Peace Walker is half action game and half management sim. Of course game play is geared towards the action side but rather than being one continuous game it's doled out in missions that can take between 30 seconds and 30 minutes to complete, that's including the cut scenes for those weary of the series' pretention to putting whole movies between game play chunks. The opening prologue is probably one of the longest parts giving you a short brief of events in Metal Gear Solid 3 before introducing you to the current scenario. You're given a quick tutorial to the new control style drilled out by one of Snakes Militaires Sans Frontières soldiers and then dropped into a stylised animated comic book cut scene that sets the games storyline in motion. Snake is leading a small nomad mercenary group currently based in Columbia with the help of Kaz Miller. He's asked by a man claiming to be a university professor, Galvez, and his peace obsessed student Paz to kick a CIA backed army out of Costa Rica, a nation that's banned an institutionalised military. You do a bit of shooting and sneaking to get used to the controls before another set of cut scenes raises the stakes even higher. It turns out that Galvez is a KGB agent who's funding the local resistance, the Sandinistas, and the CIA is bringing nukes into the area. Why would Snake want to help the commies expand their influence in the region and fight his former employers? Because Galvez has a cassette with the voice of his mentor The Boss on it, a woman who Snake assassinated at the end of Metal Gear Solid 3. So to investigate the origins of this mysterious tape and in the name of peace for Costa Rica Snake begrudgingly accepts the mission and the game begins proper.
The hub of the game is Mother Base, the management portion of the game. At the start of the game you can assign your starting troops to a couple of teams and start a bit of research or just go straight to the mission listing. You're not overloaded at the start as the game eases you into its various mechanics as you play through the story. On the mission screen you start off with 3 missions that eventually balloon into over 100. Story missions have you either sneaking about levels that are split into several small areas completing an objective or facing off a boss in all out warfare, usually a tank or helicopter backed up by a few hardened soldiers or one of the games giant AI machines. There's enough variety in the missions and levels so you don't feel like you're doing the same thing over and over, fortunate because if you get hooked you will end up doing the levels again. At the end of a mission you'll be ranked on how well you did, with your paltry set of equipment at the start of the game you won't be able to get top marks first time around. Later you'll be coming back with new weapons, items and outfits either to get a better rank or to find hidden goodies you couldn't get at before.
Side missions add a nice break from the main story and a bit of variety with defence, elimination, collection and paparazzi levels to name a few but the diversity is destroyed by the same bloody boss battles appearing about 50 times. It's not even the fun robot battles either but slightly different versions of tanks and helicopters that appear in the main storyline. It's a poor do when you have all these repetitive boss battles and only one 'ghost photography' mission. Maybe Konami could have got away with this if they put an inordinate about of other side missions in too. Lucky you can ignore this repetition with no great loss, except maybe one of the game many, many weapons.
The missions also link in with the management side of the game as you collect soldiers and items to boost Militaires Sans Frontières army and armoury. All enemy soldiers can be knocked out and recruited by using a Fulton recovery balloon which whisks them back to Mother Base, where after a short time in the brig they'll be yours to command. The same goes for prisoners of war less the KOing and brig part. You can also gain troops as they volunteer automatically or through the recruitment option in Mother Base. The recruit system scans for nearby wireless access points and when found lets you play a mission where you knock a load of people out using close quarters combat and then they're yours. If you use the same access point you get less potential troops with weaker skills so it helps to go out and about with your PSP as this is one of the best ways to get strong soldiers for your cause. You don't actually access the wifi point either so you don't have to hound anyone for a password, it's great if you're on the bus as you can just detect random wifi points as you go by and build up your army quickly. The whole point of building an army is to expand Mother Base by assigning your troops to combat, research, medical, intel and mess hall teams. The troops have 5 corresponding stats so it's usually obvious which team to put them in. Most important is combat and research, combat builds up GMP a type of currency you spend on research and development so you can access more powerful weapons. As you build up your base's stats and find weapon designs in the missions you'll be able to develop ridiculously powerful equipment, something you'll be wanting for the later boss battles in the game. Your combat team can also be sent on 'outer ops' missions, along with the tanks and helicopters that you get from them many boss missions, winning these gives you access to even more weapons and items to research.
All this base management and mission replaying works as one of the games strong points as the game is crammed full of things to do once you've run through the main storyline. The story is intriguing and you don't have to have an encyclopaedic knowledge of Metal Gear Solid to get sucked into it. Sticking to the main missions the story flows smoothly and you don't get characters worries jammed down your throat while you're trying to play the game. But those in love with the series do get their fill too, there're a lot of cues to events yet to come in MGS 1, 2 and 4 with a lot of information coming from characters in non mandatory briefing files; from useful details about enemies and mission areas to character developing views on the film 2001 a Space Odyssy and Frances disposition to unrest. More so, after the main story there another chapter that reveals the true intentions of the characters that draw themselves to Snake and cements Peace Walker in the conspiratorial ideologies that make up the series. It even lets you develop your own Metal Gear from scavenged parts of the games 4 boss mechs and battle it in a simulation training mission or send it out with your troops in the outer ops.
With the help of an amazing musical score and excellent visuals for the PSP Peace Walker makes its self a game that you can spend hours pottering about in. With that 'just one more mission' game play that allows for a quick sortie or two when out and about or an extended session when at home Peace Walker promises hours of fun. It's a pity it's on the PSP, a console that no one seems to be interested in, but it wouldn't feel right on any other system. My main gripe is that its selling point is its co-op play but it fails to use the internet to realise that, allowing only for local PSPs to connect to each other. Not being able to utilize the multiplayer leaves me wanting, but by enlarge there's enough to keep you entertained with solo play. Metal Gear fan or not, if you have a PSP you should seriously consider getting this game.
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