Overview:

Set a few years after the events of Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, you’re following along cyborg ninja Raiden as he jetsets across the world.  This isn’t a typical MGS game with you trying to practice stealth and avoiding combat.  Nope!  You’re actively wanting fights so you can show off all your ninja moves.  Not to mention you get to go into a slow-mo effect where you chop people or objects up into hundreds of pieces because why not!?  It’s a fast action game with parries, dodging, and chopping up dudes.  Quite the departure but, honestly, a very welcome addition to the series!

Visuals:

This game comes from the time when brown was king.  Everything has that gritty realistic brown smudgeness to it so everything kind of looks like garbage.  It’s not a bad looking game but it is from a time.  The characters look pretty good but they just look like a mess of cyborg parts.  There’s not much to really say about the game because it is pretty generic and really no style, but that’s not a knock.  It’s just forgettable.

Audio:

Lord, this game is crazy!  All of the weird little references to pop culture, the way people talk, the music…it’s all up there.  Raiden is always trying to seem like this deep badass but just comes off as a dope the entire time.  The chatter is nonstop with a radio play happening the entire time.  The voice acting is pretty good with the usual heavy hitters of voice actors reading absurd stuff.  The real meat and potatoes is the music that kicks in during the fights.  It’s terrible trash metal that, like Raiden, is trying to seem edgy and cool but just also comes off as silly.  I love it!

Completion:

I FINISHED THIS GAME!  It’s a pretty short affair and very straight forward but it is a fun game.  The combat was really fun and intuitive save for the shitty camera.  It couldn’t keep up with the action.  The story goes places and ends on a nice little (prophetic) note but I enjoyed my time.  It was a nice MGS addition to the lore and the world after MGS4.  I would have loved to see more exploration of the world after but this is all we got.  Nice job Raiden!