Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake Review (Massivive)
Section 1: The Wrapper
To begin with I would like to describe the part of this title that actually took some development hours to put together, upon launching the game the player is faced with a sleek menu created in the Unity engine that is used to select a game to play. I generally think that they did a good job with this menu, it looks and feels great. There's appropriate audio and the menu options are presented all at once in a simple linear list with no obvious tablet interface inspirations like one might see with other major AAA games nowadays.
Section 2: Metal Gear (1987)
Of the two games included here, this was the one that I had already played years ago and so returning to it I had a 1:1 experience with the last time, which had novelty but was not fantastic. For a first try it is quite remarkable how much they managed to pull off, a ton of elements that would be refined heavily later on in the series have a start here but the absence of things like the camera and soliton radar mean that you can be caught off-guard by enemies on the next screen over in many cases, a binocular item can be found which allows you to go into a viewing mode where you can clunkily look ahead in one of four directions to get a general idea of what's there, but you will still end up coming out of elevators or going into trucks to meet an enemy right in front of you. Given the era that the game released in, there is certainly some jank that will require outside knowledge or trial and error in order to get anything done in the game, for example the necessity to punch walls at random in some areas to see which ones can be blown up with C4 as there is no visual indicator of a destructible wall beforehand, or some trucks beginning to move at random and transporting you to a different area, sometimes to the player's great detriment. One major pitfall is the ending requiring the player to have saved all of the hostages in the game and avoiding any of them dying in order to be able to carry enough C4 to defeat the final boss.
Despite this crustiness I think this is a pretty fun game to be played with a map handy for when things get confusing, particularly an annotated one to tell you which doors will accept which numbered key cards so that you don't find yourself cycling through six of them while taking damage in a room full of poison gas, it would also be nice to know when you find an elevator that only goes straight up for some reason.
Section 3: Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake (1990)
Upon finishing MG1 for the first time, I found myself greatly fatigued from the experience to where I never bothered pushing far into MG2. Having now finished the game, I deeply regret not having played this game sooner. While MG1 feels like a product of its time, MG2 could release as an indie game on Steam today and would be praised highly. Mechanically MG2 is shockingly not very far behind Metal Gear Solid for the PlayStation 1, while the dialogue is nowhere near as deep as the 3D titles in the franchise, there are characters to speak to throughout the game either in person or over radio that have a lot more to say than MG1's single-line badly-translated vague hints.
Of the large number of gameplay elements that carry over to the later games in the series, some of the strongest that began here and remained untouched include a radar for seeing the position of enemies not in your immediate field of vision, using thermal goggles to see laser beams, crawling up to claymore mines to disarm them, various ground surfaces that make distinct sounds when walked upon that can alert guards, and using cardboard boxes with different shipping labels in order to travel between areas quickly later on.
One thing that MGS1 realised was a bit of a problem and took steps to cut down on considerably is the backtracking. Despite having the aforementioned cardboard box transit system available, the lategame for MG2 is still quite a pain as you are required to travel so far back for certain mandatory points of progression. For those who played Metal Gear Solid 1, imagine having to solve the PAL card puzzle, except you were required to backtrack all the way to Meryl's cell in the first armory building and then back again.
Section 4: Peace Extra Fluff
As well as the two games themselves in a number of text languages, the collection also allows you to view a master book and a screenplay book, the former includes a bunch of annotated screenshots and art from the game explaining the characters and plot, while the latter is a transcript of everything that happens in both games, this includes every piece of dialogue with every character which I personally think is pretty damn cool, as someone who often misses a good amount of dialogue in MGS by not calling everyone in my phonebook whenever I enter a new room or pick up an item, it was nice to read through some of the other possible calls I had missed.
Conclusion
While I would not tell you to spend the asking price for just purchasing these two games on their own while ignoring the rest of the collection, I would definitely factor these games into the price of the collection in its entirety as they are far from filler (the NES games definitely are). MG2 in particular sits right at home with other games in the series, with a ton of its own weird and memorable stuff like a snake that gets into your inventory and eats your rations, or acid that will instantly turn you into a puddle when stepped in.