Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots

By and large, in terms of features and controls at least, Guns of the Patriots feels more like traditional MGS than Snake Eater or Portable Ops did. Uninterrupted by the heavy menu usage and elaborate gameplay systems of both those games, it's a tense, exacting, crisp and relatively fast-paced stealth thriller, with a stop-start rhythm that harks all the way back to 1998. Its departures from what we expect of Metal Gear don't come in the form of some arcane new mechanic; they're more subtle, more general, but perhaps more fundamental.

The series' traditional bird's-eye view of the action has been replaced with a more contemporary free-look third-person camera. This actually first appeared in the Subsistence version of MGS3, but this is the first time a Metal Gear game has been designed around it, and it shows. The environments are more open but also more complex, detailed and multi-layered.

The demo consists of a honeycomb maze of shattered, bombed-out building shells, and our route through takes us sneaking all around its outskirts, looping and circling and doubling back, before finally heading out into the street for a confrontation with an enemy tank. Blowing this up with a rocket launcher earns the trust of the rebel soldiers fighting the mercenary bad guys, and the demo ends with a quite un-MGS running battle, accompanied by the rebels, mopping up the last of the PMC (private military corporation) soldiers. Then a cut-scene introduces Meryl and her new Foxhound unit, one of whom appears to be Frank Spencer in a balaclava.

The "no place to hide" strapline is a bit disingenuous - in this demo at least, there were places to hide absolutely everywhere. But the feeling of cover was much more fragile, and the option of shooting your way out much more realistic. Guns of the Patriots bring action to the fore more than any Metal Gear Solid to date has dared to. Snake is tooled to the nines with heavy hardware, and allowed to use it without necessarily having to run for cover in a querulous flap afterwards.

That will come as a relief to many players, but we're not 100 percent sure it's a good thing, yet. The fact is that the nine-year-old template for this game was not conceived as a full-bore shooter, and the controls and camera can't really cope with the action. Aiming is maddeningly imprecise, lock-on has a mind of its own, and the camera moves with a vague inertia which works nicely for taking in the view, but not for flicking around a battlefield quickly. It's messy, frankly, and the game feels much better when playing with the painstaking, inch-at-a-time precision you had to in previous instalments.

One thing you needn't worry about: Guns of the Patriots looks stunning. There are far more expansive, varied and showy game environments out there, it's true - the setting is almost drab in its realism - but the characters and their costumes are rendered and animated with an exquisite eye for detail, understated style and perfect, disbelief-suspending finish. Old Snake has the smouldering, craggy dignity of a Connery or Redford, and he's not even real. Metal Gear Solid has always been one of the sexiest game series, and Guns of the Patriots is just dripping with spy-fetish cool.

But it's a game with a flashback button, and all that implies. It's burdened - or blessed, depending on your point of view - with a long and complex history and a decade-old style of stealth play, and as much as it seeks to break out of that, it probably won't. It's probably going to remain a Marmite game, delighting, enraging and confusing people in equal measure. But there's no doubt that it will be a dream come true to MGS fans, and based on our demo, it's quite likely to be their favourite since the first.