One of the most obscure releases in the Metal Gear franchise. It's essentially a Java ME demake of the similarly named PSP title (just take off the Mobile part) for people's cell phones. This is pretty interesting in that it was released in 2D and 3D variants. Now, for the sake of this review I played through both versions and can definitively tell you that the differences are entirely visual, affecting things like camera placement and player perspective rather than the actual content which is 100% identical across the board. For example, in the 2D edition, my personal preference, you have a much wider view of your surroundings while in its 3D counterpart the sights are more closely oriented around the protagonist like in a traditional game, which leads to it having some of that classic Solid feel and in my opinion smoother movement, but with the tradeoff of your vision being more frequently obscured by the geometry.

It's honestly kind of baffling to me that this exists at all. I mean, if they were so intent on coming out with a cellular tie-in to one of the Metal Gear outings, why would they pick what is easily among the fanbase's least favorite entries and four years after it would have had any chance of being relevant to begin with? It doesn't even represent what was happening over on Sony's handheld very well either.

As you might expect, the technical limitations inherent to the mobile devices of the time period really hold this adventure back. The ten bite-sized recreations of stages from the original are undeniably charming and surprisingly faithful in layout, but it's hard to get excited over the small-scale equivalent of the same tactical turn-based card gameplay when the action is this basic. Guards don't react to being shot so long as you remain in their blindspots, I never had to use the option to customize my deck because there's no need for legitimate strategic thought, guns are so weak it can take multiple turns to kill a single guy, for every level where you actually have to plan your route around enemies there's another where you can just beeline it straight to the exit in seconds before anyone has a chance to react whether they saw you or not, the whole thing can be beaten in well under an hour, and I defeated the final (and only) boss twice without taking a sliver of damage. There's also none of the property's penchant for storytelling to be found.

Part of me did get a slight kick out of revisiting an era when developers tried to make genuine games for phones as opposed to the flood of barely distinguishable "free-to-play" cash grabs designed to nickel-and-dime players into bankruptcy through microtransactions prevalent nowadays. This simply fails to provide a worthwhile Metal Gear experience however. It's not offensively terrible or painful to play through. It's merely simplistic, pathetically easy, and over in a flash.

4/10