Let it never be said that Kojima Productions lack ambition. With demand for more complete portable MGS title since the release of the original Metal Gear Acid and a baying audience of fans to buy it, Portable Ops could well have wound up a quick remake of the original title, or a cut down port - but instead crams in team play, online multiplayer and the modernised camera control from MGS3: Subsistence into the PSP's slim shell. In avoiding the easy route MPO certainly provides an experience that's instantly familiar, technologically potent and impressively creative - but it seems to have spent far too much time in the shadow of its more recent PlayStation outings, to its detriment.
At least in some respects the series' first handheld outing since the Game Boy's Metal Gear Ghost Babel has helped rein in some of the series' more recent extravagances - for starters Codec call sections are unusually rare, very brief, and entirely text-based. The cut-scenes, while occasionally straining patience while on the bus or at the end of a lunch-hour, are expertly executed, blending Ashley Wood's comic-book graphics (love them or hate them) with atypically excellent voice acting. The plot itself is still bonkers - and sadly, far weaker and less series-relevant than it should be- but it's delivered with the fantastic realism that defined the likes of the original MGS and the Game Boy outing.
Elsewhere, much has been done to condense the typically dense and extravagant world of MGS to a portable screen - gameplay is subdivided into missions of less than an hour long, for example, while a four-item inventory keeps the preposterous range of equipment available in check, and the environments are on a scale and design that allows them to be memorised within minutes. For all the work, some typical PSP developmental issues are very much present, primarily in the controls. An annoying quart-in-a-pint-pot affair, rather than using the age-old top-down camera system, it incorporates the movable third-person view from MGS3: Subsistence, which is neither necessary nor particularly elegant when squashed onto the PSP's single-stick controls. It proves a massive and unavoidable handicap, which even auto-aim and especially inept enemies can't hide.
On that note, the bosses in Portable Ops are utterly woeful by series standards. Between the inability to use weapons effectively due to the camera and the confined environments there's no capacity here for the inventiveness seen in the rest of the series' headline set-pieces. Rarely does a boss fight involve anything more complex than finding a break in the enemy fire and hitting a weak-spot for massive damage; even in comparison to MGS1's occasional duck-shoots, the charmlessness of the combat leaks through, and there is very little encouragement to charge on to the next overblown battle between a demented 'Nam-vet ice-man and Snake.
Between all the borderline-nonsensical anti-war plot and indestructible super soldiers with incestuous ties to the rest of the series, the meat of the game is rather more complete, providing an unusual squad-based take on the classic MGS set-up of sneaking from A to B and picking up C. The player initially controls only Snake himself, but within the first hour new soldiers are recruited and a team of four characters can be taken into the field. Though they can't work in tandem with each other - only one is controllable at any time, with the rest safely holed up in a traditional cardboard box - working out how to progress across the map and exploit each character's capabilities best requires a fair degree of planning, and a bit of luck.
It's in the management and co-ordination of your veritable rebel army that Portable Ops really comes into its own. To prevent players from merely finding the three best back-up troops to follow Snake into battle, damage and stamina wear are carried forward after each mission, requiring that you rotate characters often, and keep recruiting additional members for your team. It's impossible not to become attached to some of the squad, and in a masterstroke, characters that die in the field are gone permanently, short of restarting the mission. It's very much like the Fire Emblem series, though with the added torture that boss fights almost inevitably result in a few deaths.
It's a fitting dilemma given the series' overarching themes of soldiers being used for their leaders' gains, and supplying a constant stream of fresh blood to the team becomes a central concern. While the big-name characters can only be unlocked by completing certain objectives on-game, the far more entertaining Wi-Fi recruiting method often brings up some worthwhile rewards. Simply by wander around Wi-Fi hot-spots and hammering a button now and then, the game generates one-of-a-kind recruits, Barcode Battler-style. It's oddly addictive, and with plenty of non-combat roles to fill- specialists in making new weapons and medics to speed up character recovery amongst others - finding Wi-Fi spots becomes a game in itself.
There unfortunately isn't enough variety in the missions themselves, or the environments they occur in, perhaps as a result of the PSP's limited resources. Whether it's the 1970s setting that lacks IR sensor beams and security cameras or simply a lack of imagination, slipping through enemy lines undetected usually just requires that your select a suitable character with the right costume to go undetected, and employ a bit of precognition to work out when to stick some heavy-hitters into the team for when a boss fight punctuates the sneaking. Compared to the instantly memorable locations of the previous MGS titles, or the gloriously cartoony world of the Acid games, they make for a bland game to travel through, though the tension of managing and protecting your team during and between missions keeps it nominally interesting.
The bizarre situation is that in attempting to give Metal Gear fans a "proper" outing on an atypical console, Kojima Productions has somehow lost much of that MGS magic, and for a stealth game, the sneaking just doesn't cut it. While there's a lot to love, and it does succeed in giving fans exactly what they wanted, it doesn't feel as complete, compelling, or competent as the rest of the canon. Those wishing to get a portable Metal Gear fix before MGS4 comes would be advised to hunt out the far superior Ghost Babel on the Game boy Color; this is a game for the die-hards only.
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