Hands-on with Metal Gear Solid: Snake Eater 3D on Nintendo 3DS

Unlike with Kid Icarus: Uprising, I went into the 3D remake of the third Metal Gear Solid game with high expectations. I left, however, ultimately disappointed.

It’s not because the core game is bad – far from it. The third entry in the venerable stealth-action series is often cited as being the franchise's finest hour.

The problem is that it’s just not suited to its new 3DS home.

The demo I played at Nintendo’s event in London spanned the very first part of the game, where Snake tries to avoid KGB patrols in the jungle under instructions from the Major.

In many ways, the initial impressions were good. The game is not just a cutdown version of the PS2 original, with some neat 3D effects applied during cutscenes and decently detailed textures.

Unfortunately, the cutscenes run like a dog in both 2D and 3D – odd given that the game itself doesn't seem to experience many technical problems during play.

What the gameplay does suffer from is a control scheme obviously designed for a dual-stick, multi-trigger controller.

Every button is assigned to some kind of action, whether it be to switch stances, use items, switch items, or alter the camera. The latter operation is applied to the face buttons and just feels strangely clumsy – moving too fast to make aiming comfortable.

Pushing up against the wall, meanwhile, is just painful, requiring you to hold the analogue stick directly up at all times.

Oddly, while it is easy to accidentally let go of a hold (and therefore send the camera spinning back to its ‘too zoomed-in for a decent overview of the patrols’ setting), it is far too easy for Snake to start hugging a random tree when trying to run away from said patrols.

Switching the targeting controls to a first-person perspective in an effort to minimise the third-person aiming issues, I encounter another problem: it automatically turns off the 3D. Not so bad if you’ve got the slider on minimum, but jarring if not.

There may be the option of altering the control scheme in the finished game, but these were greyed out on the demo. I have my doubts as to how all the buttons could be squeezed in, regardless.

It’s a massive shame, for in other areas Metal Gear Solid works fantastically.

Taking down a Russian with a stealthy shot to the head or navigating around the ruins of a disused base bring back memories of the Snake of old, though the range of complicated menus and extraneous communication sequences are likely to be as divisive as they ever were.

But while the spirit of the original is very much intact, unless some changes to the controls are made before its release later this year, Metal Gear Solid: Snake Eater 3D may just end up eating its own tail.