TGS07 hands-on: Metal Gear Online
Surprisingly the line for Metal Gear Online was relatively short, even for a press day, so we took advantage and got our hands on the upcoming online stealth shooter. Twelve PS3s were set up so that a constant rotation of players could fight together, six to a team. As each match began the next set of players were sent to a mysterious back room. Finally it was our turn and we could discover what was going on back there.
The door opened onto a tiny room filled with chairs, a projector and a Japanese woman with a pointer who sternly (though she was talking in Japanese so we can't be sure) gave us our briefing. Undoubtedly hilarious if you understand Japanese, we were sadly left staring at the lady's beret. We did, however, learn the basic controls via the enthusiastic pointing at the handy images that were being projected onto the wall. These will be familiar to anyone who's ever played a Metal Gear Solid game before. After a short talk on the skill system and an overview of the map we were sent out to fight.
The skill system allows you to apply four latent abilities to your character before the battle begins. These included increased mobility, auto-aim and weapon proficiencies. The gameplay itself is very similar to Metal Gear Solid 4, but without any of the stealth abilities. Your character can crouch, crawl and do a forward flip. Movement is fairly slow, especially when compared to Warhawk's fast paced ground-based sections, but this has the effect of increasing the tension of the game.
As the game starts, and each time you respawn, you must select your weapons of choice. Other pieces of equipment are automatically in your inventory, including the famous cardboard box. Combat is a fairly simple point-and click affair (as it should be) made more complex by utilizing Metal Gear Solid's "L1-hold to ready weapon, then R1 to shoot." As a result there were several times during the game when players were seen performing a melee attack by accident.
Another control niggle is the lack of Y-axis invert. The options menu has settings for both the X- and Y-axis, which work perfectly when moving around, but the moment you ready your gun the axis invert options revert to normal. We searched the menus as much as we could, suffering many deaths, looking for some sort of aim-specific camera options before finally giving up. This isn't to say the option isn't there, it's just that we didn't find it in the j
Japanese menus.
As an online game, Metal Gear Online relies on effective team management and camaraderie. Players can help their fallen team mates out and provide cover for those in need. This adds another element to the game by not allowing players to ignore their mates, as can sometimes happen with online-only games.
Graphically, the game is close to, if not as good as, Metal Gear Solid 4 itself. The level we played in was large, detailed and full of hiding places. At some points it felt too large and we found ourselves searching for what felt like ages looking for someone on the opposing team to be killed by.
One downside we noticed was that players can clip through each other, making melee combat difficult and confusing. we imagine this will be fixed before the official release next year. The player characters are also quite bland and boring to look at; however, during his Q&A at Leipzig last month, Kojima promised that there will be playable cameos from series' staples (please let it be Johnny Sisaki). Despite these problems, we're looking forward to seeing how the final version turns out when it's released at around the same time as Metal Gear Solid 4 next year.
