port, I’m perfectly happy to play that for the rest of my life, but I won’t pretend most fans don’t want a glitzy, accurate, and skilful re-do of their old favourite. If what I saw of Delta is anything to go by, that’s exactly what we’re getting. Way to go, Snake, age hasn’t slowed you down one bit.