Kept you waiting, huh? It took a few days for my copy of Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater to arrive, but what’s a week when it’s been over two decades?
I’ve been eagerly awaiting the release of this game because it is not every day that you get a remake this faithful of such an iconic game. Delta is exacting in recreating the source material, but with the care to modernize the gameplay past the limitations of the PlayStation 2.
Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater is a beautiful mix of military fetish bordering on the obsessive, camp spy movie nonsense, and that je ne sais quoi Hideo Kojima brings that makes even the most nonsensical combinations work perfectly.
Before we start eating though, let’s set some criteria here, as there’s more than one way to skin a snake. Although Delta is close to a shot-by-shot remake of Metal Gear Solid 3, it is a massive project that is being sold at a AAA blockbuster price point. A game with this much cultural weight, production value and asking price must be able to justify itself alone, so that’s what I am going off of.
If anything, since Konami confirmed plans to resume the Metal Gear franchise without Kojima, the closest valid comparison for Delta is The Phantom Pain, as the last mainline MGS title.
With that out of the way, I have my cardboard box, my tiger stripe BDU, and a whole lot of thoughts. It’s time to perform DualShocker’s first HALO jump into Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater.
The World Was Split Into Two
Metal Gear Solid titles excel at setting the stage, and Snake Eater does not let the family name down. We go back in time to 1964, in one of the tensest periods after World War 2. After almost turning the world to dust during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Soviet Union and the United States remained on edge. JFK was assassinated in 1963, and internal strife slowly eroded Khrushchev’s grip on power.
In 1964, cassette tapes had yet to hit the market, VHS didn’t exist yet, and the only entertainment Snake had in the Soviet wilderness was tasteful magazines.
This was a time of porous air defences and insufficient satellite surveillance. If you wanted to snap a picture of Soviet military installations, you had to be there, which cost the lives of plenty of American aviators over the years.
Hideo Kojima has always had a penchant for blending the real with the nonsensical, but Snake Eater is his most grounded project. This is also reflected in multiple game design choices in both the original and the remake, but more on that later.
Hit the Ground Running
After sitting through a movie-length cutscene (of which there are dozens in this game, but in a good way), I was firmly on Soviet ground with clear instructions and next to no tools.
The revamped movement in Metal Gear Solid Delta is much crisper than in the original game, though the responsiveness falls short of The Phantom Pain. On the plus side, the crawling was much more natural, and the dive and roll is a lot more useful than its predecessor’s frog hop.
The Tselinoyarsk area is modelled beautifully, and it pays good homage to Soviet Central Asia. Delta decided to stick with the original game’s design of short, fragmented maps, and I think it was vindicated for the most part.
To fight the artificial feeling of the tight quarters, Konami packed them with wildlife and guards. Just pull out the movement detector in any outdoor segment and see for yourself how busy the scope gets. Every living thing in Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater has its own agenda—guards follow patrol routes, scorpions seek dark corners, and vultures eat any dead body you leave behind.
In a single fight against a certain sniper, I wish we had more room to play, akin to the battle against the other sniper in Afghanistan, but the maps fit the movement speed and stealth well.
The biggest issue I have here is that the game keeps a single autosave slot, and it is overwritten every time you transition between areas. Guess who had to roll back two hours after forgetting to save and botching an infiltration?
A Gunslinger’s Dream
I’m not trying to compete with the pros here because there’s no way I could ever manage, so if you want an actual deep dive on the accuracy (and occasional lack thereof) on the firearms of Snake Eater, I defer to Jonathan Ferguson and Dave Jewitt in their breakdown of Metal Gear Solid 3.
I am merely a nerd who finds these things interesting, and boy, does this game know its audience. Instead of the Temu versions of real guns that permeated MGS5, I was treated to an array of beautifully modelled and (mostly) accurate iconic firearms in use around 1964.
Rather than quietly add this, though, Metal Gear Solid Delta likes to brag. Just about every character to hold a weapon in this game will wax lyrical about technical minutiae that would never make the cut in any other game.
EVA will tell you all about the technique of firing her Chinese Mauser C96 copy sideways so the recoil helps her track targets. Snake cannot shut up about his new tricked-out M1911. The support team aboard the C-130 is happy to ramble about every single gun you find in the wild. It feels like home.
Even when it takes creative liberties, the game pays homage to some cool Cold War designs like the D-21 drone with the fantasy passenger compartment, the Object 279 tank that was never actually fielded, and the Mi-24 that makes its appearance half a decade before its actual introduction.
Dare to be Camp
In an era where everything has to be ironic and sincerity is perceived as cringe (thanks, Tiffany Ferg), it was so refreshing to play a game that is not afraid to be silly. The writing in Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater (and its source material, by association) is frequently ridiculous, but that’s because it wants to be fun.
The game manages to hold serious themes without sacrificing the humor, and a lot of that is due to the spectacular performances by the cast. The endless innuendo between David Hayter and Jodi Benson (or good old Ariel) never gets stale, but there is also plenty of joy to be found in the codec messages.
Every living thing in Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater has its own agenda…
My favorite segment is the cinema chat between Snake and Para-Medic when I’m trying to save the game. I never skipped any of those, because why would I rob myself of a combat medic explaining Godzilla to a special forces operator?
That irreverent attitude is reflected in the antagonists as well, and the developers did them justice by using the new tech to make the battles as memorable as they are ridiculous.
Fight for the Mission
The 2004 version of Snake Eater was a masterpiece that occasionally hit a wall due to the PlayStation 2’s limitations. Metal Gear Solid Delta still gives you the option to use the old mechanics, but unless you are blinded by nostalgia or a masochist, there’s little reason to use those.
The standard (new) combat in MGS Delta is a work of art, and it reminds me of just how good a game can be when it dedicates itself wholly to the espionage experience. You don’t get to use Reflex Mode to make up for sloppy decisions here. Movement and camouflage need to be carefully weighed to avoid detection, and every combat encounter reminds you of how you are a bad secret squirrel.
…every character to hold a weapon in this game will wax lyrical about technical minutiae…
What makes the game really come alive are the boss fights. Skill issue has a part in it, but I loathe the trend of boss fights just being bullet sponges that attack super fast and/or eat half your health in one hit. It turns everything into a dodge-roll spam that becomes tedious by the third fight.
Metal Gear Solid Delta on the other hand has eccentric bosses that are just as human as you are, with strengths, quirks, and vulnerabilities. The new camera and combat style makes these encounters even more memorable, and I loved trying to crack each of these specimens. You can try to outsmart your enemies, or brute-force your way to victory if you dare. What a thrill, either way.
Show Me Your Scars
For all the noise made by the Unreal Engine 5 critics, the game looks good and runs smoothly for the most part. This is a baseline PlayStation 5 hooked to a 4K television; there are no delusions about that, so I played in Performance mode most of the time after testing both.
That said, it’s not a perfect experience. Certain cutscenes are choppy (especially pre-rendered ones), and there is a noticeable frame drop during one of the boss fights. It’s not enough to affect the gameplay, but that second spent thinking about frame rates is enough to shatter the illusion the game works so hard to build.
Can Konami match (or even come close) to the level of writing and directing?
Another missed opportunity in this remake is the poor DualSense integration, something I find inexcusable in this day and age. Contrast that with the trigger weight in Sniper Elite: Resistance for example, also a third-person shooter about espionage, or the all-in implementation in ARMA Reforger.
These issues are far from game-breaking, but they make me mourn what could have been if Konami had spared some love for these details. I want to believe the developers when they say performance woes will be taken care of in future patches, but I fear the trigger implementation won’t ever change.
In My Time There’ll Be No One Else
It’s been exactly ten years since Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain came out. I spent this decade between replays of MGS titles, and entertaining Kojima’s latest adventures with Death Stranding. The life of the post-apocalyptic delivery boy is good and all, but I’m glad to be home.
Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater is a return to form for Konami, and a shining beacon in the post-Kojima darkness. The game is far more faithful to the source material than other modern remakes like Final Fantasy VII, but it makes a statement by being a major improvement over it.
The developers are planning to eventually make their own, all-new Metal Gear games, and this is a perfect starting point for a team with such lofty ambitions. They executed some of the best stealth mechanics in history in a modern format without losing any of the feeling, making the game more engaging and fun to play.
Can Konami match (or even come close) to the level of writing and directing that Hideo Kojima originally set for the series? I don’t know, but after playing through Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater, I actually want to find out the answer.
Twenty-one years is a long time for a videogame, but the writing in Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater aged like a fine wine. Konami played its hand well by keeping all that made the game great, and just replacing the more dated, practical bits. From crawling around in the mountains to fighting Soviet Spider-Man in the jungle, Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater is fun to play and actually feels good. It is the perfect gift for Metal Gear Solid fans, ten years after the mainline game. Despite some minor gripes specific to the PlayStation 5 integration, this game is a sign that you can, in fact, improve on perfection… if it’s part of the mission.
Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater
Reviewed on PlayStation 5
- Released
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August 28, 2025
- ESRB
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Mature 17+ // Blood, Sexual Themes, Violence
- Unmatched stealth mechanics in a modern game
- Eccentric writing that still holds up
- Excessive (complimentary) attention to Cold War tech details
- New combat and camera that make the original completely obsolete
- Lazy DualSense integration
- Rare but noticeable frame drops even on Performance mode
- Some maps would have worked better stitched together
- A single auto-save slot that triggers too often