Metal Gear Solid: Conscription-at-Gunpoint Simulator.

I really shouldn't be doing a review for this game.  I should review some other game that I actually like for the PSP, and there are quite a few, but for as much trouble that I went through to find this game, I wasn't terribly impressed with it.

Now before anybody cries foul, the game isn't bad, it's just not very good, either.  Part of this just stems from the fact that the controls on the PSP are pretty limited, and seeing as how MGS3 utilized just about every button on the PS2, the gameplay just feels really stripped on Portable Ops.  Of course, the controls are not nearly as obtuse and annoying as they were on The Twin Snakes.

First off, the good:  The game looks pretty good, the game has an interesting plot, which does figure into the overall story arc of the series, introducing characters that would appear in later games, and while the controls feel stripped, they still work well for the most part.  The sound is great, and though the voice-acting in the game is limited, it's still very good, and despite the lack of in-game cutscenes, the highly-stylized comic approach to the story bits are actually pretty slick.

The plot is that Big Boss has retired from Fox but has been kidnapped and taken to a South American archipelago, just a handful of miles south of Cuba.  The place was going to be a secret nuclear launch site for the Soviet Union but it was abandoned after talks of nuclear arms reductions began between the US and the USSR.  Now a group of armed renegades have taken the abandoned base for their own nefarious purposes, and have abducted Big Boss in hopes of locating where the remainder of the Philospher's Legacy is hidden.


Thanks to some help from a cellmate, Snake escapes and begins to infiltrate the island, learning along the way that he and his former comrade, Major Zero has been set up to take the fall in regards to this incident.


The real problem for me here is that the game just kinda sprawls out in your front yard like a passed out drunk at 2AM in terms of gameplay.  First off, rather than being focused around Big Boss infiltrating the base solo, he decides to recruit the disenfranchised soviet soldiers who originally guarded the base.  The entire game pretty much revolves around the notion of capturing soldiers, dragging them to a truck (or having other captured soldiers dragging them to the truck), and waiting a short period of time for them to be recruited into your ranks.


You can form squads from these soldiers and then deploy them in certain areas of the base, either to gather supplies, intelligence, or whatnot.  That's all well and good, but I just didn't find it very compelling and more tedious than anything.


Naturally, when Big Boss goes out in the field, he can take several other soldiers with him, and switch between them on fly, even picking where each soldier starts out before entering an area.  The advantage of doing this is that while Big Boss sticks out like a sore thumb, the soldiers he recruits can blend in with their comrades as long as they're wearing the same uniforms and don't do anything to arouse their suspicions, which is kinda neat, but there'll be areas where some soldiers will just see through the facade in a heartbeat and all hell will break loose.


Another thing I don't like is the mission-oriented story progression.  Rather than having one big world, it's all broken down into selectable areas from a central hub, and you go out and do stuff, eventually you can do missions that progress the story, but...


It's really hard for me to describe what I don't like about this game.  I think what really got to me is the whole "Pokemon" mentality of Portable Ops.  The entire thing revolves around recruiting soldiers and stuff, but it just feels like it's needless fluff to extend the game's length.  What I really don't like is the limited inventory that Snake and the other soldiers have.  I don't mind limited inventory, but any given character in the game can only carry up to 4 items at a time, and that includes weapons, ammo, and restorative items.  It's really damn annoying, despite the fact that the soldiers are there to supplement it.


What it all comes down to is that all the gameplay elements really just don't click together.  They aren't bad, but they just aren't compelling.  Despite the decent controls, the gameplay still feels down, the soldier recruiting is tedious and boring, and the day/night cycle and the mission-oriented progression just feels very uninspired.  Sure there's multiplayer, but that doesn't excuse a weak single-player experience.  The plot is pretty good, but it's not compelling enough for me to trudge through really obtuse gameplay.  The game just feels dumbed down all across the board:  Dumbed down controls, dumbed down strategy elements, and dumbed down squad-based gameplay.


Look, I know this is about Big Boss, and how he began his career as a cult of personality that soldiers flocked to for salvation, but could they not have found a better way of demonstrating that without sacrificing the gameplay?