Few games truly deserve a remake as much as Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater. Arguably the best stealth action game of its generation, it pushed the PlayStation 2 to its limits back in 2004—so much so that the hardware sometimes weighed down its ambitions. Twenty years later, Konami’s complete remake harnessing the power of up-to-date consoles has the potential to unlock the full, uncompromising vision of the original creators. Instead, this novel, Kojima-free Metal Gear Solid Delta feels more like a glossy HD remaster than the elegant remake it could have been. It’s a handsome nostalgia trip, to be sure, but it’s almost too faithful to be true.
During a recent demo, I got to play Metal Gear Solid Delta’s Virtuous Mission; a complete recreation of the MGS3 prologue built in Unreal Engine 5. It looks as fantastic as you’d expect, especially when it comes to the character models – the faces and clothing are a real highlight. The real star of the show, however, is the jungle, with up-to-date lighting techniques helping to showcase the graphical reconstruction of every blade of grass, every puddle of mud, and every writhing python.
If you’re a Metal Gear veteran, you know that Virtuous Mission’s roughly 90-minute running time is dominated by cutscenes and codec calls. It’s not the ideal section to test out Konami’s changes (apart from the visuals), especially since Delta uses the same audio dialogue as the original Snake Eater, and as such, all of the cutscenes are identical frame-for-frame and line-for-line. But if this section is any indication, any gameplay changes are minimal. Delta feels like a painstaking reconstruction of Metal Gear Solid 3, down to the last millimeter. The trees are exactly where they were originally. The same enemies patrol the same routes. And frustratingly constant loading screens re-divide the jungle into diminutive, enclosed maps.
This structure, perfectly preserved from the 2004 original, makes Metal Gear Solid Delta feel much older than its novel high-resolution graphics. The jungle is diminutive and claustrophobic, not because of the imposing canopy, but because of the narrow spaces in which to play. Loading screens act as difficult barriers, meaning that what happens in one zone has no effect on another—alerted guards can’t chase you on another map, for example. This lack of continuity between each segment limits your creativity; there’s seemingly no way to create distractions that trick enemies into exploring beyond the boundary of the loading screen, or to line up the perfect shot through the seams between zones.
All of this, of course, wasn’t just forgivable in 2004, but expected. The PS2 simply couldn’t render the entire fluid play area in such granular detail. But in 2024, it sorely lacks the freedom of Metal Gear Solid 5’s sprawling maps, which would have been a perfect fit for Snake Eater’s Soviet wilderness. It reminds me of Capcom’s Resident Evil 2 remake, which did away with the original game’s iconic door-opening loading screens in favor of a more immersive, completely fluid police station. Without a similar approach, I fear the overall experience of MGS Delta won’t be sufficiently different from the Snake Eater HD remaster available as part of last year’s Master Collection Vol. 1 – a game with a much lower price tag AND bundled with two other truly excellent games.
After playing the demo, I had a chance to talk to producer Noriaki Okamura and asked why the team hadn’t decided to update the MGS3 map design. “We talked about it internally,” he told me. “Maybe we should change the look of the game to the current open-world map? But on second thought, we definitely would have to completely rewrite the game from the ground up, and in doing so, we might have changed other things about the game, and we decided that wasn’t the direction we really wanted to go.”
While Virtuous Mission’s playspace is exactly as you remember it, Konami has made some sharp changes that undeniably make Delta more enjoyable to play than its parent. Chief among them is the revamped control scheme, which works in conjunction with the over-the-shoulder aiming, a feature lifted from the 3DS version of MGS3. The setup is practically revolutionary. The original Snake Eater used commands that had their roots in the relatively basic MGS1, but increasingly convoluted and challenging boss fights demanded a level of precise control that the scheme simply couldn’t keep up with. Thankfully, the senior, tedious aiming mechanics have been forgotten, replaced by up-to-date trigger-based weapon controls that allow for straightforward, precise headshots. There’s nothing in Virtuous Mission that really tests my shooting skills, but I’m really looking forward to fighting The Fury; a boss whose speed and attack patterns were no match for the original game’s clunky controls.
Other welcome improvements include a quick-select system for your d-pad, allowing you to access crucial functions like saving your game by tapping down on the d-pad, while the up button opens a quick-select for your camouflage. The remaining two buttons on the d-pad cycle through your inventory, which is a diminutive but solid improvement over the original scheme.
More significantly, Snake can now walk while crouching (another feature first included on the 3DS version), which feels practically necessary for a stealth game. Combined with the revamped aiming system and up-to-date 3D camera, Snake Eater now feels much more intuitive. However, I have to say that it still feels like a last-gen game; Snake unfortunately doesn’t move with the fluidity of his MGS5 counterpart. Again, it feels like Konami missed a clear opportunity to bring up-to-date improvements to MGS Delta.
Assuming the entire game follows this demo, I think your feelings about Delta will depend on how faithful you want this remake to be. If you’re a purist, you’re in luck: the novel MGS team at Konami clearly sees the original Snake Eater as something of a religious text. But that means Delta’s innovative vision is being held prisoner by the early 2000s. Even the cutscenes feature the same fade-to-black loading between scenes as the original—something that the cinephile Kojima would have surely exorcised if he’d had access to SSDs back then.
Aside from the updated graphics and controls, there’s nothing surprising, refreshing, or dare I say stimulating about MGS Delta, at least in this demo. The only significant change we found was that shooting Ocelot didn’t trigger the time paradox on the game screen. It’s unclear if this omission is simply because the demo wasn’t pulled from the final game, but the lack of such celebrated Kojima-ism in Delta’s first press preview raised concerns. Hopefully, it’ll make it into the full release.
Okamura told me that he “wanted to avoid the series being forgotten over time,” and that Delta’s goal was to “make sure we delivered the game as faithfully as possible so that it didn’t take away from the nostalgic aspect.” It’s a noble goal, but I can’t lend a hand but feel like that’s the Master Collection’s job. I had hoped Delta would see the team improve and refine Snake Eater with ideas from The Phantom Pain and beyond, offering the same story and goals but in a more up-to-date, more pliant, and more reactive hunting ground. That could have made it the remake that toppled Resident Evil 2 from its place. Instead, Metal Gear Solid Delta shapes up as little more than a prettier, more intuitive version of 2004’s imperative stealth game.
Matt Purslow is a senior features editor at IGN.
