Metal Gear Solid: Master Collection Vol. 2 review – 18 years later, MGS4 still feels like an event

Playing Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots for the first time since it launched back in 2008 is a strange feeling, partly because so much of what made it feel enormous back then has simply disappeared from games, that sense that you're playing the latest instalment in some sprawling, decades-long saga where every character, conspiracy and elegant bit of military hardware has been building towards this one enormous finale.

We get big games now, obviously, GTA6 is nearly here, but very few arrive carrying quite this much baggage, and MGS4 doesn't exactly try to hide it either, it throws the whole lot at you: Big Boss, Liquid, the Patriots, Snake's ageing, the Beauty and the Beast Unit, a return to Shadow Moses, Metal Gear REX, Ocelot pulling strings, and somehow expects you to keep up.

Then, when the music swells, and Old Snake is crawling towards his end, tapping 'Triangle' to keep him alive and save the world, it still works. I know what's coming, I've played it before, I've spent enough time with the series to know where all of this is heading, and yet there's something about seeing Old Snake drag himself towards his final confrontation that remains truly epic.

That might be the strangest thing about coming back to MGS4 in 2026, and it's fantastic that we finally can, because for all the things that have aged badly, and there are plenty, Kojima's finale still has an extraordinary sense of occasion, playfulness and invention that many modern games simply don't have or strive for.

MGS4 is playable again

It also helps that this is the first time I've been able to play it properly outside the PS3, and it still feels like a technical triumph. MGS4 was already pushing the PS3 hard in 2008, and I had forgotten just how much visual information it was trying to throw around. The Middle Eastern battlefields are still busy and grimy, the character models hold up surprisingly well, the snow blowing around Shadow Moses looks fantastic, and the Shadow Moses Metal Gear encounter remains an enormous technical showcase designed to sell you on the power of PS3. There's not really a drop in quality from what you watch and what you play, and while that seems a given these days, in 2008 it felt like magic.

At 4K and 60fps it feels clean and crisp without losing that slightly grubby late-PS3 character, and while the assets obviously haven't been rebuilt to modern standards, the actual design has aged far better than I expected. The enemy design, environments and boss encounters still have nuance and subtle ideas running through them, rather than simply being places to walk through or fight between cinematics; designs like the Gekko that mix machine and organic, muscle, that 'moo' like cows and hunt in packs exude personality and showcase Kojima's renowned attention to detail.

The Beauty and the Beast Unit are still one of the best examples of this. These bosses are women traumatised by war and turned into machines of destruction, revenge and spectacle, and yes, the way MGS4 presents them is very much tied to the late 2000s, with Kojima's fascination with sex, violence and fetishised character design often pushing things further than they need to go, and in fact even 18 years ago eyesbrows were raised, but mechanically they're memorable fights that bookend missions nicely while playing on nostalgia for earlier entries in the series.

Laughing Octopus can camouflage herself into the scenery and disappear into rooms you've just searched, firing clouds of ink that disorient Snake, while Night Vision gives you another way of tracking her by picking up the footprints she leaves behind. Screaming Mantis takes control of dead as well as living soldiers, and Meryl's presence gives you another perilous route through the encounter as she's used as a human shield, particularly once you realise that shooting Mantis' puppets can help break through her defences. They are weird, inventive fights and, importantly, they make you think for a few minutes before you get to go back to the next enormous cinematic.

Because yes, that problem is still here. Back in 2008, I remember feeling that the balance between actually playing MGS4 and watching MGS4 was a little off, and coming back to it now hasn't changed my mind. You can play for a handful of minutes, and then suddenly you're watching a 20-minute cinematic, particularly during the early stages, and although the story is doing important work, it can feel like the controller has been taken away just when you're getting into the rhythm of the game.

Do want an MGS lore dump?

That isn't helped by the sheer amount of lore you're expected to soak up and ponder upon. MGS4 is assuming you've followed Snake from the original Metal Gear through Metal Gear 2, MGS1 and MGS2, and then spent enough time thinking about Big Boss, Zero, the Patriots, Liquid, Ocelot and the various clone projects to remember who everyone is when they suddenly appear on screen. If you've only a passing relationship with Metal Gear, good luck.

But if you have followed it, the fan service is ridiculous, and that's really why you were here in 2008 anyway. The final third is still one of the most effective pieces of nostalgia bait I've seen in a game, whether it's pressing 'X' during scenes to recall iconic moments or the iconic mission that starts with a pixel-art dream sequence before sending Snake back to Shadow Moses, the setting of the original Metal Gear Solid. It is basically Kojima taking you by the hand and walking you around his own history, pointing at things you remember and then nudging you to make sure you noticed the reference.

There are jokes about changing discs, because in Metal Gear Solid on PS1 you had to swap discs at this precise moment, and now you're on a PS5, so there's no need (the joke is edited from the PS3 original). The ghost of Psycho Mantis gets another fourth-wall-breaking shot at messing with you, only to discover there's no memory card for him to read, before settling for making the DualSense vibrate very weakly instead. It's silly, it's completely unnecessary, and it works because Metal Gear has always understood that the player is part of the joke.

Kojima spends much of the game doing things like this, breaking the fourth wall and turning the hardware itself into part of the experience. The controller can vibrate, and inputs become erratic to make you feel Old Snake's distress; Beauty and the Beast bosses 'remember' past encounters, while Snake can destress by reading Playboy magazines found in missions, which feels particularly funny now because it is such an aggressively 2000s idea of what a video game soldier should be doing.

Other moments haven't aged nearly as well. Snake staring at Naomi's chest affects his stress meter, and the game's treatment of its female characters can veer between genuinely interesting and deeply uncomfortable, sometimes within the same encounter (Mei Ling is the butt of one too many jokes). The Beauty and the Beast Unit are tragic products of war and fascinating mechanical opponents, but the camera and character designs are still very much Kojima circa 2008.

It's a game of contradictions like that, really, and perhaps that's why it remains so fascinating. For all the talking, MGS4 has some superb gameplay when it lets you get on with it. The return to Shadow Moses is fantastic, the sniper sequence in the snowstorm works brilliantly, the Metal Gear battle is a spectacular showcase, and the motorbike chase through an Eastern Europe Prague-inspired city is the sort of hyperactive cinematic set piece that makes you forget about the tedious cat-and-mouse follow-the-spy section that comes before it.

The enemy and world design have held up especially well, because Kojima's team has always been good at making the game's mechanics feel like part of the world rather than systems sitting on top of it. You aren't just shooting enemies; you're dealing with soldiers whose behaviour changes depending on the battlefield, watching factions fight each other, manipulating it too, and finding ways to move through spaces where the chaos can sometimes work in your favour, even now, which makes MGS4 unique.

Then I remember that this was all happening on the PS3 and you really need to admire the creative work involved. It's easy to look at the 4K/60fps presentation and assume the game has been substantially rebuilt, but this is still the MGS4 you remember. Konami hasn't recreated it in Unreal Engine 5 like Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater, and the underlying art and animation still come from the original game. What you're getting is a modern port and presentation of that 2008 game, and that's enough because the design still works, and it has one of the best final thirds of any game you'll play this year.

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Peace Walker and Ghost Babel

The rest of Master Collection Vol. 2 is almost a relief after all of that. Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker is the obvious second headline game, originally released on PSP and set during Big Boss's story after MGS3: Snake Eater. It's a very different kind of Metal Gear, built around short missions and the gradual development of Mother Base, where you can transport enemy soldiers and equipment back to your operation (using comical balloons), expand your private military force and build up the resources you need for later missions.

I remembered liking the idea of Peace Walker more than the actual game, but it works better on PS5 than I expected. Those bite-sized missions, originally designed for a handheld, suit modern pick-up-and-play sessions surprisingly well, and the HD version runs at 60fps; the underlying assets still have their PSP origins, but the character models look sharp on a large TV.

The art does a lot of work here to sell Peace Walker's personality. Yoji Shinkawa's expressive, ink-heavy style remains one of the series' strongest parts, and the comic-panel cutscenes painted by Ashley Wood look particularly good because they were designed around these illustrations rather than trying to pretend the PSP could deliver MGS4-style cinematics. They can look a little blurry and blown-out on a TV, but the interactive elements are still fun – shooting mechs and fighting enemies inside comic panels is a very fourth-wall-breaking addition to the series.

But there is heavy asset reuse, and you will return to the environments time and again to grind for resources, which was always an issue with Peace Walker on PSP. As a handheld game, it worked because we accept the restrictions; here it can get repetitive, with only the lore to keep you hooked, because as with every Kojima game, there are big twists, teases, and insights that lead into other areas of the series.

Then there's Metal Gear: Ghost Babel, the Game Boy Color game that is arguably the purest Metal Gear experience in the whole collection, and the one game that disconnects from Kojima's need to keep fleshing out the Snake saga's lore, because it's set in an alternate timeline. Despite its Western title, Metal Gear Solid isn't a Game Boy version of the PlayStation game. It's an original story built specifically around the Game Boy Color, and that gives it a lovely sense of identity rather than feeling like a compromised version of something bigger. For that reason, and its simple, direct game design, Ghost Babel is a really enjoyable entry.

That sounds like a big statement when you sit it alongside Guns of the Patriots, but after hours of Snake's ageing, the Patriots, Liquid Ocelot and enough exposition to fill several textbooks – which funnily enough are, kind of, included here as the original scripts – playing this pixel art 2D stealth game feels fantastic. You sneak around, avoid guards, collect keycards, find routes and puzzle-solve through maze-like environments and generally get on with playing rather than being told about the history of the Metal Gear universe.

There is something refreshing about seeing Metal Gear reduced to those basic ingredients again, especially after replaying MGS4. And while it's basic, there are still moments of inspiration – boss fights like trap-based Black Arts Viper that require some thought to defeat – and nice touches like hiding in water and grass, tapping to lure enemies, basically all the stealth ideas from the 3D series distilled into pixels.

The Master Collection Vol. 2 extras

Master Collection Vol. 2 also goes far beyond simply putting three games on a disc. It includes the MGS4 and Peace Walker Screenplay Books, Master Books covering characters and story information, the MGS4 Database, a digital soundtrack, and other archive material. The wealth of content is fitting too, because Metal Gear has always been as much about its world-building as its gameplay, and being able to dig into that material makes Master Collection Vol. 2 feel more like an archive than a simple rerelease. Presentation is excellent too, with nice photography and clean menu designs, and you can adjust screen settings and dimensions if you want, such as pixel smoothing in Ghost Babel.

Compared with Master Collection Vol. 1 at launch, the PS5 version of Vol.2 feels considerably more polished. I'm not seeing the same combination of low-resolution presentation, 30fps limitations, input problems and obvious bugs that made the first collection feel like it needed more time before release. For Master Collection Vol. 2, it's simply the games that catch the eye.

That's the biggest surprise here, because I went back into MGS4 expecting to be reminded why I didn't love it so much in 2008, and in some ways I was surprised by how modern it actually feels to play and replay on PS5; I enjoyed it more. The cutscenes are still very long, the exposition bloated, some of the sexual representation has aged badly, and the game assumes you care deeply about a story that has been running since 1987.

But I also remembered why I cared about it in the first place: I had to play it at the time, and enjoy replaying it again now. MGS4 has an ambition you rarely see now: a willingness to let a video game become completely consumed by its own history, then try to bring all of it to a close. It can be exhausting, occasionally embarrassing and sometimes completely baffling, but when the pieces come together it still has an emotional force that's difficult to dismiss.

Peace Walker gives the collection a much more manageable stealth-action experience, and Ghost Babel is a wonderful reminder of how simple and inventive Metal Gear could be before Kojima turned the series into his own particular blend of video game, action movie, political thriller and elaborate in-joke.

But if you're buying Master Collection Vol. 2, you're buying it for MGS4, and after 18 years, finally being able to play that game outside the PS3, in 4K and at 60fps, running nicely, it's worth the price of admission. Whatever you thought of Old/Solid Snake's final mission in 2008, there's something genuinely satisfying about watching it run properly on a modern console, especially when the music starts, the callbacks begin piling up, and you realise you're heading towards that ending all over again.

I still don't think MGS4 is the best Metal Gear game, but playing it again has reminded me why it felt like such a big deal back in 2008.