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Game Review: ‘Metal Gear Solid 4’

Solid Snake may have gray hair, back pains and not much time left, but the guy still gets the coolest gear. Snake is the star of the newest and final video game in the “Metal Gear Solid” series, “Guns of the Patriots,” a fun, visually rich adventure that closes out the long-running series.

He has an “octo-camo” suit, which lets you creep up to a wall and pick up its pattern — brick, stone, wallpaper — to hide in plain sight. He has a full head-up display with zoom and night-vision capability. He also has the latest Metal Gear, the Mark II, a little robot that can become invisible and scout ahead for traps or bad guys. (In a nice touch, Snake operates it with a PlayStation controller.) Plus, there’s the obligatory smorgasbord of silenced pistols, assault rifles and incendiaries, if you’re into that sort of thing.

The only problem with Snake and his toys is that you don’t feel like you get enough time with them. “MGS4” is to video games what each new “Star Trek” sequel is to movies: A genre exercise set up to please a fan base already familiar with the stories and characters. Series devotees will be pleased to see the new edition wrap up many long-standing storylines, but anyone other than hard-core followers will quickly be driven to distraction by endless tangents and digressions. Fortunately, the parts you do get to play are pretty fun.

The storyline of “Metal Gear” is so convoluted that I’m not qualified to get into it beyond the details of “Guns of the Patriots”: In the near future, you reprise the role of Snake, a venerable special operator, who again has to go up against his arch-nemesis, Liquid Ocelot. (“MGS” characters’ names sound like those e-mail forwards composed by random-word generators.) Snake is now in his 60s and can’t keep going forever, we’re given to understand, so after a life of video-game violence, this is his last chance to take out his greatest enemy.

The “Metal Gear” series has been noted for its movielike aspirations, including its focus on grown-up themes, such as free will and conformity, and its use of extended cinematic cut-scenes to add detail to the storyline. Indeed, you don’t play “Guns of the Patriots” so much as fill in blanks when the game’s director, Hideo Kojima, deigns to involve you.

You help Snake fight or sneak around before Kojima sweeps back in for another half-hour pause. Kojima as a “director” is a lot like the American filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson, of “There Will Be Blood,” in that each believes his technical talents — as well as just making projects really long — can inject power into mediocre or silly material. Let the message-board flame wars commence!

Working with Snake takes a little getting used to; I didn’t like him at first, having spent so many years playing the simpler “Splinter Cell” franchise, which stole its stealth-shooter concept from “Metal Gear” and ditched the labyrinthine back story. But you can have Snake do some amazing things — he has more close-quarters combat moves than a character from “Street Fighter.” If you’re willing to memorize a long menu of button combinations and re-start levels to practice on victims, you can learn to have Snake frisk people, threaten them with his pistol and do just about everything but tickle them with a feather. Shooting and killing, on the other hand, is simple to master.

The game is so geared toward stealth-creep that its online multiplayer mode falls a little flat. It takes a few deliberate moves to bring up a weapon and fire it, which makes for some silly firefights in online death matches if you spot an enemy but forget to aim. The maps are vanilla, but the online mode retains the sharp, clear graphics of the single-player.

Of course, when you spend as much time just watching a game as playing it, it should look pretty good.

Game Review