For a Playstation 1 game, Metal Gear Solid is surprisingly ambitious and manages to achieve most of said ambitions. The gameplay is fun, tactical and well thought-out, even if some sections have aged fairly poorly and are a little frustrating. The story, while a little lacking in subtlety, is consistently entertaining and emotional, providing its characters with satisfying arcs from beginning to end. Snake is an extremely compelling protagonist, and the mysteries within Shadow Moses are a delight to unearth.

I've had my eye on the Metal Gear Solid series for a while now and eventually I got the incentive to try the first game in the series after @wheatie assigned it to me. Had a decent time with it!

Metal Gear Solid is a classic stealth game - you sneak your way past enemies, and usually don't face them head on. (Else you have to deal with really frustrating aiming controls!) Your tools consist of several weapons like a silenced pistol, a sniper or even a rocket launcher, but also handy gadgets like EMP grenades and... a cardboard box?

The overarching narrative was engaging and consisted of many, fully voice-acted cutscenes. Some of them longer than others, ranging from quick Codec calls to villains monologuing for minutes on the brink of death. I have to admit that there were times where the exposition and monologues went on for a bit too long for my taste and apparently the cutscenes are only getting longer in the later games. A shame, since I believe those moments drag down the pacing quite a bit.

As I mentioned before, my other main complaint are the controls. Sure, this game is 25 year old at the time of writing this, but other games released in that period had more understandable controls too (an example being Ocarina of Time). The worst offender was definitely the aiming, but then again I didn't find out until after the beating the game that there was auto-aiming. Oh well, too late now.

That aside, Metal Gear Solid was enjoyable enough to make me want to check out the rest of the series as well, considering MGS2 and MGS3 are praised highly. It's a fairly short game and was just the right experience to play after Red Dead Redemption 2, which took me about a month to beat. But let me tell you, going from the graphics of RDR2 to PS1 models was certainly something! Have a good day.