There Will Never Be Another Game Like Metal Gear Solid 4

Video games have changed

Midway through Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, just as Solid Snake is about to ride into a high-octane motorcycle shootout, director Hideo Kojima forces players to have a come-to-Jesus moment. Big Mama stops to explain that her troops are child soldiers. They’re largely orphans who grew up surrounded by warfare. They started working in the arms industry, and moved to combat as a way to support their younger siblings while getting revenge on the companies responsible for killing their parents. The dystopian monologue is capped off by a sobering reality check.

“Nowadays, anyone with a computer can get combat training,” Big Mama says. “The FPS games these children love are distributed for free by these companies. Of course, it’s all just virtual training. It’s so easy for them to get absorbed by these war games. And before they know it, they’re in the PMCs holding real guns. These kids end up fighting in proxy wars that have nothing to do with their own lives. They think it’s cool to fight like this. They think combat is life.”

18 years later, when Metal Gear Solid 4 is now old enough to buy cigarettes and be recruited for military service, that monologue is more prescient than ever. And you can finally revisit it thanks to Metal Gear Solid Master Collection: Vol. 2, which brings the PlayStation 3 game to Windows PC and modern consoles for the first time, alongside Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker and Metal Gear: Ghost Babel. It’s an important moment for video game preservation, especially in the wake of the PS3 store’s recent shutdown, but it’s also a reminder of a dark truth: It’s impossible to imagine a game like Metal Gear Solid 4 ever existing again.

Set five years after Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, Guns of the Patriots plays like a 15-hour anxiety spiral. Everything Solid Snake was fighting to stop has come to pass. Senseless war has broken out around the world, made all the more deadly by mech warriors who now roam the Middle East gunning down rival PMC soldiers. Now on the verge of death due to the effects of accelerated aging, Solid Snake sets out on one last globe-trotting mission to unmask a global conspiracy, destroy the AI that powers it, and put an end to the age of war.

Despite critics hailing it as Kojima’s magnum opus in 2008, it was a polarizing release. Its abundance of long-winded cutscenes (including a record-setting 70-minute finale!) drew criticism from players who felt like Kojima seemed more interested in making movies than games. The release won’t do much to change players' opinions, even if it's dropping at a time when cinematic storytelling is all the rage in games. It’s still a largely hands-off experience that’s invested in tying up every single loose thread in the series. Call it fan service or payoff, but it’s still impressive to witness it and feel like every single detail in the series’ history was placed there for a reason.

Perhaps what’s changed most with age is that the cutscenes are now a reprieve from the gameplay. Metal Gear Solid 4 is hard to get through in 2026, and Master Collection: Vol. 2 doesn’t try to rewrite history. Every wart is preserved in a faithful remaster (aside from a new voice line to account for the fact that you no longer need to switch discs midway through it) filled with agonizing boss fights, dull tailing missions, and unwieldy third-person shooting. Aside from its strong opening chapter, where Snake navigates the streets of an unnamed Middle Eastern city like a deadly maze, Metal Gear Solid 4 is the series’ messiest game in retrospect.

But the poorly aged stealth action is far from the most shocking thing about Metal Gear Solid 4. Instead, it’s how direct Kojima is about tackling political issues without mincing a single word. Developed in the midst of the War on Terror, Metal Gear Solid 4 acts as an indictment of the entire military industrial complex. It isn’t subtle about its commentary either. “The age of difference has become the age of control, all in the name of averting catastrophe from weapons of mass destruction,” Snake says in a particularly pointed opening monologue.

In 2008, musings like this had a clear target. Metal Gear Solid 4 was largely developed during the waning years of George W. Bush’s presidency, after it had come to light that his administration lied about Iraq possessing WMDs in order to justify a continued war effort. It became a global issue as the United States roped in allies to fight in a never-ending war where the mission was always changing. Though Kojima isn’t an American, his series had become inextricable from American politics. Don’t forget that Metal Gear Solid 2, a game about terrorism largely set in New York City, launched just two months after September 11.

Recommended For You

For all its soap-opera silliness and at times incomprehensible lore, Metal Gear Solid 4’s message is unmissable. It’s all laid out in the very first chapter when Snake meets a weapon-dealing merchant (and soda-drinking monkey owner) named Drebin. He’s practically the game’s own Greek chorus, spelling out what Metal Gear Solid has to say about the arms industry and how much countries profit off of warfare.

“The world depends on war — on the war economy,” Otacon tells Snake in a codex call after first meeting Drebin. “Can you imagine what would happen if war just disappeared overnight?”

But like so many of Kojima’s games, what once felt like timely commentary has since become distressingly predictive. In 2026, Metal Gear Solid 4 may as well be a commentary about the Russia-Ukraine conflict or Israel’s war on Gaza. Billions of dollars have been pumped into both conflicts, with American companies like General Dynamics and Boeing directly profiting from them. In 2025, the Wall Street Journal reported that revenue at Lockheed Martin’s missile division “rose 13% last year to $12.7 billion.” That’s the war economy hard at work. Metal Gear Solid 4 even plays with that dynamic directly in its gameplay. The more you shoot at enemies rather than sneaking around them, the more expensive guns become at Drebin’s shop, because increased conflict drives demand.

You can feel the industry’s regression as you play through Metal Gear Solid 4 and struggle to imagine it getting made today.

And all of this is before getting into Metal Gear Solid 4’s AI commentary. What felt like sci-fi gibberish in 2008 has since become about as on-the-nose as it gets, thanks to the rapid proliferation of LLM technology. Earlier this year, United States Secretary of War Pete Hegseth revealed his plan to accelerate the military’s use of AI in a memorandum: “I direct the Department of War to accelerate America's Military AI Dominance by becoming an ‘AI-first’ warfighting force across all components, from front to back.” For the past 18 years, it seems the United States has done everything in its power to build the world Solid Snake was so determined to destroy.

What’s especially striking is how timely Metal Gear Solid 4’s critique feels next to new games that were actually developed in the shadow of current events. That’s damning for an industry that has spent the last two decades fighting to be considered “mature.” For all the wordy scripts and hyperrealistic visuals, it feels as though big-budget video games have only gotten shyer about tackling real-world issues in confrontational terms. How many times in the last decade have Ubisoft executives come out insisting that series like Far Cry and Watch Dogs are not “political,” despite being very clearly inspired by recent events? You can find plenty of games that dabble in anti-capitalist ideology or allude to climate change, but it’s becoming rarer to see a searing takedown of the war machine at a AAA level along the lines of Spec-Ops: The Line, the 2013 game that forced players to grapple with the war crimes their character commits.

That’s not exactly surprising given how much the video game industry has become glued to the very things that Kojima took to task in 2008. Video games are proudly used as recruitment tools for the United States military. Call of Duty has even fueled training experiments within the Marine Corps. The Trump administration now uses frequent references to games like Halo to create propaganda. Big Mama’s monologue about how military shooters fit into the player-to-soldier pipeline is just a matter of fact. (Playing Metal Gear Solid 4 now, I almost wonder if the shooting was intentionally designed to feel clumsy to deter players from falling into a frictionless military fantasy.)

At its top levels, the industry is only becoming more hostile to those who dare to work through real-world issues like this through their games. Can we really expect an Xbox-published game to say much about the arms business when Microsoft, its parent company, is entangled with the Gaza War? What creative latitude will developers at EA have now that the company is owned by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund and Affinity Partners, an investment firm run by Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump’s son-in-law? You can feel the industry’s regression as you play through Metal Gear Solid 4 and struggle to imagine it getting made today.

Metal Gear Solid Master Collection: Vol. 2 is the year’s most necessary game release in that respect. It’s a rebuttal to the myth that video games have become more outwardly progressive in recent years; its long admonishments about countries that profit off of war are fiercer than anything you’ll find in a big-budget game this year. (Though we have, mercifully, moved on from stories in which you gun down sexy-PTSD victims.) As deeply imperfect as Metal Gear Solid 4 is today, it’s a reminder of how much ground video game publishers have ceded to the war machine. It's an anti-war protest marching into captured territory.

Metal Gear Solid Master Collection: Vol. 2 will be released Aug. 27 on Switch, Switch 2, PlayStation 5, Windows PC, and Xbox Series X. The game was reviewed on Steam Machine using a prerelease download code provided by Konami. You can find additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.