Difficulty:

Just Right

Time Spent:

10 Hours or Less

The Bottom Line:

"Total letdown"

Don't believe what everyone says!! I know best and this game is awful!!

Ok, I'm joking, clearly alot of people like this game very much so there must be something good about it!

Personally, I'm miffed as to why it's so popular (apart from due to hype and anticipation).

As you can see, I'm not a huge fan of this game, despite thinking that the original was one of the best games ever. I never owned a PS2 before and so was excited to pick this game up now that I acquired a PS2 for free.

I'm not going to go on about stuff, instead I'll just highlight the reasons why I believe this game to not be very good:


1. Very poor user accessibility-
There is no introduction to or explanation of the story or the gameplay mechanics. It's almost as if you've loaded the next level of MGS1. Anyone playing the game for the first time, or someone who hasn't played for a while, has to guess at what to do and how to play.
In-game instructions are minimal and you are often unsure of what you are meant to be doing or why you are doing it.
The first game had exceptional VR training levels that taught you all the techniques needed to enjoy the game to it's fullest. There is nothing in MGS2.

Consequently it feels as if you've been dropped into the middle of the game and you've got to play catch-up.

Oddly, you literally DO get dropped into the middle of the game if you say that you haven't completed the first game when loading the game for the first time: The entire first half of the game is REMOVED (the best part too, where you play as Snake on the tanker), and you start the game on the Plant as Raiden.

There is no explaination that this will happen and that you will consequently miss a large part of the game.

2. Far too many cut scenes (and most are pointless)-
This game seems to be 20% gameplay and 80% cut-scenes (and that's almost being generous). Of the first hour and a half of the game I literally played around 10-15 minutes, which mainly involved moving from cut-scene to cut-scene.

This would be acceptable, maybe, if these cut scenes were critical to the game and well scripted, but unfortunately most of the cut-scenes are drawn out waffle that could have been done in a few quick lines of dialogue, and the actual script is pseudo high-brow, pretentious nonesense which is so corny and badly written it's ridiculous. This makes the 30 min cutscene feel like 1hr.

3. Shoddy design-
Guards will stand within a metre of you yet still fail to see you. Yet when you hide in a locker, the guards will instinctively go straight for the locker you're in. Most of the gameplay boils down to entering a corridor, waiting for the guard to turn away from you, shoot him with the tranquiliser, move to the next corridor.

After setting off the alarm and having about ten guards after me, I ran up a flight of stairs, which triggered a cut scene, and all of a sudden everything was fine.

I encountered many blatant invisible walls.

The controls are innaccurate, and you can easily run out into a corridor when all you wanted to do was lean against a wall.

4. Variety
There's only 1 level!! Well, ok, 2 levels if you selected the 'right' answer at the beginning of the game. You get the epilogue on the tanker with snake, then there's the Plant level with Raiden (which is mostly cut scenes anyway). The Plant level is very very samey, with basically a repetition of the same environment over and over.