A Metal Gear Solid Triangle: Snake Eater Review ► Ludology Now!

Over a year ago I traveled to London for a Konami preview event which included looks at three games: the remake of Silent Hill 2, the remake of Metal Gear Solid 3, and Deliver At All Costs. Silent Hill 2 released the soonest after that event, Deliver At All Costs released earlier this year, and now, finally, Metal Gear Solid 🜂: Snake Eater is available for everyone.

You can read my full preview for Metal Gear Solid Triangle on Screen Rant (although I don’t know how strongly I would recommend visiting the site these days, as just trying to read through my own preview caused my computer to be bombarded with ads and slow down near to a crawl). Suffice it to say that my general thoughts ended with “This is nice, but if you already played MGS3, it is unnecessary to buy it again.”

After playing through the full release on PC, my thoughts haven’t shifted much. The lingering questions and concerns I had back then — would Snake Versus Monkeys be included; will this ever stop feeling so clunky — have all been answered (yes, and sort of) but the general feeling of soullessness, of artificiality, remains.

How MGS🜂: Snake Eater has changed

It’s an interesting truth that, in the years of our lord 2024 and 2025, Bloober Team did a better job of justifying its remake of Silent Hill 2 than Konami itself did of justifying its remake of Metal Gear Solid 3. To be sure, the material makes this an easier fit. James being trapped in the same loop for 20 years makes thematic sense; there is no ludonarrative dissonance in repeating James’ journey. Snake doesn’t have this excuse.

One almost wishes Konami had chosen to recreate Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty instead. That game, with its focus on AI and virtual reality, is more thematically relevant today than it ever was and also offers a perfect excuse for the remake treatment, as some interpretations of the material see Raiden’s entire experience as one big simulation. MGS3 doesn’t have this tertiary conflict; everything happening in the oxymoronic Russian jungle setting of Snake Eater is actually happening.

These are complaints of someone who has played and replayed MGS3 over and over again in the years since its original PS2 release. These are the thoughts of someone who bought the Metal Gear Solid Master Collection on PS3. These are the words of someone who has watched every Super Bunnyhop and Munt Chunk video essay on Metal Gear. I am not an unbiased source.

With all that being said, there are some fun additions that I wasn’t expecting, like facepaint that gives Snake a pair of aviator sunglasses and a completely gold outfit reminiscent of the DLC for Sleeping Dogs. At its core, this is still one of the best games ever made.

To address one criticism I had with Metal Gear Solid Triangle from the preview event which has been fixed in the final release: moving around is much more in line with the original game now, far more jerky and less clunky. This is a good thing, although picking up bodies is still a chore and a half.

Who Metal Gear Solid 🜂: Snake Eater is for

If you have never played a Metal Gear Solid game before, this is an absolutely fine place to start, especially if you are in your early twenties and don’t want to go through the hassle of playing a game made fifteen years before you were born. You are missing out on a lot of spirit, though, but then again aren’t we all?

I feel like, as a game critic of a certain age, it’s easy to forget that we’re not the target audience anymore. The ‘why does this remake exist when the original is perfectly fine’ argument begins to lose steam when put up against the answer of ‘the majority of the audience has no idea what you are talking about.’ How could they, when hundreds of thousands of new games are released every year?

I don’t want to get lost in the ‘what do we lose and what do we gain in a remake’ conversation again. I’ve had too many of them by now and, honestly, my opinion varies each time. For me, someone who has played through Snake Eater more times than I can count already, someone who has done a tranq-only run on all three of the first Metal Gear Solid games, my opinion doesn’t matter except to say “Yes, this is more of MGS3 again, but prettier and missing something intangible.”

For new players, enjoy. Please get into this series. Please go back and play the originals if you want, but don’t feel like you have to. Feel free to just enjoy this. Don’t let other people tell you what to like.

And for people like me, a message: Don’t be rude to people for enjoying this. Don’t find small details, inconsistencies, and blow them out of proportion. Don’t compare screenshots of scenes with captions like “CHILDHOOD RUINED!”, because no it’s not. It’s just a game, from a company who hasn’t had a lot of luck in the past decade and is trying its best to return to some sort of form, and Kojima doesn’t care. You shouldn’t either. Just let things be.

THIS WEEK’S RECOMMENDED MEDIA:

EDITOR'S NOTE: This issue of Ludology Now! was split between two 3 1/4in floppy disks which were delivered by mail in a bubble-wrapped envelope early this morning. There was no return address.

For more issues of Ludology, check out this breakdown of a retro handheld console review.