A prequel to the previous games, set in the cold war.

With GTA this and Halo that, despite Konami's best efforts to hype it, you could have been forgiven for forgetting about Metal Gear Solid 3. But for those of you who have access to NTSC games at least, it's finally out now and probably could do with a review.

Set in the middle of the jungle during the cold war, this instalment of the series has the player sneaking through the jungle as well as through installations. Well, I say sneaking through the jungle, but don't expect anything as good as Far Cry here. Cliffs surround each area, with gaps in them which take you to the next area, so it's debatable if they're truly any better than the standard inside rooms of the Metal Gear Solid series. But, they do play differently. They are a little bigger than standard rooms, so much so that the enemies often cannot cover all of the ground. This makes for different tactics than the normal inside levels, where the enemy can pretty easily cover most of the ground at once. Much of the jungle floor is also covered with long grass, which results in large areas where the player can take cover, hide, and slowly move around in without being seen.

Ever seeking to enhance the experience, this game features several new gameplay features. The one that gives the game it's name, is the stamina gauge. This constantly decreases, depending on what the player is doing. Snake needs to eat to keep his strength up, and most of the food in the game will come from hunting animals. Well, I say hunting. Usually, they are just sitting around, just waiting to be shot and picked up for food.
Note that eating doesn't increase your HP. HP healing items are very rare (I've only found 3 in the game) as well. To counter this, the damage taken is less than usual, and you slowly regain HP over time. I think this is actually a very smart move, because it takes away the annoyance of having to constantly get your rations out and heal during a fight.

Next up is the ability to get injured. Getting injured lowers your maximum HP, or causes some other ailment such as poison or stamina drain, until you go into the menu and cure it. It doesn't really add any new tactics to the game, because you are always given plenty of medical supplies and event the most complex of surgical operation can be done instantly, and in the end acts only as an annoying interruption during the middle of some battle. Kind of spoils the fact that you don't have to keep going into the menu to eat rations.
Konami have introduced a camouflage system. You can change your clothes and face paint, each of which are best against different backdrops. (Actually, it's the ground that you're standing on that counts, but it still works pretty well.) The better camouflaged you are, the closer an enemy has to get before they can see you. Crouching and crawling also reduces how visible you are, whilst moving or running around makes you more visible. You are told how well each camouflage is for your particular location when choosing which one, so you might think that it would be just another menu chore, but... actually, it's pretty cool. If you want to take advantage of it, you only have to switch every couple of levels, as you go into a different environment. And it gives you a nice ability to customise your character.

The classics refuse to die

Metal Gear Solid 2 was famous for shooting itself in the foot with overly long cutscenes. So what about this instalment? Well, while shortened slightly they are there - Konami are just too in love with going on and on to give them up. But this time they've made a clever move that lets them keep two eggs in one basket. Rather than being play constantly throughout the game, cutscenes are now huddled together for protection. You get long periods of gameplay without one in site, then they pack a load in. This makes for a much better playing experience, because the gameplay isn't constantly interrupted, and when you do get a cutscene you know that it's time to put your feet up for a while and watch. The only exception is the beginning, which is pretty much one long solid cutscene for the first couple of hours.

And I can't end without talking about the bosses. Metal Gear Solid has always done well here, and most live up to the standard Metal Gear Solid fair. But some go further and really stand out. For example, one fight sees you up against a sniper in the jungle. Rather than just one area, this takes place in about four huge areas, with the boss somewhere within. The goal is to find and sneak up on him, before he finds and sneaks up on you. Fights like that stand out as a high point in the game, purely because they are so different to anything else you encounter before.

So, what else is good? Well, it's a Metal Gear Solid game! Those are always full of nice little touches, secrets and humour, and this one no different, but it would be impossible to list them all.

So, what else is bad. Well, of all the problems, a couple really stood out.
The first is your inventory. You can only have up to 8 items and 8 weapons on your L2 and R2 buttons at once. Possibly a nice move in some respects, it saves your equip menus getting too cluttered. The bad news is, that every time you want to get something out that's not something you thought you'd need, you have to go into the menu, take something off, and then equip what you want. And you don't get any help description telling you what items or weapons do until after you have equipped them and come back out of the menus, another pain which can lead to you looking over the things in your backpack thinking, "what on earth does this do"?
And it gets worse. If you die, as usual you are send back to the start of the level/boss fight. But the problem is, your equipment is reverted to what it was when you started too, meaning that if you die or are constantly having to redo a section, then unless it just so happens that you were carrying the right equipment, you having to go into the menus and re-equip everything each time.

If you kill Ocelot, you get a gameover, and are nagged for trying to change the plot

That's a small pain, but a much more serious one, and by far the biggest gripe in the game, is the camera. It aligns it so the bottom of the screen is right next to your feet, as is best for action games. This works very well when you are travelling north, and the game is designed so you will be heading north most of the time. But the problem comes when you want to go either east or west, or even worse south and into the screen. If this happens, you can't see anything further than two feet in front of your face, and with no radar, any enemies behind the screen are completely invisible to the player. Why on Earth wasn't the option put in to rotate the camera angles? Some critics may have moaned that it would mean them having to do more work controlling the camera, but it would have solved all of the problems.
As it is, there are only two ways round it. By using the right analogue stick, you can move the camera so that Snake is no longer at the centre, increasing the distance that the player can see to three feet.
A better option is to use the first person mode. But the problem is, that you can't move whilst looking around in first person. This reduces you to looking, then walking a bit, looking, then walking a bit, and so on. It's the only way to play, but it is seriously annoying and slows you down to a crawl.

Anyway, I've said all I'm going to say. The above two paragraphs may sound negative, but I'm just warning you to all of the game's flaws. As for it's strengths, I'll leave you to discover the rest. It's a must buy for Metal Gear Solid fans, and a fun twenty hour distraction for anyone else. I say 8.5 out of 10. It's just a shame that if you are stuck with a PAL console, it won't be out until next year.