Metal Gear Solid is bar none one of my favorite franchises from the formative years of my gaming career. Kojima’s stealth action opus not only cemented my love for stealth games, but showed me the power of video games as storytelling. Yes, some cutscenes stretched on. Yes, Kojima indulged in cinematic pretension. But few works shaped the medium as much. His fingerprint remains, even now.
So when Konami announced in 2023 that they were remaking Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, I had mixed feelings. It’s been a decade since the ugly Kojima split and a decade since Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain. And, if you’ve followed Metal Gear, you know the baggage. Metal Gear Survive was a disaster. The Master Collection brought the classics back, but left us questioning whether anyone could carry this series forward without its creator.
If you’re going to attempt it, though, there’s no safer bet than Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater. It’s the most universally beloved entry in the franchise with a story clean enough to stand alone and emotional enough to stick with you forever. There’s a reason it’s in my top ten games of all time. So, the question is: does Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater honor that legacy? Or should this dream have stayed buried?
What a Thrill
Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater is a 1:1 adaptation of the 2004 classic. The same script. The same voice acting. The same story beats. What’s new is the wrapper: Unreal Engine 5 visuals, plus a modern control scheme inspired by MGSV.
For newcomers: it’s 1964, peak Cold War. You play as John, codename “Naked Snake,” sent into the Soviet wilderness to extract a defecting scientist whose nuclear research could tip the world into World War III. From that starting point, the story spirals into betrayal, loyalty, and the painful birth of a legend. To say more would spoil its turns, but trust me: this is one of gaming’s best Cold War thrillers.
And here’s the clever part of Konami having their cake and eating it too, starting here instead of with MGS1: as a prequel, it stands on its own. You don’t need to know anything about the Shadow Moses or Big Shell incidents of the first two games. Sure, veterans catch winks and nods to the future. But you can come in fresh and still get hit with a powerful, self-contained narrative. In a franchise often knocked for convolution, Snake Eater remains the cleanest, most emotionally resonant tale Kojima ever told, and in its 1:1 retelling, that is 100% preserved here.
New Flesh on Old Bones
Snake Eater has had more ports and re-releases than any other Metal Gear to date (the PS2 original, the Subsistence re-release, the 3DS port, and its inclusion in the HD/Master Collection). What makes Delta special is the controls. Snake finally plays with modern fluidity, including over-the-shoulder aiming, crouch-walks, tighter gunplay—staples to the franchise introduced until Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, refined to perfection in MGSV. It all feels far smoother than the PS2 original ever did. And when it clicks, it’s a thrill. Sneaking feels less stiff. Firefights don’t feel like punishment. For the first time, Snake Eater plays the way nostalgia told you it did.
But here’s the rub: everything else—the levels, the patrols, the AI—are still calibrated for 2004. Which means the shiny new control scheme sometimes steamrolls the old design. Guards drop too quickly. Stealth sequences lose their tension. Scenarios become trivial because you’ve brought MGSV’s toolkit into PS2-era arenas.
It’s not as disastrous as Twin Snakes—the infamous GameCube remake of MGS1 that broke balance by bolting MGS2’s mechanics onto old encounters. But it rhymes with that problem. During my playthrough (about ten hours), I often felt the game wasn’t resisting me enough. If you’re playing for the first time, this might not matter. But veterans should absolutely crank the difficulty to hard or extreme. The new systems demand more friction than the base game provides.
Thankfully, Konami was wise to include a “Legacy Mode” that allows someone to play the game close to how it was originally intended back in 2004, with fixed camera and all. While the addition is a great idea, the execution is a little wanting because there’s no way to make it control like it used to. Instead, it uses a half-step control scheme that somehow feels more awkward than before. So, even then, it comes with compromises. Still, it’s a heavily appreciated effort nonetheless.
Still a Dream
Even with that clash, there were moments where Delta swept me back to why Snake Eater is legendary.
The survival mechanics still shine. Swapping camo patterns mid-mission. Healing Snake’s wounds manually. Hunting frogs or snakes to stave off hunger. The sandbox nature of different approaches. Kojima’s obsession with detail made it unscathed to the new version, and it still makes the jungle feel alive.
And the bosses? Still among the best in gaming. The sniper duel with The End remains iconic. The tragic showdown with The Boss remains devastating. Even the weirder ones—The Fear, The Fury—still have personality and style that modern games rarely touch.
The second half still hits like a truck. The story escalates into rousing, operatic territory. The cinematics, though lifted directly from 2004, still land with weight. Kojima was ahead of his time, and that shows. The ending still breaks me, even twenty years later. And Konami, to their credit, didn’t mess with it.
Unreal Blessings and Curses
On the surface, Delta looks fantastic. The jungle is lush. Character models pop with detail. Yoji Shinkawa’s iconic designs translate beautifully into modern fidelity. Seeing Naked Snake, Ocelot, The Boss, and the rest of the cast rendered this way is surreal.
Cutscenes, copied shot-for-shot from the original, feel natural in the new visuals. The dialogue is all 1:1 lifted from the original, and the way it’s all shot and framed with the added fidelity to the character models makes it feels like something made originally for today. That speaks to how timeless Kojima’s direction was, but also how well the devs at Virtuos updated the presentation. And for the full Cold War mood, enable the Legacy filter. The green tint isn’t just cosmetic—it’s atmosphere.
But with Unreal 5 comes baggage. Like almost every game that uses the engine nowadays, with all its bells and whistles, performance is wildly uneven. It’s not unplayable, but for a game where a lot of its scale is derived from the PlayStation 2 era, it feels slightly inexcusable for the performance to not be more stable than it is. On PS5 Pro, oddly enough, the game looks slightly worse and runs worse than on base PS5, which feels like a flashback to the Pro’s launch from last November, which is something we should have long moved past by now. For a flagship remake, that’s inexcusable. Kojima’s games were always technical showcases— from a performance perspective, Delta isn’t. Until patches arrive, I’d actually recommend playing on a base PS5 (or a beefy PC).
The Balance of Remakes
Faithful remakes walk a thin line. Change too much, and you betray the original. Change too little, and you expose its seams. Delta leans hard toward faithfulness, and it both helps and hurts.
On the one hand, the story is untouched, the details preserved, and the atmosphere is intact. That makes it a respectful love letter. On the other, by keeping enemy design frozen in 2004 while handing the player 2025 controls, the balance tips toward triviality. You can feel the gap.
That said, I’d rather have this problem than the opposite. I’d rather a remake preserve too much than mutilate its soul. And, despite its rough edges, Delta still feels like Snake Eater.
I’m Still in a Dream
Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater was never going to replace the original. It didn’t have to. What it needed to do was make one of gaming’s greatest works have a newer accessible point, for new players and old fans alike. And on that front, it succeeds—if imperfectly.
At its best, Delta reminded me exactly why I consider Snake Eater one of the best games of all time. At its worst, it reminded me of the risks of remakes: sometimes new mechanics clash with old bones. But here’s what matters: in 2025, stealth action is nearly extinct. And even with its uneven balance and technical hiccups, Snake Eater still towers above most modern games. It’s proof that a masterpiece can endure.
Would I recommend it? Yes—with caveats. If you’re new, this is the best way to experience the story, period. If you’re a veteran, you’ll see the cracks, but you’ll also be reminded of why you fell in love with Metal Gear in the first place.
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