Gear

I find myself in a simulation of a simulation, a modern recreation of a fictional jungle that I and many others fought and persisted through decades ago. As I crawl through the grass, sneak through Soviet weapons facilities, and survive on the animals of the wild, my mind oscillates through deja vu, the pleasant stupor of nostalgia, and the thrill of a sophisticated stealth experience that challenges my reflexes as well as my ability to plan several steps ahead to stay in control of dangerous situations. An inspired story threads these sneaking sequences together, telling a tale of fractured relationships, the pain they cause, and how grand forces beyond our control shape us. I’ve been here before; I’m struck with a strange feeling of being caught between memory and newness. As I crawl through the mud, I think, is this an authentic experience? Is this a substitute for the “real thing” that came ages ago? I take a step forward. “Huh? Footsteps? Is someone there?” says someone around the corner. It’s time to put those thoughts about reality, simulations, and authenticity to the side; I’ve a mission to complete. Into the fray I go, silently, swiftly, with new, deadly precision.

To remake Metal Gear Solid 3 is an interesting proposition. The winding, cryptic narrative of the Metal Gear Solid series starts with the events of Snake Eater. It’s a prequel, and a well-written, rightly celebrated one at that. It also represents a maturation of the formula series creator Hideo Kojima, along with the team of developers at Konami, started with 1998’s Metal Gear Solid. Snake Eater digs deeper into the series’ stealth focus, with enemies more attuned to the sounds of your footsteps and more capable of spotting you from a greater distance. You also have to contend with needs such as hunger and treating your wounds, and using camouflage is essential to staying out of sight.

With the games that followed MGS3, the series began to lose much of its identity, becoming less an evolution of the original Metal Gear games that arrived on MSX in the late ‘80s and more a response to the third-person shooters of the Xbox 360 and PS3 era. With Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, we drifted even further from the original mold, embracing an open-world format, fracturing the traditional narrative structure many were used to, and perhaps most controversially, replacing the iconic voice of the American version of Snake while eliminating such series’ staples  as dedicated “codec” conversations. This fractured series identity is what Delta steps into.

Fans of that original MGS experience might feel like we’ve lost our way from the kind of stealth and narrative adventures that we cherished so much in the late ‘90s and early ‘00s. Delta arrives as a potential reset for that, and succeeds with flying camo colors as a remarkably faithful remake of one of the all-time greats of our medium.

© Screenshot: Konami / Claire Jackson / Kotaku (taken in photo mode)

After MGS2’s switcheroo forced players to contend with a protagonist who, to put it mildly, challenged the masculine archetype the series had centered up to that point, MGS3 recenters traditional, Kurt Russell-inspired masculinity, the kind that defines itself through rugged violence essentialized as a struggle against nature; a thing to fight, a thing to kill, a thing to consume. And the women of the game are eager to show as much tits and ass as an M rating would allow at the time.

MGS3, and by extension Delta, is prone to complicated, often incorrect, assumptions about governments and economic systems, and its wiser moments can all too quickly be overshadowed by the excitement of wielding deadly weapons without caution and smashing up commies in the East. Still, it’s important to see MGS3 as a bold reaffirming of what worked in MGS and a rejection of what didn’t, in the eyes of some, in MGS2. Snake Eater would go on to be one of the most celebrated MGS titles. Now we’re here in 2025, and once again Snake Eater exists as a kind of course correction for the series; it’s an opportunity to take the missteps of MGSV, its open-world structure that often felt directionless and bland, its fractured narrative that was hard to parse for a story already playing with some high level concepts, and correct them.

In doing so, Delta stands to remind us of just how powerful this era of MGS was, when it was laser focused on captivating, linear level structure, along with a story you could enjoy as you would a film, not the disconnected threads that Phantom Pain asked players to stitch together themselves. It also streamlines those aspects of the original that saw you spending much of your time diving through cumbersome menus, and offers a more traditional camera and aiming experience via its “New Style” mode, which the game defaults to. It also, naturally, delivers the high level of graphical fidelity we expect from a modern AAA game, though some purists may take offense at differences in color grading (they should really just go play the original if it bothers them that much). I’d argue this stylistic change is in line with what Snake Eater was always aspiring to, and is in keeping with what Kojima envisioned for the future of the series, which was to bring it even closer to photorealism.

© Screenshot: Konami / Claire Jackson / Kotaku (taken in photo mode)

And so, we come back to Kojima, whose stamp is all over Snake Eater and who is nonetheless conspicuously absent from Delta. To be frank, the lack of Kojima on this project feels weird, even preposterous. Would we accept a Twin Peaks “remake” or fourth season without David Lynch? Would we tolerate a shot-for-shot remake of The Matrix without the participation of the Wachowski sisters? Crazy talk! Would we even want those things if their creators were intimately attached?

But of course, for all the genius and talent David Lynch gave to Twin Peaks, what would that show be without the incredible compositions of Angelo Badalamenti? Would The Matrix have warped our minds in the same way without the technical and creative genius of John Gaeta, who was able to bring bullet time to life? It is so often the case that the works which we remember and cherish dearly are collaborative works, brought to life by far more than just the director’s name.

Video games are no different. While MGS wouldn’t exist without the enthusiastic, eccentric creative energy of Hideo Kojima, it takes far more than one person to build a video game as ambitious as any Metal Gear Solid. Major AAA titles are team efforts, and success can never be attributed to any one individual. Who’s to say what MGS would’ve been like if even one other person on the teams that built these games were swapped out?

Delta makes no attempt at hiding the work of Hideo Kojima, with his name showing up a number of times in the opening credits. With very limited exceptions that will certainly be dissected vigorously by the MGS fanbase, the camera work in the cutscenes stays true to that in the original with frightening accuracy. The environment and characters look incredible, conveying well the emotional depth the original aimed for with its lofty cinematic goals. Add the fact that the game uses the original’s voice acting and music, and the combined effect plays a trick on the mind: Delta gave me both the thrills of a modern, polished AAA game and an active dose of nostalgia for the PS2 era in all the best ways.

© Screenshot: Konami / Claire Jackson / Kotaku (taken in photo mode)

When that camera is turned over to you, the default settings give you a different kind of perspective than what Snake Eater originally shipped with. You can freely rotate the camera, you can even move in first person like you could in MGS4 and V, though at a slower pace. You press the left trigger to raise your weapon, you fire it with the right. You reload with a face button.

For all these modern comforts, however, the game still feels like it’s playing in the world that MGS, Sons of Liberty, and the original Snake Eater built. Smartly, the d-pad becomes of use in a way that preserves the left and right corners of the screen as your dedicated item and weapon management system. Gone is the more Gears of War-esque weapon selection system of The Phantom Pain. Added to this layout is an up-press on the d-pad to scroll through a selection of camo to change outfits way faster than you could in the original. You can also press down on the d-pad to bring up a new codec/radio menu and swiftly hop on a call with the game’s NPCs–and yes, you can still call Para-Medic to save your progress and enjoy snippets of cinema history afterwards.

This streamlining takes elements of Snake Eater that once required you to sift through different screens to engage with them and instead places them in the heat of the moment, easier to reach for when you need them. In my experience, this improves the flow of Snake Eater’s gameplay so much that I prefer playing Delta over the original based on this alone. And while I have some serious reservations about the thought of any other MGS game getting remade, I have to say, if it’s going to play like Delta, have at it, Konami! (I will now hide under my desk to avoid getting struck by lightning.)

Most mechanics remain largely faithful to the original, rather than undergoing the kind of deep expansion you might expect them to receive in a remake such as this. Close-quarters-combat, for instance, has not been expanded beyond some flashier animations that mostly occur during certain boss fights–one fight in particular relies on these fancier animations instead of a sound cue like the original did. This marks perhaps Delta’s most extreme deviation from the original.

© Screenshot: Konami / Claire Jackson / Kotaku (taken in photo mode)

You can, however, crouch-walk. This was not in MGS DNA until Guns of the Patriots, and it’s a welcome modernization here; moving from cover, crouching, then going to a crawl all feels suitably smooth, sophisticated, and intuitive. It makes for a wildly impressive and immersive stealth experience that demands an adherence to form in the way you approach situations. You need to learn and memorize how best to turn corners, when and where to emerge from tall grass. Snake Eater encourages you to build those best practices, that stealth form, like an athlete training for an event; Delta gives you increased mobility and camerawork to be more immersed in the experience. It can make the game easier, however. With that in mind, I recommend that veterans of the original start on Hard difficulty unless they’re looking for a breezy first trip through.

The one downside to the new camera style is that it can, on occasion, feel claustrophobically close. There’s no FOV slider, even on the PC version, and the game’s environments are smaller than what we’re used to in modern shooters.

The pacing of the game has not changed much either. Snake moves at about the same speed as he did in the original. No sprint function was added, and things like swimming and wading through mud still feel like a chore. I think Konami could’ve stood to be a bit bolder by speeding that pace up, but it fits with a game that’s already trying to make its combat feel meatier and more impactful than that in a rapid, twitchy shooter. Despite feeling similar to modern games in terms of its controls, Delta also still feels like the original Snake Eater, not an MGS3 overhaul mod for MGSV or something. Indeed, it feels more like classic Metal Gear Solid than any MGS game has in decades, without feeling like a retro throwback that requires a rewiring of your brain.

Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater

• Back-of-the-box quote:

  Same great snake taste you love, now with four times the pixels!

• Developer:

  Konami

• Type of game:

  Third-person stealth action game.

• Liked:

  Faithful recreation of a classic, wonderfully improved controls.

• Disliked:

  Lack of an FOV slider, some slower elements of the original remain.

• Platforms:

  PS5, Xbox Series X/S, Windows PCs (played).

• Release date:

  August 28, 2025 (playable on August 26 for those who pre-order the deluxe version).

• Played:

  30 hours on a non-lethal, never-spotted run on the game’s Hard difficulty setting using the “New Style” camera.

That extends to the menu systems, which have all of the character and detail that they exuded in the original. Eat a snake, and you’ll sometimes see a little cutscene of our protagonist chowing down, followed up by the sound of him chewing, swallowing, and commenting on how tasty it was. The game will play the audio every time you eat, as it did in the original. The remake could’ve given us an option to skip as it does feel a little tedious and repetitive when you’re more than a dozen hours into the game.

MGS3 was always far from my favorite Metal Gear Solid. It lacked MGS2’s fourth-wall-breaking meta stuff that had me captivated, putting me in a weird liminal space where I obsessed about what the purpose of a “sequel” even is. Its plot twists, in my opinion, don’t match up to the wild revelations of the first MGS or, for that matter, those of MGSV later on. And its survival mechanics always slowed the action down too much for me. But Delta really helped me appreciate what this game is by breaking down the rigid barriers of the original’s menu-diving while giving me a more sophisticated set of movement options and camera controls. And the game is visually impressive not just because it’s a modern-day AAA game with the horsepower of our modern consoles and GPUs. There’s real care in the presentation, from the improved fidelity of facial animations to carry those wonderfully well-written lines of dialogue, to bits of grass, leaves, and sticks getting stuck to your clothes and falling off as you move around. Delta’s graphics got more than a few “wows” out of me.

© Screenshot: Konami / Claire Jackson / Kotaku

I’ve got my critiques of that 2004 premiere of Snake in the jungle, but there’s no denying that the original Snake Eater will remain one of the greatest games of all time and people should play it if they care about the history of this medium, and to see how the now humble processing power of the PS2 was pushed to its extreme to tell a captivating story about shifting allegiances, broken relationships, and the threat we humans pose to ourselves by using our intellect to build super weapons. For those returning to this jungle, expect a faithful and respectful rearticulation of a game you loved–and if you didn’t love it, maybe the slight modernizations will win you over as they did for me.

Should someone come across Snake Eater for the first time with Delta, they’ll find a phenomenal modern stealth experience housed in the kind of classic narrative and linear structure that modern games have been neglecting far too often in their quests to make their worlds bigger. Delta knows its subject matter can stimulate the imagination, and no piece of silicon can out muscle that.

Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater modernizes the classic mechanics of the original while preserving the breathlessly tense feeling of its stealth gameplay, and its painstakingly accurate recreation of the original’s aesthetic and vibrantly beating cinematic heart preserve so much of why these games have withstood the test of time. Should Delta be not just a one-off but the dawn of a new generation for Metal Gear Solid, it’s a promising one indeed.

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