Metal Gear Online

To split my hairs even more finely, it's more an online game based on the Metal Gear engine than a specific online Metal Gear game. The game relies entirely on the traditional Metal Gear Solid control system, which was developed for single-player stealth, yet game modes like Deathmatch and Base Capture were developed for multiplayer run-and-gun action. As it stands, Metal Gear Online doesn't quite find a way to combine these two elements into anything truly distinctive. You crouch-run into action, but must rely on needlessly complex controls to react to living opponents in an open-plan battle, rather than the AI foes in a linear narrative they were designed for.

The cover system, so integral to the single-player experience, is all but useless here. With no patrolling guards to worry about, waste time creeping along walls and peering round corners here and some l33t player will shiv you from behind or snipe your face off in a heartbeat. Sometimes you can vault over a low wall, other times you can only crouch behind it. Characters are incapable of pulling themselves up onto surfaces that are only shoulder height. The scrolling weapon select system is a poor fit for the online arena, especially when the d-pad is begging for something useful to do, while having your HUD spread out all over the screen, with health at top-left and a tiny ammo gauge at bottom right, is the sort of thing that works in a slower-paced offline game but proves hazardous in a game where access to that information needs to be almost subliminal in nature. Buttons come mapped with multiple functions, all of which come together to form a barrier between you and the simple enjoyment of playing the game. You can see the fun, but it's not always easy to feel it.

The effect is jarring, particularly for new players. There's a clever tutorial feature, in which experienced players can mentor newbies in real-time training exercises, and a couple of dedicated beginners servers, but apart from those concessions this is a game that tips the balance strongly in favour of the better players. They get to modify their weapons, they get better abilities and access to more useful items. As with most online games, rounds are often dominated by a few alpha male players, but the effect seems more pronounced here. The same names accrue points at the top of the table, while the same names stay at the bottom until they drop out. Some will find this "survival of the fittest" approach refreshingly brutal, but I suspect that soon only the hardcore will remain, and I fear for the naïve player who blunders into their first game six months from now.

The generous options mean that there are many ways you can tweak the controls to make them more immediate, but the fact that you have to do so manually suggests a game where they took Metal Gear in one hand, online multiplayer in the other, and simply squished them together. The trouble is, if you simplified the controls to better match online play, then most of what makes the game Metal Gear would vanish, leaving only familiar sound effects, porn mag traps and Snake's cameo appearances in Sneaking Missions as tangible reminders of the source material.

It'd be much easier to make the effort needed to get the most out of Metal Gear Online if it were offering something we'd never seen before in the realms of online play. It's never anything less than a solid online action game, but with a certified loon like Kojima involved it's not unreasonable to expect something out of the ordinary. Yet that's exactly what Metal Gear Online is. It's incredibly ordinary, offering little that the Warhawks or SOCOMs of this world haven't already, but with the distancing barrier of an inherited control scheme that doesn't really benefit the game. Remove the emotive Metal Gear branding that so often demands kneejerk defence or dismissal, and you're left with the bare bones of a decent multiplayer title, brimming with potential but far from fulfilling its promise.