• Posted January 11th, 2008 at 05:44 EDT by
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• 16 Comments

Review Score

Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops Plus

PSU Review Score

5.5

Avg. user review score:

7.3

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Summary

With Metal Gear Solid Portable Ops as great as it was, this game is going to do nothing but collect dust. Unless you’re a die-hard MGS fan, you’ll have no reason to really own this title at all.

We like

• Quality visuals
• Realistic weaponry
• Online play

We dislike

• Some visual tearing
• Repetitive mission objectives
• No storyline

See PSU's review on Metacritic & GameRankings

(continued from previous page) ...teams works quite the same as well. The medical unit helps create and develop items that will aid you in the health and stamina departments, as well as others. The technical unit will help create more advanced weaponry for your soldiers to use. Your spies will supply you with details regarding the maps and where enemies may lie, and finally your sneaking team delves into the game and completes the objectives.

The mission objectives generally very bland and dry. They also get very repetitive after awhile. Each mission has you try to reach and advance point which will take you to the next mission area. Your goal is ultimately to reach the end point of each mission. These objectives can be as tedious as not being detected, subduing an enemy, and finding out information, etcetera… They are all relatively short objectives, which serve no greater purpose at all.

A lot of other sites and gamers were reporting that you could simply just power-level your character in MGS: Ops+, so we decided to give it a shot. At first I was confused because I had never played an RPG MGS game before, but then I quickly realized this wasn’t supposed to be one either. Well, we’ll confirm for you right now, the rumor and evident complaining is more than true. After 3-4 hours of doing the same thing a couple of times over, our guy was buffed up and ready to go.

Just think of Jason Bourne on steroids. As a result, we started taking it to the enemy head on and it was all downhill from that point forward. The game became drastically easy to the point of it being pointless to even play. Yes, this ability is great for people who want to take their player online against the world; however, it completely destroys the very essence of the offline campaign.

That brings us to the online portion of Metal Gear Solid Ops+ that we personally were hoping would give the title a reasonable reason to play. Disappointed with the offline performance, we figured that sometimes games are just geared more towards the online aspect. Well, during our first match online, we lost not only the bout, but our character as well. Naturally, we were surprised by this revelation, although apparently, losing in an online battle involves also losing the character you just put several hours into. That only raised one question in our minds, “Why even take it online?” With this huge downfall being one of the primary reasons of logging this game online, why even bother?

Don’t get us wrong, the online portion of the game still offers a substantial experience. They have included in things such as a beginners lobby, new modes and maps. Some of the smaller additions include the ability to salute in new ways. They’ve also added in a chat room where you can banter with other individuals. One of the cool new modes added for Portable Ops Plus is called, “Shooting Range.”

Shooting Range gives you a set time to run through a stage and take out targets turning them to your teams color. The only issue with this mode is the fact that there is no ammo cases spread out throughout the stage. Therefore, unless you bring a team that is carrying some serious lead, chances are you may run out. This really hurts what otherwise could have been a very enjoyable mode to play. It was a great idea, just poorly executed. Portable Ops Plus will have you more than likely just sticking to the core game modes such as Team Deathmatch or Solo mode.

The score to this game was a simple port from the original. Obviously this doesn’t leave much to be desired as it’s quite easy to just enjoy it for what it is. As far as the sound effects for the specific game go, we were a tad disappointed. With Kojima being a known lunatic for perfection, it saddened us to see such bland and sometimes unrealistic sound effects taking place. A good example of this is a frog-like sound that more resembled a dying llama. Also, for those wondering if the terrible visual tearing still exists, then yes, sadly it ... (continued on next page)