Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker

Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker is serious business. You can tell by the 15-minute installation it recommends you undergo to enjoy the full voice-acting, the uninterrupted minutes of cut-scenes and the fully featured online and offline co-op and competitive multiplayer. It's on a small format, but in terms of content and self-image, Peace Walker is a full-sized blockbuster. It's Metal Gear Solid 5 in all but name. The plot, in true MGS tradition, is detailed yet impenetrable to the point where you suspect that it may be a massive joke at your expense. A melodramatic military opera loosely anchored in the cold war, you play as Big Boss – Solid Snake's older clone, for the benefit of anyone not versed in Metal Gear's convoluted backstory. BB is leading his self-created mercenary army, Militaires Sans Frontières, through leafy Costa Rica at the behest of an undercover KGB agent who claims to be a professor at the "University of Peace". Frankly, it's best not to think about it too much. As with the beautiful outdoor mission environments, the cut-scenes in between them are gorgeous. 3D models melt into mottled comic-book graphics; onomatopoeic letters punctuate the screen as a character flicks a cigarette lighter with a "ssshk" or punches with a "thwack". You can zoom and pan around them and occasionally participate. But the balance is firmly towards stealth rather than violence. It's always been too easy to blunder your way through MGS, but Peace Walker demands that you incapacitate rather than kill and avoid detection rather than take on reinforcements. Once you've tranquillised a foe, you can disappear his sleeping form with a hilarious evacuation balloon, which adds him to the Militaires Sans Frontières ranks. Between the tightly designed missions, there's an army micro-management sub-game that proves weirdly compelling. For all its ambition, however, Peace Walker really struggles with the PSP's limited controls; the absence of a second analogue stick makes aiming feel awkward and the absence of mid-mission checkpoints can exacerbate the frustration. Playing in co-op makes the story missions considerably less frustrating to play, allowing you to compensate for each other's mistakes. Co-op also allows MGS 's bizarre sense of humour to stretch its legs outside of the confines of the plot cut-scenes, as you sneak around in a two-person cardboard-box-disguised convoy. None the less, Peace Walker is undoubtedly the most ambitious game on the PSP by far, and one of the best. But while playing, you can't help wishing that, being such serious business, it were on a more powerful platform, allowing more space to breathe.