Metal Gear Acid Review

Metal Gear Acid Review
Posted :: Jun 7, 2005 by phorrest

Introduction:
Metal Gear Acid (or Ac!d) is a great option for anybody looking for a good RPG experience on the PSP. But don't go in expecting anything like the Metal Gear Solid series. The slow pace does not make it the best choice if you are looking for portability, but it's surprising to see a game this complex as a launch title.

Story:
Acid begins in the near future with the hijacking of an airliner carrying Senator Hach, a candidate for president in the upcoming election. The only demand is that the US government deliver a secret project, codenamed Pythagoras, to them. Players soon discover that the research for Pythagoras is being conducted at the Lobito Physics and Chemistry Lab in the small African republic of Moloni. A special forces squad is dispatched to the island to investigate and retrieve Pythagoras after the Moloni government refuses to cooperate. But before they could complete their mission, they were assaulted by an unknown militia occupying the lab and all contact was lost. The game picks up here with the legendary soldier Solid Snake being called out of retirement once again to hopefully accomplish alone what the entire squad could not.

If you've played any of the Metal Gear Solid games before you know what to expect from the story, and this chapter does not disappoint in that factor. For those of you unfamiliar with the series, the story is completely insane, complicated, and full of more twists than Wario Ware: Twisted. Acid does do two things better than its predecessors though. The first is the resolution. My advice to get maximum enjoyment out of this game is to just absorb what is going on rather than trying to figure it out and just wait until the ending where everything is explained. Otherwise you may fall into the same trap I did and think that the story is actually heading in the direction that it wants you to think. Without knowing the ending and all the minor details it contains, the story seems really awful and underdeveloped. The second improvement is that the mission based structure fits the Metal Gear storytelling style better than the action games. The majority of the story is takes place between missions, as you would expect with any mission-based game, and doesn't break up the action as it does so frequently in the Solid games. The segments can still get lengthy at times though. Overall, the story is enjoyable and stays interesting by frequently tearing the rug out from under you at every turn.

Gameplay:
The major thing to expect going into Acid is a very slow pace, unlike the Solid series. Acid plays out on grid based maps, much like Final Fantasy Tactics or the lesser known Nippon Ichi games. However unlike most strat-rpgs, you don't have a set menu to choose your actions from. Before each mission you have a chance to edit a deck of at least 30 cards from over 200 that each represent an action that can be used on the field. At the beginning of each turn up to two cards are drawn into your hand, which can contain a maximum of six. Each card has a certain cost which you can pay to either use the ability or move by discarding it from your hand. This leads to the major slowdown in the pace sometimes as you wait to draw the one C4 card to blow up a wall, or the costume you need to sneak by a guard. Each character has a set number of actions per turn and can use cards until all their actions are up. As cards are used, cost is accumulated and used to determine turn order. The player with the least cost is the next to go and so on. The enemies have to abide by the same rules also so that can be used to your advantage. There are a few actions that do not require cards however, like punching an enemy in an adjacent square, or knock on a wall to draw the attention of a guard. A major annoyance is that simple movement actions, like crouching, turning, and flattening against a wall, are set after you use a card for movement. Meaning that you have to throw away a card and gain a lot of cost if you want to change any of those. There is also no way to cancel an action, so if you want to do any of those and forget, you are out of luck. You gain new cards to improve your deck as you progress through the game by finding packs of cards during the missions, being awarded a few for getting a mission rank better than a B, or buying packs and singles from the card shop between mission with points earned based on mission performance. I've only explained the very basic parts of the engine because covering every little nuance would take ten pages and I have no major gripes with those parts. The main story itself is fairly long; I put in about 18 hours on my first play through including a large chunk of time replaying old missions so I could buy more cards. But there is also plenty of replay value. There's a wireless multiplayer mode that lets you go head-to-head against your friend's deck and after completion, Metal Gear Acid can be played through again with all your old cards on either normal or a new hard mode, which almost doubles the difficulty.

Graphics:
The art style has shifted to a more anime inspired style. It still retains quite a bit of Solid's style, but it takes awhile to get used to it after the realism the Solid series has led gamers to expect. The art portrayed on the cards is entertaining and quite varied. Ranging from new art specifically for a card to art taken directly from the Solid series to sprites taken from the early Metal Gear games for the NES and MSX. I was quite surprised to see cards based on the game Snatcher, a Sega CD game that is the least known of the Metal Gear series.

The graphics during missions are about on par with that of the first Metal Gear solid for the Playstation 1, if not a little bit better. The style is also almost exactly the same. Metal Gear Acid looks great for a portable game, but there is a lot of slowdown at random times. The major problem with the style is that they get quite bland on the long indoor levels and the outdoor levels aren't very interesting either. The animations also suffer from this lack of variety and it is very uninteresting to see Snake get hit by ten shots from an assault rifle and do the same jerking animation for every bullet. I would have liked to have an option to zoom the camera out, because it offers a very limited range and it is annoying to have to cancel out of a movement to just go back to the main menu to enter free look mode. The camera also starts to become unruly when you walk under a ledge or walkway.

Conclusion:
If you're still struggling to find a solid title for the PSP, then look no further than Metal Gear Acid. While the gameplay can be slow at times, it still has a lot to offer fans of the Metal Gear series, strategy games, and RPGs. If you don't mind slower game play, then give Metal Gear Acid a try.