Metal Gear Solid Δ: Snake Eater, referred to from here on as Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater or just the Snake Eater Remake, was one of the titles on this year’s radar that I was the most cautiously optimistic for. Remakes of classic titles can be an easy miss if the proper steps are not taken to preserve the legacy of the original, and with the Metal Gear series’ prolific creator Hideo Kojima not on board, there was a lot that could have gone wrong with remaking Snake Eater, one of the greatest and most memorable titles of both its franchise and its console generation. To my utter surprise, Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater is excellent in the areas I was worried about, and struggles profoundly in the spaces I had no idea I had to worry about to begin with. The mix of its surprisingly great qualities and its shockingly significant problems come together to make a confusing mess of a title and an even more confused reviewer, who was left shocked and disappointed by the execution of what could have been an incredible remake.
For the utterly unawake, Delta is a remake of Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, the chronologically first game in the Metal Gear franchise, and the story that sets up all of the events to come in the franchise. It tells the story of Naked Snake, the character who would become the most prolific face of the franchise as well as protagonist in just under half of its titles, and the main antagonist in the rest. It is an incredible game that has long been lauded for its mix of a heavy, emotionally touching story and over-the-top violence and sci-fi nonsense paired seamlessly with military realism. While not the first game released in the franchise, it’s the title I think of first when asked to define Metal Gear Solid as a whole, and for many players was a defining game in their childhood.
As with any remake, Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater had the chance to completely ruin the foundation of what came before it. Little deviations or retcons to the game’s story would be enough to utterly destroy the legacy of the original. Without the series creator on board, it was easy for many to worry that this very well may happen.
To my surprise and the surprise of many others, Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater is essentially as faithful as a full remake of a game could be. The original story is preserved down to the letter alongside the game’s original audio, and every moment from the original, be it the countless side conversations you have on the codec to the very layout of each level, is faithfully recreated in Unreal Engine 5. Though I found myself weirdly missing the game’s old green fog that permeated every environment and felt that Snake’s new face seemed oddly stiff and unexpressive, the game looks and plays essentially the best you could ask a MGS3 remake to be.
The original control scheme is even preserved, albeit a new control scheme exists for those who want a more modern-feeling experience. I have noticed that these new controls throw off the balance of the game a bit, with the ability to move and shoot making Snake feel like an immensely powerful threat compared to the original game’s limited mechanics, but I appreciate the developers for not adding more enemies or nerfing anything to accommodate this, because it would have been done at the risk of altering the original. You can also now change your camouflage on the fly without having to enter the menus, which is an incredibly useful change.
With so much that could have gone wrong with adapting the original, I was shocked to see that Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater nailed it. I was even more surprised and disappointed to see that the reason the game doesn’t work is something I utterly failed to anticipate: the actual performance.
Unreal Engine 5 truly is the monkey’s paw of this remake, giving us incredible visuals at the cost of the engine’s infamous optimization issues. Many players are reporting FPS issues and engine-level crashes, and I, unfortunately (or fortunately for you, reader, since I was able to report these issues), also suffered from these problems on my PC playthrough of Delta.
Not only did I struggle to get over 30 FPS on my modern gaming rig, I experienced a number of UE5 crashes, always in the same places. The first of these crashes happened during the opening cutscene, which I had to replay three times because it continued to crash on the first profile view of the gunship, right before we get our first look at Snake.
Later, I experienced severe and random framerate drops in random levels, and crashed a few times on level transitions. The very worst of these happened when transferring from the bridge to the OKB compound, where Sokolov was kept, which caused my game to crash so badly that it turned my entire machine off.
It is with a heavy heart that I say that Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater is both probably the best Snake Eater remake we could have asked for and utterly unplayable in its current state. I cannot, of course, speak for console performance, which is usually pretty steady since there is only one persistent set of hardware they have to worry about when testing on consoles. For the PC, however, the game is currently in a terrible state performance-wise, and since it’s yet to have been addressed by the developers (who apparently are currently working on fixes), I cannot, at the time of writing, recommend it.
The Final Word
Though incredibly faithful to the original, severe performance issues plague this remake of Snake Eater. While the game could and likely will be made playable down the line, it is hard to recommend the title at the time of writing, where severe framerate issues and engine-level crashes plague the PC version of the game.
Metal Gear Solid Δ: Snake Eater was reviewed on the PC. Find more detailed looks at popular and upcoming titles on our Game Reviews page! Metal Gear Solid Δ: Snake Eater is available on Steam, Xbox, and PlayStation.
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