Surpised by how well this one holds up. The gameplay feels quite good despite its age and the voice acting is way ahead of its time. The story has some great twists and turns, especially with its political themes (The US destroying their past not out of shame, but because it would mean a PR disaster? Surely only fiction).

There are quite a lot of flaws though. For how many tools you get, you barely get to use them. There are few stealth sections after like 3 hours and most of those can be solved by a chaff or stun grenade. Also the game makes you do a surprising amount of direct combat instead of stealth which in most cases feels quite bad. The bosses for that matter are also quite hit or miss. All of them have great concepts but only a few actually feel fun to fight. At times the story also is quite overburdened and clumsy. Gray Fox is quite underexplored here and Meryl feels like she's only here to fulfill a trope. The exposition is also really backloaded which made large parts of the game more confusing than it needed to be.

Anyway great start to a series, excited to see where it goes (and how Twin Snakes uses this material).

Reviewed on Apr 28, 2024


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