I’m far from alone in the assertion that Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain featured some of the best stealth mechanics of the series. Were they packaged with a story and overall level design that did them justice? I say no to that, but I can’t deny that MGSV plays like a dream. Oh, and the plot twist was super neat, for the record.
When Delta, the remake of 2004’s Snake Eater, was announced, many an MGS fan hoped that the game would play similarly to MGSV, and would perhaps even run on the celebrated Fox Engine.
Folks, I’m here to tell you that’s not the case. As I alluded to in my review of the fancy new remake, Delta plays much like the MGS3 you remember from just about any of its re-releases over the years. Plus, it runs on Unreal. And in my experience, that worked out well. I experienced very few technical issues during my time with a pre-release build provided by Konami. I was not thinking about graphics engines; I was fully immersed.
But let’s have a chat about how this game plays in its moment-to-moment gameplay and put Delta under the microscope to compare it against The Phantom Pain and the original Snake Eater as it exists in the current Master Collection.
Movement and shooting
Delta and MGSV feel very different in motion, but it does feel like there’s a similar animation framework under the hood. Delta has a slower pace to it. MGSV’s Venom Snake is a bit choppier in his movements (not choppy in a bad way, but he has a kind of rigid urgency in how he moves that doesn’t feel present in Delta). Play some animations next to each other and you’ll see similarities, but to me, both with what I can see and what I have felt while playing Delta for 30 hours, the new remake feels smoother even compared to the impressive, and somewhat speedier, gameplay of MGSV.
Unlike MGSV, Delta does not feature a sprint option. Snake’s speed when you’re pushing forward on the analog stick (or the W key on keyboard) without using the stalking feature is his top speed. In my opinion, sprint wouldn’t have worked in the remake as the environments are just too small. They feel as dense and lush as a jungle should be, but even compared to those in MGS4, these environments are smaller. It’s a PS2 game after all!
Snake’s forward roll from the 2000-era MGS games is back and it functions like you remember it. You can roll into enemies to damage them. Rolling is key to non-lethally damaging certain bosses, and is especially important when trying to beat Volgin without “killing” him.
Snake can now hop over waist-high cover like in MGSV, something not possible in the original.
A very odd, basically insignificant change for all but the most diehard MGS freaks (and I’m one) is that flattening yourself against an opened locker door does not close the door. Does this matter? Here, no. There aren’t many lockers in the jungle. Should we ever see a Delta-fied MGS2, however, I’ll make a case for keeping this quirk in that game.
Comparing the feeling of guns is a tough gavial to wrestle as MGSV features a wildly different palette of weaponry with different ammo counts, even among similar categories. Also, MGSV let you upgrade weapons to improve their performance. No such mechanic exists in Delta. What you find is what you get.
Delta’s shooting feels like it splits the difference between the over-the-shoulder standard we see in every damn third-person shooter these days and what exists in the original Snake Eater. You can swap camera orientation to the left or right on the fly, like in MGSV. And the speed of shooting feels a touch closer to MGSV, but only on a very superficial level. It still feels like the pacing of Snake Eater, and you kinda have to play it to really feel what I’m talking about here. You’ll experience this most directly if you get caught and have to shoot your way out of a situation.
A non-animation-related change Delta makes from the original concerns how the tranquilizer pistol functions. There’s a distinct bullet (dart?) drop over a distance, Making this pistol dramatically less OP. To me, this is a huge win as the tranquilizer gun, while essential for the series’ meta commentary on violence, made it too easy to quickly put a number of guards to sleep, often diluting the sneaking experience. In Delta, you’re gonna have to get closer to the enemy if you want to put them to sleep without doing a bunch of physics in your head to calculate where that dart is going to land. This makes for a more challenging and immersive experience.
Close-Quarters-Combat (CQC)
MGS3 introduced CQC to the series, deepening the way you would enter and leave combat. Before this, Snake had a simple punch-punch-kick animation and the ability to flip an enemy or grab them in a chokehold, from which you could either knock them out through strangulation or snap their little digital necks.
MGSV expanded CQC to include all manner of new moves such as throwing an enemy up against a wall, stealing their gun, or going all Neo on a swarm of enemies with a rapid series of punches on multiple targets when surrounded. In Delta, you still get that old familiar punch-punch-kick animation with three taps of the melee button. It feels a little awkward to be honest, being mapped to the right trigger on a controller, but that button serves as your CQC command here, just as it does in MGSV.
Snake’s moveset is otherwise just like it was in the original (at least as far as I can tell after 30 hours). You can grab with similar speed and movements; you can toss an enemy down to the ground by combining the CQC button with a directional movement. This feels easier to do in the Remake than it does in the original. Holding enemies up at gunpoint, however, is a little trickier. You have to be real close to do it. I didn’t hold up enemies a whole lot during my playthrough as I found I wasn’t close enough and ended up getting spotted too often. Maybe with future playthroughs I’ll get a better sense of that, but it feels harder than it did in the original, and even compared to MGSV.
CQC in Delta sticks very close to how it was in the original game. There’s a more dramatic flair at work in the animation that can sometimes feel different, but Snake typically grabs and tosses enemies at a similar pace as in the original Snake Eater.
It feels like Snake Eater, it tastes like Snake Eater (with a bit of hot sauce)
While Delta has clearly taken some cues from MGSV, and maybe it even borrowed some animations here and there, the experience of playing this remake almost never feels like Phantom Pain. Yes, Snake can now crouch walk and transition to crawling in a way that doesn’t exist in the original Snake Eater, but otherwise everything feels like an analog copy of the original. Analog in the sense that it’s not a pure copy, and features a few quirks of its own.
When in battle, Delta also feels dramatically more similar to its original in my experience. Phantom Pain is snappier, faster, conceived as a modern third-person shooter. The new camera style of Delta can make things easier (veterans should probably start on Hard mode, as I mentioned in my review), but you’re still in trouble when the enemies spot you and start increasing in number. It is hard, as it was in the original, to shoot your way out of situations. MGSV, in my experience, could let you be more of a bloody menace if you so desired. Delta, however, aims to preserve the outnumbered, outgunned feeling of the original.
Delta’s unique additions to the Snake Eater formula feel grounded in its roots with gentle modern modifications. A Snake Eater mod of MGSV this is not. So if you’re like me and hold that 2000’s-era MGS experience in high regard, get ready for a wildly satisfying modern tweak of a legendary stealth game.