A wise fictional character once said that war never changes, and if you play Snake Eater, you’d be hard pressed to argue. A remake of 2004’s cold war PS2 classic, Konami has dropped the three from the title and replaced it with a delta – but, make no mistake, this is the jungle-roaming jaunt almost exactly as you remember it. Without Hideo Kojima at the helm, Konami has sensibly not meddled with any story beats of this madcap masterpiece, instead pouring its energy into lavishly rendered art and adding slicker modern controls.
Still, if there’s any PS2 title that can pass as a modern release, it’s Metal Gear Solid 3. Shifting the series into the great outdoors, Kojima squeezed every last drop of power out of Sony’s ageing console – sending Naked Snake slithering across the jungle. To contemporary players, these were vast, sprawling locales. Yet revisit Tselinoyarsk’s soggy swampland in today’s open-world gaming landscape, and the leafy jungles that once seemed impossibly vast on PS2 now feel almost quaint.
Thankfully, the sheer charm and character crammed into these mosquito-ridden playgrounds still looms just as large. Every carefully laid path you crawl across is brimming with playful possibilities. Snake can lay in the mud and snipe a hornet’s nest, watching it engulf a nearby patrol before screaming soldiers leap off a cliff. Vultures descend on fallen enemies in the harsh desert sun, and you can even shoot out a guard’s walkie-talkie, preventing any calls for backup. It’s these interweaving systems and the ambitious narrative that make a modest map feel suitably epic.
Story-wise, Snake Eater is just as batshit as ever, throwing real world historical footage from the cold war at you one second, before having you fight a human made out of bees the next. While long term fans will be sagely nodding along to lines about the la-li-lu-le-lo, for newcomers, Snake Eater’s relentless opening bombardment of cutscenes may prove utterly impenetrable. It doesn’t help matters that Snake Eater’s prologue regularly wrestles control away from the player, subjecting you to walls of text tutorials between tiny playable interludes, before burying you once again in an avalanche of proper nouns.
Thankfully, once it actually lets you play, Snake’s Soviet outing has never felt better. While purists can opt for the classic top down perspective via legacy mode, there’s little reason to. The modern controls are a revelation, seeing a newly agile and accurate Snake doubling down on the action portion of the series’ tagline. Playing on normal difficulty becomes a breeze with the modern controls, transforming the once tank-like Snake into a kinetic killing machine.
There are a handful of other welcome new changes awaiting grizzled Virtuous mission vets. A new optional compass handily points you in the direction of your objective and holding down the D-pad allows you to quickly access your codec or swap out camouflage on the fly.
Speaking of camo, Snake Eater’s survival systems are probably its greatest legacy. You can see its DNA still coursing through modern games, with Kojima’s influential hunting systems and injury-treating mechanics laying the foundations for the absurdly popular survival adventures to come. While these pioneering systems feel a little threadbare by today’s standards, they still add a welcome extra layer to Snake’s sneaky shenanigans.
Kojima’s meta playfulness still shines, with Snake Eater playfully logging your gameplay decisions in fascinating ways. From being able to kill an early boss hours before your scheduled fight by sniping him during a brief post cutscene appearance, to a showdown where the consequences of your bloodlust haunt you, few modern games embrace this degree of meta interactivity.
Despite its cinematic ambitions, Snake Eater succeeds when it’s unashamedly being a video game. Items fall out of enemy soldiers, hidden frogs rotate and warble when you shoot them, and camouflaged rubber ducks are carefully hidden across each environment.
It helps that Delta is an absolute stunner on PS5 pro, too, being one of the handful of graphical showcases for Sony’s overpriced and under-loved new system. Memorable sequences of yesteryear now teem with cinematic grandeur, brought to life in lavishly rendered 4K. It’s not all aged like a fine wine, however, with EVA’s cleavage-ogling cutscenes revealing an embarrassingly juvenile male gaze that betrays the game’s 2004 origins.
There are, however, a few aspects that could have done with a redux. While players could hardly forget the iconic final showdown, the hurried final cutscenes suggest that Kojima was haphazardly attempting to tie the last loose plot threads together. It’s one area where Konami could have meddled, in what still feels like an anticlimactic finale.
Outside the main game, there’s an enjoyably silly Ape Escape mode and an additional secret unlockable curio that I won’t spoil. The only all-new mode – the Foxhunt multiplayer component – is now, disappointingly, arriving post launch, leaving the current offering feeling slightly incomplete.
Snake Eater is a leaner, meaner Metal Gear, a cold war caper owing just as much to James Bond as it does Apocalypse Now. Kojima makes no secret of his love of Hollywood, yet where his works often balloon into unwieldy epics, this game is still his most filmic achievement to date. It’s silly, self-contained and enjoyably campy, veering from the sublime to the ridiculous with admirable swagger. From its seamless merging of cold war paranoia with anime-esque silliness, the legendary voice performances never fail to delight, their campy theatrics lending an air of plausibility to the impossibly absurd.
If the free Foxhunt mode ends up reliving the Metal Gear Online glory days when it arrives later this year, add another star to the score. Even if it doesn’t, Snake Eater is a melodramatic delight, offering a brilliant introduction to – or excuse to revisit – one of gaming’s most gloriously idiosyncratic masterpieces.
