Metal Gear Solid: Master Collection Vol. 2 Review

The argument for Vol. 2 is Metal Gear Solid 4, which spent an entire console generation locked to the PlayStation 3 as the only mainline entry never re-released. Having it on current machines at all is worth something, and the game itself has lost none of its nerve: the Act 3 shadowing, the microwave corridor, a final act that closes fifty years of story with a straight face.

The package around it is thinner than the game deserves. This is the same emulation layer that carried the first volume, and it carries the same habits: resolution caps that leave a 2008 game looking like a 2008 game on a 4K panel, input latency that shows in the close-quarters combat, and a menu shell that treats a landmark series as a file browser. The extras are the documents and manuals a fan already owns.

The extras are the documents and manuals a fan already owns, and at full price the wrapper is fair to criticise. It is not, in the end, what decides this. Guns of the Patriots spent eighteen years stranded on dead hardware, the one mainline entry a new player simply could not reach, and it is here, complete, running on machines people own. The visuals and gameplay marks record what Konami did with it. The overall records what it is: the last unreachable piece of the most ambitious story in the medium, finally reachable.