Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater review – cold war chaos reborn with cinematic swagger

PC, PS5, Xbox; Konami
Konami's lavish remake of Hideo Kojima's PS2 masterpiece swaps in slick controls and stunning visuals, but leaves the eccentric espionage drama as gloriously unhinged as ever

A wise fictional character once said that war never changes, and if you play Snake Eater, you'd be hard pressed to argue. A remake of 2004's cold war PS2 classic, Konami has dropped the three from the title and replaced it with a delta - but, make no mistake, this is the jungle-roaming jaunt almost exactly as you remember it. Without Hideo Kojima at the helm, Konami has sensibly not meddled with any story beats of this madcap masterpiece, instead pouring its energy into lavishly rendered art and adding slicker modern controls.

Still, if there's any PS2 title that can pass as a modern release, it's Metal Gear Solid 3. Shifting the series into the great outdoors, Kojima squeezed every last drop of power out of Sony's ageing console - sending Naked Snake slithering across the jungle. To contemporary players, these were vast, sprawling locales. Yet revisit Tselinoyarsk's soggy swampland in today's open-world gaming landscape, and the leafy jungles that once seemed impossibly vast on PS2 now feel almost quaint.