Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater review – A reverent remake of one of gaming’s best

How things change. Konami was done with console games in 2015 and now there’s a Metal Gear Solid 3 remake in our hands and a new Silent Hill on the horizon. The same year, the company was scrubbing Hideo Kojima’s name from games and promotional materials. The game director’s name has flashed onto the screen at least six times during the opening few minutes of Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater. You’d struggle to pick out the devs who worked on the remake, such an effort has been made to give props to the game’s legacy devs. I suppose time heals all wounds — even the festering sores of a public breakup with a former lover (who’s now in a threeway with Norman Reedus and Geoff Keighley). 

Still, no matter how much some things change, some stay the same…

For starters, MGS3 is still unbelievably camp — Ocelot, please stop meowing, please, my wife is judging me, please. David Hayter’s Naked Snake still grunts more than a Minecraft villager, repeats what people say, and gets horny over a pistol. He still gets bodied by his woman mentor over and over, to the point where if it was released for the first time today, basement goblins brain-poisoned by Facebook reels would be calling it a “humiliation ritual”. Afterwards, he still calls his support team like a kid telling their mum that someone’s picking on them. Every woman in the game still gets their babylons out at every opportunity, and the bad guys are extremely gropey little freaks, to the point where there’s a content warning upfront to say, “Lads, this game is a little old fashioned, if you know what I mean?” A guy still shoots at you with a tommy gun made of hornets. It’s still – despite some of that and because of some of that (but definitely not the gropey stuff) – one of the best games ever made. 

The team at Konami has treated the original Metal Gear Solid 3 like a cathedral renovation, conserving the history – the legacy – while addressing structural weaknesses and restoring the stained glass windows. Finally, we have a version of Metal Gear Solid 3 that looks better than the cutscenes on Konami’s pachinko machine. 

If you haven’t played the original, you’re probably wondering what all the fuss is about. In the words of the game’s main villain: Very well, I will explain it to you before I kill you.

Metal Gear Solid 3 is part Rambo and part Bond. You’re on an infiltration mission through jungles, mountains, and compounds to rescue a scientist and bring down a mechanised tank with nuclear capabilities — how you do that is up to you. You’re dropped in with essentially nothing and you have to procure your equipment on-site, growing your personal arsenal until it’s vast and versatile, allowing for many different playstyles. You could feasibly run and gun your way through the game, but it also supports playthroughs where you kill no one and are never even seen. 

The game arrived at a time before the triple-A games industry had settled on “best-practices” and standardized control schemes so there was still plenty of experimentation. Metal Gear Solid and its four sequels (and the spinoffs) are all completely different stealth games as a result, with Snake Eater focusing on light survival elements and camouflage concealment. Instead of the binary detection of other stealth games – you’re either seen or not – MGS3 assigns a percentage value to your visibility based on the environment around you versus the clothes you’re wearing. This remake retains all of that but makes it even better by taking into account the dirtiness of your outfit. Cake yourself in mud and you’re essentially invisible when crawling through sludge – just watch it’s not deep enough to accidentally drown in. Crawl through a pile of leaves and it turns your fatigues into a makeshift ghillie suit. The additions to the formula are few, but they’re all additive and don’t detract from the intended experience at all. 

The developers even kept the areas you explore exactly the same as the original — these are bite-sized stealth puzzles separated by loading screens. There’s lots of variety, from large indoor areas that feel like classic Metal Gear Solid settings to dense jungles where you can watch enemies from a tree branch, or creep between mounds on a mountaintop as the wind rages and a helicopter circles above. Part of me wishes they’d experimented with opening the game up and removing the loading screens, but it’d be a fundamentally different game if they did, so it’s understandable. Why would you mess too much with one of the best games ever made? You wouldn’t dare. 

Another change is how the game tracks wounds. As with the original, you have to dig bullets out of your body, splint broken bones, rub ointment on burns, and use your cigar to burn off leeches. But instead of solely being tracked as a list of events in a menu, every battle wound stays visible on Snake’s body. His clothes tear and soak with blood, and old wounds close up and become scars, marking a fleshy diary of your playthrough. It’s a really cool addition that adds to the fantasy of you being outgunned deep in enemy territory. 

You can play the whole game through as Kojima intended, with a fixed camera and the classic piss filter, or you can choose New Style and control Snake from a more modern third-person camera. The camera adds a new dimension to the game and makes it feel like a fresh experience, in some cases making things more of a challenge because the fixed camera usually framed the action so you could see enemies from wherever you were, which also made it more clear where to go. Now you have to rely on your ability to spot threats and viable routes, using information like the shadows cast by enemies to intuit where they are. The one downside to this camera mode is that it’s difficult to tell what is and isn’t explorable, which meant I had to open my map every time I entered a new area to know where to head. Of course, if you don’t like this, you can switch back to Legacy Style at any time. 

Even with the modern control scheme, there’s still a bit of clumsiness, too — some of it by design and some not. By design, you’ll bump into an enemy and give away your position if you get too close before trying to grab them. Not so much by design, if Snake is facing the wrong direction, he’ll sometimes take a few steps forward before turning when you push in another direction, which isn’t ideal when that means you peekaboo a guard around the other side of your cover. Don’t get me started on standing back up after being knocked down — it’s a whole thing. 

While some aspects of fine control haven’t aged gracefully, a lot of it still feels as fresh today as it did in 2004. The ladder climb as the music comes in, deciding whether to fight the old sniper, kill him while he’s sleeping, or let him die of old age, and the Shagohod chase sequence that feels like a playable cutscene — there are so many special moments and they haven’t faded with age. Camouflage stealth feels as new as it did back then because no one else has attempted it in the same way, and close-quarters combat (CQC) still makes you feel like John Wick when you grab an enemy by the wrist, crack their ribs, and disarm them while flipping them onto their heads. What a thrill!

The enemy soldiers themselves are smarter than most modern enemies and despite being faceless balaclava-wearing fellas, have more personality than some actual characters. They work in groups and interact, they look under and inside things when searching for you and throw grenades into where they can’t follow. I still love how you hear them talking about you over the radio, but you can still hear the guy doing the talking saying it directly into his radio nearby. You can even interrupt those calls in a bunch of different ways, including by shooting the walkie talkie itself. 

Of course, this being a super faithful remake, there’s a lot of exposition. It’s classic Kojima stuff, overexplaining every aspect of the story and even things that have no bearing on the plot at all. You can seek some of this out by calling your handlers and having optional chats, but there are at least three hours of cutscenes here by default. Still, like many of the other best games of the time, this is designed to be played and played, looking for better times and results, so you’ll be skipping them all by your second playthrough anyway, which is arguably when the game comes into its own — when you work toward those no-alerts, no kills runs. 

There’s a random radio conversation you can have with one of your handlers when you try to save the game. She loves to talk about movies, and it feels like Hideo Kojima – a well-documented movie freak – talking to you directly. In it, Kojima from 20 years ago confidently states that they’ll still be making Godzilla movies in 2024. Of course, we now know he was 100 percent correct. And while those movies have changed with the times and the creatives behind them have moved on and passed the torch, they still carry the fire of those classics. If we’re still making Metal Gear Solid games in 20 years time, Delta has me convinced that the developers at Konami respect Kojima’s legacy enough to make the Boss proud. Things change, they always do, but good art is eternal.