Metal Gear Acid 2

"In the end run, just another Tactics game."

A little about me.. I've been playing since the Commodore 64 games, and one genre I liked as a child was turn based wargames. They made me think, and think hard to overcome obstacles. If I planned well, I could totally decimate the opposition.

Then came RTS games, I was in LOVE. Slow, plodding gameplay was over. What before my imagination took care of was happening in front of me. Not only that, but I could position troops and lay traps in better ways then ever before. As an avid wargamer, I was in HEAVEN, and would never look back.

And then one day I hear about this wargame everyone is drooling over: Final fantasy Tactics. I was not impressed. Here I was.. once again, playing a turn-based wargame. Ahhh, nothing like actually taking a step backwards in gaming eh? Worse still.. it began to throw stupid rules at me like Only staffs in this battle. Only back attacks work against the enemy, no magic in this battle, et-cetera. That annoyed me to no end. Rather then building my army intelligently, I was generalizing hoping to be able to deal with whatever stupid rule the game threw at me next. I tried a few more "Tactics" games... and I got more and more disgusted with them.

Along Comes Metal Gear Acid (I started with part 2, myself). I was told by a close friend, who loves tactics games, that this would be the one to turn me around. And at first, he was correct, also. I was enjoying trying to optimize my deck, position myself accurately, and the aura was very cool. VERY high presentation values.

Then, it began. The game got what I call "Tacticky", in honour of the game that started this BS. "Snake! If you get spotted, these enemies are nearly impossible to kill with just bullets!"

....and it just got worse for the next 6 missions I forced myself to play. Can't these tactics games stop that? At least when I played this same game as a child, I didn't have to worry about Germany's tanks being immune to shells this round, and could only be bombed, but next round you could only stop their soldiers with banana peels.

Now, to be fair, not all turn-based wargames are bad. I had and continue to have endless amounts of fun with the Advance Wars series... but you know what? Go get that instead. It beats the pants off of this weak offering.

The bottom line: It's just a tired concept from 1979, only this time WORSE due to the BS... and the light dusting of Metal Gear on top does not save this.

Though it does make me wonder: why didn't they just release a Metal Gear game for the PSP? If I wanted to play Magic: The Gathering.. why.. I'd go DO so. With real cards. A shameful waste of a good franchise. Let others say "Bravo for trying something new", I will not be so patronizing.

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 04/21/06