Summary: 45/100

Introduction

In "Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty" (or simply MGS2) you start by playing a character named Solid Snake, a mercenary introduced in previous games in the "Metal Gear" series. Solid Snake is infiltrating a cargo tanker sitting in New York Harbor, in order to gather evidence on a fiendish machine being transported in the hold. The first half of the game takes place on this tanker. In the second half of the game you play a different, younger, less-experienced character named Raiden, this time infiltrating a floating recycling plant in New York Harbor.

Although Solid Snake and Raiden have access to many weapons, dealing death is not the point here. The goal is to be sneaky, evade detection by enemy soldiers, and yet accomplish all the goals that are set out before you. There's not a lot of deep thinking in MGS2 - it's an action-adventure game in which you simply try to execute your missions, one after another, without getting detected or killed in the process.

The Review

MGS2 is firmly in the Doom branch of the gaming family tree (sharing the space with games like Quake, Half-Life, and Halo): you run around 3D rendered environments, spending most of your time in corridors and avoiding enemies at close quarters. It is different from Doom and its nearest cousins in that you are explicitly not trying to kill everything that moves. In this game, you are not a superhuman character able to defeat a dozen enemies in one go. In fact, if two or three bad guys gang up on you, they will probably kill you. Like the game Thief, your over-riding concern is not to rack up kills, but to avoid detection altogether.

The graphics are superb - the game is at the top of the heap of this genre for its superb modeling and rendering of dark, interior scenes (there are some exterior scenes as well, but most of the game takes place inside the tanker or the plant).

Gameplay is fluid - the loading times between regions are short and not overly frequent, and the controller responds nicely to button and joystick commands. You can run, walk, crouch, sneek, tumble, and otherwise get through the worlds with ease. The game contains many cut-scenes, or stand-alone segments where you just put down the controller and watch.

The first half-hour or so of the game makes sense: you have a mission, and you're out to accomplish it. But then the game turns and you discover that there's some kind of secret conspiracy going on, and need to do some further work to try to help your colleagues back home understand what's up. Along the way you run into a variety of idiosyncratic enemies.
And that's where the trouble begins. The idea of the game is clearly to involve you in a conspiracy that grows in size and importance as the game progresses. Obviously you're intended to be drawn into the unfolding mystery, and feel eager to determine the truth behind the situation; that's the reason why you keep playing the game, beyond whatever intrinsic satisfaction comes from pushing Snake (and then Raiden) through their paces.

Unfortunately, the game desginers have confused complexity for depth, and exposition for development. The relationships between the main characters are not made clear in the beginning, and they only get muddier after that. So as I played, and these characters formed new betrayals and alliances among themselves, it was only the shocked reactions of the other game characters, and the musical cues, that told me that a significant change had occurred, and even then I didn't really understand what was revealed about the characters and their goals. As the game progressed, rather than refine the situation, the game tries to increase the player's interest by throwing in more and more subplots and external plots until it accumulates beyond comprehension and just all stops making any kind of sense. It's not as though you have any choice in the matter anyway, since you must execute the assignments given you in sequence to progress through the game, but that isn't clear until the game is over. I kept waiting for either the pieces to fall into place, or for a chance to use the information I'd been gathering. Neither of those things happen. If you watched the TV show "Twin Peaks", you'll recognize this dawning sense that each new piece of information just makes the big picture even more obscure, and you come to realize that you'll probably never understand what's going on.

A Horrifying Caricature

A related problem is that the characters are flat stereotypes at best, and horrifying caricatures at worst. For example, Reiden spends much of his communication time in the second half of the game with his girlfriend Rose.

Rose easily wins this year's coveted Most Embarassingly Awful Character In A Game award. The voice performance is just fine - it's the words that she says that led me to want to do anything in the world to get her to just go away. For example, while Reiden is in tense combat, with the clock ticking and potentially millions of lives on the line, Rose chooses that moment to get pouty about their relationship, using passive aggressive behavior and incessant whining to get him to open up to her right then and there, tell her of his childhood, and so on. These conversations recur frequently and are wildly inappropriate to the situations in which Rieden is enmeshed. Far from feeling any compassion for Reiden, she uses these moments as opportunities to rake him over the coals. For example, when Rieden is out-running one army and rushing to try to stop a ticking bomb, Rose initiates a confrontation about whether he loves her for her, or just because she's beautiful. When he rescues a lady scientist who is the key to averting an enormous disaster for all of the US East Coast, Rose takes the opportunity to jealously whine to him that he seems to like the scientist more than herself, and that she doesn't think he loves her enough. Good grief! I wish that these were just the wrong topics at the wrong time, but the character herself is so badly-written and speaks in such cliche-laden language that I kept praying she would just go away. Unfortunately, you can't avoid Rose, since every time you save the game, you are drawn into another of these emotionally stupefying conversations.

The rest of the characters are no picnic, but they're not as consistently, jaw-clenchingly annoying as Rose. Furthermore, in the classic style of bad video game writing, our heroes seem to avoid asking specific questions to get the information they need, in favor of vague requests for ultimately irrelevant backstory. Sometimes the people in radio contact do offer useful, specific help, but that's a small fraction of the time.

As the game wraps up the major characters take the opportunity to proclaim their philosophies on personal values, the digital revolution, the nature of truth, the responsibility of parents, and a variety of other topics. These philosophies are generally pretty shallow, but that doesn't stop their advocates from going on and on (and on and on). Like the John Galt speech in "Atlas Shrugged", only the most masochistic players would willingly subject themselves to such endless cut-rate moralizing. Although technically you can skip these segments, that's dangerous, because you don't know that information important to the game won't be revealed, and you can't easily go back and see them again. Once the game was over I realized that all of these scenes were irrelevant to the game and could have been safely skipped - I wish I'd known that!

The production values of the game are generally high. The art varies from very good to excellent, with a clear Japanese design esthetic throughout. The sound work is generally good and supportive, though the music and effects never rise to truly add an emotional layer to the graphics. Surprisingly, one of the major contributors to the game is given the title "Vibration Effects Designer", presumably referring to when and how the little rumble motors in the controller are used during the game.

Summary

"Metal Gear 2 Solid: Sons of Liberty" is a step forward in production quality for a game that is basically about sneaking around, avoiding detection, and tolerating the The Most Annoying Girlfriend in History. The story around the game quickly becomes hopelessly confusing. The characters you interact with range from mildly interesting to psychologically fragile or incomprehensible.

MGS2 is fun to play, and it has a few surprises, but I'd suggest renting the game before buying it. If you enjoy the gameplay for its own sake, then continue to play, but don't hold onto any expectations that it will start to make sense or the characters will develop.
I'm giving the game a score as high as 45/100 because of the very high quality of the execution of gameplay mechanics and visuals for this genre.