Metal Gear Solid Touch (iPhone)

[aruljothi]

Release Date: 03/19/2009
ESRB Rating: Rating Pending
Genre: Action
Publisher: Konami
Developer: Kojima Productions

I'll be frank: Metal Gear Solid Touch is nothing like what you'd expect, or even want, from a new portable Metal Gear game. In fact, it contains nothing that will keep you from thinking it's a glorified Flash game. But among the vast ocean of crappy iPhone games, especially the "shooting gallery" type that MGS Touch falls under, you're not getting a completely raw deal. After all, it's made at the home of Metal Gear, Kojima Productions; so while it plays incredibly simply, the overall production is pleasantly well-done.

There's no stealth in this Metal Gear -- it's all about guns and glory. Solid Snake stands behind some sort of barrier (sandbags or a rock wall), and must simply kill the enemy soldiers that pop up, and when you reach the stage's kill quota, you can move on. In other words, you can just chill out behind the barrier as long as you want and watch the enemies keep appearing. It's dead simple gameplay on the level of classic light gun games, but extra wrinkles make the game slightly more fresh -- larger foes, like the Gekko robots, need to be shot in the legs and disabled before you can fire at their domes to destroy them.


The control is easy to grasp: half the time, you're using Snake's machine gun, so it's a simple matter of moving the aiming reticule to a target and repeatedly tapping the screen to fire. Moving the reticule is itself easy, as you can put your finger anywhere on the screen to "pick up" the cursor and drag it around. To shoot more distant foes, you'll need to use Snake's secondary sniper rifle, which is done simply by taking another finger and pinching the screen to "zoom in" down the rifle's scope. Aiming with the rifle is unavoidably slower, so it's best to move the reticule to a target before pinching. Getting the hang of the controls doesn't take long, and in no time you'll be swiftly taking down enemies and clearing stages.

But what's most baffling about MGS Touch is that the game is done all in 2D, Ever since its first reveal, MGS Touch's most contentious aspect is still its all-2D look, with stiff sprites taken from MGS4 that "enhance" the shooting-gallery feel. While disappointing at first, consider that the iPhone isn't really a 3D powerhouse on the level of the PSP -- generally, the better a 3D game looks or the more it has going on, the worse it's going to run because of all the other stuff your device is doing. So, as "cheap" as it may seem on the surface, Kojima Productions was smart to go with 2D route for MGS Touch, as it can look more like MGS4 while moving quick enough to be a decent shooting game.

[pradeep prem]

this game should be amazing
that has best in action