Where do I start, really? I have never played any game in the series, and was generally really interested. I had heard a lot about the games, and how they were cool and interesting to play, but I somehow never had time to really play them. Until now (scary music... drum roll!).

You can imagine my surprise when I realized that I had sat through roughly 45 minutes of bad cut-scenes with poor dialog while waiting to start playing the game. Sure, there were a few 15 second segments in which I was kindly asked to move Mr. Snake from point A to point B, but that can't really count, can it?

But lets start from the beginning. This is a game by Hideo Kojima (hope I didn't screw up the spelling). You will read that sentence about 10 times in the first 15-20 minutes of the game, so don't you forget it! That guy seems to be really proud of this game (for reasons unknown to me) so he has plastered his name all over it. And it's not like I have any idea who that guy is, so that's not going to help me to form an opinion of the game anyway. But I digress.

Before you play this game, don't ask other people how it is... You will be told (as was I) that you can do a lot of things in this game: you can crawl around, you can hunt wild animals, you can eat them, you can cure yourself from bruises and bullet wounds, you can switch clothes and facial makeup to blend in with the environment and a lot of other things. Yes, you can do all those things, but they are either so haphazardly implemented that they appear ridiculous or you have to navigate an off-game pause menu (that you can go into while having 3 enemies shooting you) and basically press a few buttons.

And it really looks like someone was proud of those pause-menu features, since there are a lot of them. Take the cure menu, for example: you can select ointment, serum, bandages, stitches and a lot of other specialized first-aid items, but the combinations are trivial, they are given to you as a bulleted list EVERY time you have to use them - in fact, you can use all of them all the time, and not even bother with the order in which you use them. Want to stitch up the wound after you have bandaged it? - fine - Snake has already paused time in the middle of a battle and is now nonchalantly curing himself in a pause menu pre-rendered video animation, so obviously he can sow his own skin through the bandage.

I could go on and write a smart-ass paragraph for all these features, but I will spare you the pain - all the features from the pause menu are a bunch of gimmicks, with no real gameplay value as I will elaborate next. Don't get me wrong - I think these features are cool - but they are poorly implemented, have no REAL meaning in the game and they are completely counter-immersive.

This game is supposed to be a tactical combat game. How sad is it then that no tactics are necessary to advance in it? The level layouts are hopelessly sausage-istic (meaning there is a wall everywhere except forward), the enemy AI is pretty terrible and there are no real objectives to speak of. The only tactics that you as a player need to develop to play this game is how to deal with the craptastic camera.
Trust me, I don't say this lightly - the camera in this game is completely useless. It focuses on the main character at all times, and doesn't allow you to clearly perceive the situation at all. In fact, any perceived difficulty this game might have is 100% due to the uselessness of the camera in spotting opponents. You can go in first person mode, but by doing so you will probably end up looking the other way, and you cannot move - so you are a ripe target for the enemies. Truly, you are not fighting the enemies in this game, you are fighting the bad camera.
It's so bad, that most of the time I resorted to running out in the open, letting people shoot me, and seeing where the gun trace was coming from. The enemies are anyway easy to kill since they shoot very poorly (played on normal difficulty) and make no effort to get out of harms way. In one level, I killed 7 out of 8 enemies by standing in one room and waiting for them to come in through the only door. They never got a shot out. I felt bad for a second, but only a second.

And the whole, alert - cautious - evade dealio... It's also completely useless. First of all, you can kill everyone anyway. Second of all, the enemies show no awareness of what's going on around them. Sure if one enemy spots another dead enemy he will go around him asking: "What's wrong?", but when there is nothing to follow that - what is the point? And don't even start me on the animals (like the dogs). I shot one dog with a silenced pistol - it rotated a bit in place, moved in a 2 meter radius from where I shot it, and stopped so I could shoot it again and kill it. Who knows, maybe Japanese dogs are more stoic than the mutts I have seen in my life.

I read somewhere that the boss battles are alone worth playing this game. Well, I played them - and I still can't believe what I saw. Boss battles are the work of the devil and have to be banned from modern games. When you have to have a boss, and he is human, you are forced to come up with some pretty stupid ideas, like lets have a guy who has bulletproof bees. BULLETPROOF BEES! Like, he can use them to make a bulletproof shield around him, and if the player chugs a grenade to him, then a bunch of bees will envelop it WHILE IT'S FLYING IN THE AIR and bring it back to the player.
Another dumb things for you to come up with might be that you fight a faggy character that has twelve bullets in his guns (which you can see on YOUR HUD, by the way), and every time he has to reload, you have to watch a relatively long cut-scene of this obviously metro-sexual character masturbating his gun (yes I said masturbating - play the damn game and you will see). And if the sight of him doing that is not creepy enough, they actually had some poor voice actor record voice over to go with the masturbation ("Oh, I never knew reloading could be so exciting!").

And the dialogs and the story - my god, what a bunch of 12-year old trash-fiction crap. Maybe something was lost in the translation, but somehow I don't think much more could have been extracted from the original. There is no story, just a bunch of characters parading in front of the screen reciting some dribble about a soviet super weapon, US conspiracy - the usual bullshit, which is not usually so poorly written. Add the endless ramblings about weapon types and how many magazines that weapon holds, and who invented that weapon, and what makes this weapon superior than that weapon - if you have ever had the misfortune of sharing company with one of these "soldier boys" (I call them) that know a lot about weapons - you know how taxing on the brain that can be. And was it too much to ask that I be able to save the game without a dumb conversation about some old movie? You have to play this game just to see how stupid it all is.

Everything about this game looks like whoever made it was so proud of it, that they would rather keep showing you how beautiful the main character is and how much you can do with him then letting you play the game. And also, whoever wrote the script is obviously quite knowledgeable about old movies and weapons - the topic of choice of many a nerd (especially since the advent of Counter Strike). I read a lot of reviews before writing mine - and I cannot believe this game got reviewed so well. I cannot explain it: maybe the western press is too keen to adopt hits from Japan, even though they are completely incompatible with the western consumer (I can talk, I am one of those consumers). I honestly cannot find one positive thing to say about this game - I read there will be a fourth installment: I will probably play it just to see if it's still crap.

And I will write about it.