Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater (PlayStation, Xbox, PC, £69.99)
Verdict: Delta, bravo!
Back in 2004, a game with the preposterous title of Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater set the bar for stealth gaming.
By taking the popular series out of military installations and corridors — and into swamps, forests and mountains — its creator, Hideo Kojima, broadened everyone’s horizons.
Your special-ops character (codename: Naked Snake) could use camouflage now! He could treat his wounds in the field! He could even eat the local fauna to get by, including — yes — the sort of fauna that hisses!
And now, here in 2025, MGS3 is back. It has been remade without Kojima’s involvement, though rest assured: its (re)makers clearly know what they’re doing.
Naked Snake: Your special-ops character can now apply his own camouflage, treat his wounds – and eat the wildlife (including other snakes) in the field
They’ve swapped out the 3 for a delta symbol, making that title somehow even more preposterous.
In a way, that little delta switch speaks for the rest of the remake: some things have been changed, but this is mostly still the MGS3 we played more than 20 years ago. Sure, the graphics are much — much — prettier.
The controls have been modernised and streamlined. But Delta’s greatest delights are the same as the original MGS3’s.
Choose your camouflage: Your character, Naked Snake, can select his own brilliant disguise in the new MGS3 game. And eat a real snake.
Suspension bridge: Our hero Naked Snake goes to extreme lengths to avoid being spotted by a couple of camp baddies on patrol
They include that stealth gameplay, of course, as well as a twisty-turny Cold War story that inserts nuclear tank-robots and intensely camp baddies into real-world situations involving Nikita Khrushchev and Lyndon Johnson. It’s bonkers and not a little self-indulgent.
But when even the save screen involves a radio conversation with another operative — who will invariably talk to you about old movies — who can complain?
Naked Snake is back. And he’s charmed the pants off me.
Kirby And The Forgotten Land – Nintendo Switch 2 Edition + Star-Crossed World (Nintendo Switch 2, £66.99 or a £16.99 upgrade if you own the original)
Verdict: In the pink
It’s déjà vu all over again. A few weeks ago, I re-reviewed Super Mario Party Jamboree after this Nintendo Switch game was released again and enhanced for the Switch 2.
And now I’m re-reviewing Kirby And The Forgotten Land for the same reason.
I awarded this Kirby game four stars when it originally came out in 2022 — and with good cause. It was one of the cutesy pink bubble’s best ever adventures and one of the finest 3D platformers on the Switch, even if its gameplay was a little too straightforward at times. It was a joy to boing and float through its cartoonishly dystopian world.
And I’m still awarding it four stars, though I probably like it even more today. This Switch 2 version is, unsurprisingly, just better — not least visually. The higher-resolution imagery pops off the newer console’s bigger screen.
Return of the blob: Everybody’s favourite pink bubble is back in a new version of Kirby And The Forgotten Land for the Switch 2
It’s also been supplemented with a new add-on called The Star-Crossed World. Basically, something nasty has dropped from space and it’s up to Kirby, of course, to set things right.
This means whole new levels appended to the old ones — with a slightly higher level of challenge and some new powers for our shape-shifting blob of a hero.
Those new powers might not sound like much on paper — Kirby can, for instance, swallow a spring to bounce higher in the air then dart back down to ground — but they are deployed so imaginatively that they all manage to astound.
In fact, the whole experience put me in mind of this year’s all-timer Donkey Kong Bananza. Nintendo’s secondary characters are still that — secondary to Mario — but they feel like the custodians of some of the company’s craziest, most captivating gameplay.
Sorry, that should be ‘kraziest, most kaptivating’ — in honour of Kong and Kirby.