Konami is going peculiarly all out as of late. The group has two major remakes on the horizon between its own development of Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater and the publishing of Bloober Team’s Silent Hill 2 remake. Both made appearances at Tokyo Game Show 2024, but Metal Gear Solid Delta had quite the demo to explore, and explore we did. The demo went through the tutorial and first engagements of the game, giving a taste that was very familiar to the 2004 game with a fresh coat of paint. In that way, it reminds of Capcom’s recently released Dead Rising: Deluxe Remaster.
Beginning Operation Virtuous Mission
After Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater’s announcement in the May 2023 PlayStation Showcase, I was very curious to see how Konami would handle this game, especially with its move to Unreal Engine 5. At Tokyo Game Show 2024, the demo was, to my knowledge, the deepest hands-on look at how it plays so far. It included the entire intro of the game, Snake’s briefing of his initial mission, and the first steps in that mission. For those who forgot or don’t know, Snake Eater begins with former Green Beret operative Naked Snake being briefed to sneak into Russian territory and extract a top-secret nuclear scientist, Dr. Nicolai Sokolov, forced to aid them in the construction of a new weapon amid the Cold War. With the dicey political climate, Snake’s mission is highly volatile, and if he’s caught, there will be no help and the US will deny its involvement.
Right from the get-go, I got the vibe that Konami isn’t trying to change much, if anything, in the story progression and quirks of narrative in Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater. Its opening cutscenes and briefings were just as wordy as I remember, but it appeared to be perfectly faithful to the memories I had of playing the 2004 game. It was an interesting to see that they stayed with such a long-winded opening (a trademark of its original creator, Hideo Kojima, who I’ll add was properly credited in the opening cinematic), but with the big starting explanation, cinematics, and the radio transmission that happens almost immediately after, I very much got the vibe that Konami wants this game to feel just as it did when players experienced it for the first time decades ago… with a new, high quality coat of paint of course.
I especially got that vibe as gameplay started. I’m an old hand at Metal Gear Solid 3, so I skipped through a lot of the tutorial content in the opening. It turned out to be fine because once I got going, a lot of muscle memory started coming back to me. Moving, hiding, arming yourself, setting up camo, firing a weapon, reloading, and using MGSD’s Codec radio system all felt highly familiar within moments of active gameplay.
The demo has you infiltrate the jungle, collect your gear, meet up with a few instances of the local wildlife, encounter Russian soldiers, and then attempt to break into a small outpost to make contact with Dr. Sokolov. Right out of the gate, I opened up the menu, checked my food to find a couple rations, armed myself with a silenced tranquilizer pistol, and then checked my uniform to adjust by body and face camo. The percentage camo system was fully intact. I had some options like red rust for mountainous terrain, but obviously opted for a jungle camo that put my percentage around 90 when crawling through grass. The food system, as hinted above, also returns and this is a game where you’ll have to get most of your meals on-site, which means occasionally engaging local wildlife. We interacted with crocodiles, hornets, snakes, and rats, and while I didn’t get to have Snake eat during the demo, I did snipe a few hornet nests and tranquilize a few snakes that made it clear that’s still a core system here.
It was good I picked up those vibes quickly too because it isn’t long before you start running into soldiers. With an aforementioned tranquilizer pistol in my inventory, camo equipped, and the element of surprise at my command, I explored my options in sneaking around the soldiers, shotting hornet nests down near them to create panic, or simply putting them to sleep and carrying their bodies to nearby high grass. Not only are they lumpy bags of mush to move, making your dispatching and hiding of them risky business, but I was kind of delighted to see that when I dropped a sleeping body on the ground, it would sometimes drop an item of equipment, be it food, ammo, etc. That’s also faithful to the original and was funny to see back here. Another thing I noticed is that gameplay areas of Metal Gear Solid Delta are still broken up into smaller sections of space instead of one massively connected world. You still transition between them by reaching their playable edge. However, loading was so fast in this version of the game that we quickly moved to the next place without much trouble.
I eventually snuck close to Sokolov’s whereabouts and almost made it to him without issue. That was when I blew my cover and raised the alarm. As you might expect, engaging soldiers head-on is a rough idea. Once they spotted me, they raised the alarm immediately and every enemy in the area started converging on my location. When I defeated the initial combatant and ran away to hide, they began checking the local area. I had to stay hidden or defeat all of them, keeping eyes off me either way until the alarm counter could go down. That meant using grass, climbing on rooftops, and crawling under foundations to keep out of sight if I didn’t want to get shot and start the alert counter over again. It also does the traditional Metal Gear Solid thing where enemies will actively chase you in red alert and then de-escalate to searching status in a yellow alert system before returning to normal. Eventually I made contact with Sokolov and the demo ended.
All of this is to say that everything I saw from cinematics and gameplay in this demo was beautiful, but highly faithful to the original. Konami gave everything I’ve seen in Metal Gear Solid Delta quite the shine with Snake, the environment, and other visual elements looking cleaner and more beautiful than ever. At the same time, once I had my feet under me and the gameplay memories of yesteryear came back, it also felt like it was playing almost one-to-one with the gameplay feel and aesthetics of the 2004 Snake Eater. With that in mind, it feels right to compare this to Dead Rising: Deluxe Remaster in my early analysis. Every system and interaction I expected to see in gameplay was faithfully intact, gray hairs and all, but with some parts just lightly improved to make them more reasonable for a modern game, such as the quick loading between playable section transitions.
Kept you waiting, huh?
Having just come off the heels of reviewing a remake that kept those original flavors intact just prior, Konami’s Tokyo Game Show 2024 demo of Metal Gear Delta: Snake Eater hit me in a very specific way. I think the game’s glow-up so far looks gorgeous, but I was delighted to see how my previous experience with Metal Gear Solid 3 translated here. I wonder if the gray spots of Snake Eater will appeal to new players as much, but old fans look to be in for an absolute treat here. If you want Snake Eater almost exactly how it felt before, but in Unreal Engine 5, this is feeling like that, no ifs, ands, or buts, and with that in mind, I’m looking forward to seeing how the rest of it pans out when Konami launches the game.
This preview is based on an early build demo shared exclusively at Tokyo Game Show 2024 on PlayStation 5. Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater is scheduled for release on PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC.
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replyTJ Denzer posted a new article, Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater is feeling like its own Deluxe Remaster
