Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater Review: A Great Remake, But Not A Necessary One

Faithful but safe, Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater shines in visuals, yet lacks the boldness that made the original unforgettable.

When you call up Para-Medic to save your game in Metal Gear Solid 3 – both the original and this remake (Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater) – she’ll usually take a moment to tell you about a movie she’s seen. Godzilla, War of the Worlds, The Blob, Dracula, and, in one instance, the 1959 apocalyptic sci-fi drama On The Beach. “The movie came out in ’59, and the year that the war was supposed to happen was 1964,” Para-Medic says, “in other words – this year.” Snake, not much of a film fan, dryly quips back: “Nice warning. Let’s hope it stays just a movie.”

This is a line that hits differently in 2025, playing through Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater, a remake of the beloved third game in the Metal Gear Solid series. Hideo Kojima, the director and main authorial voice behind the series, directed a new game this year: Death Stranding 2: On The Beach. It’s no longer just a movie!

It’s difficult to know if the Death Stranding series would exist if publisher Konami and Kojima hadn’t gone through an infamously acrimonious split in 2015 in the lead up to the release of Metal Gear Solid V. The dust has never quite settled enough to know exactly why things went down as they did, with MGS V released in an unfinished state and Kojima’s name pulled from the game’s marketing. But there’s a tension here, and it’s felt all over Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater – it’s a very good remake of an excellent game, but it’s clearly been made with a mandate not to draw ire from any fans.

Delta plays things very safe, which is not something the Metal Gear Solid series has typically done.

Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater takes the core experience of MGS 3 and puts a shiny, Unreal Engine 5-coloured coat of paint over it. In the opening credits (featuring a new rendition of Cynthia Harrell’s iconic “Snake Eater” song), the words “Based on Metal Gear Solid 3” appear, but this really is, at its core, the same game. Controls are tweaked, a few additions have been made, but the levels are the same, the story is untouched, and even the original game’s perviness is completely intact.

This is still a brilliant, strange, 60s-set Cold War spy-thriller with an extremely fun story. The system for keeping Snake fed and curing his illnesses remains excellent, and the newly-rendered environments are often gorgeous. But I’m not convinced that this is the best way to experience Metal Gear Solid 3, or that there’s a solid philosophy behind this remake. For all its advancements, it mostly made me want to go back and play the original again. 

By far the most substantial alteration is the new control scheme. While you can choose to play in the “classic” style, the main drawcard of Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater is the inclusion of an over-the-shoulder camera mode that feels much more modern. Snake can move and shoot at the same time – which was also possible in the largely forgotten 3DS release of the game, just by the way – and playing in this mode removes a bit of the game’s friction, for better or worse. It makes some boss encounters far easier than they were in the original, but it’s also the change that most makes Delta feel “new”. 

Aside from this, Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater refuses to rock the boat too heavily. Levels are still divided up into little chunks separated by loading corridors – the added power afforded by new tech has not been used to turn MGS3 into a more open experience. This means that the layout of each section is exactly as you remember it if you’ve played the original it’s going to feel very familiar.

Similarly, while enemy AI is smarter than before, the game does not ask more of you than the original, and the change in perspective makes armed combat much easier. Close-quarters combat feels quite stiff in the game’s new body, and I found myself going all-guns blazing more often in this version than I would usually play a stealth game. But by and large, it’s a very familiar game. There are not new twists or alterations – if you’ve played Snake Eater before, Delta will feel extremely familiar.

There are a few different ways to remake a game. In one approach, you get a reimagined version of the game, expanded and changed in ways that makes the remake its own thing – the Resident Evil series has mastered this approach. The other approach is to try and make the “definitive” version of a game, one that effectively overwrites the other instead of standing as its own game. Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater is much more the latter, and given all the context of Konami and Kojima’s split, and the reverence people have for the original, the whole thing feels a bit strange. 

This is complicated further by the existence of the pretty fantastic HD remaster of the original game, which is widely available on all platforms and costs a quarter of what this version costs.
It’s tempting to look at a release like this and say “once you’ve played this it would be hard to go back to the original”. But is this version of the  game actually properly better than the original just by virtue of being shinier and a bit easier to play? I’m not convinced that it is.

Metal Gear Solid 3 was a game built around both the power and the limitations of the PlayStation 2, and its singular design – its visual filter, its mix of seriousness and goofiness, its loveable jank and exhaustive systems for keeping Snake fed and well – are all a bit more special in the context of its original release.

Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater is very much a game for people who are already intimately familiar with MGS 3 and want to replay it in a new way; anyone coming in fresh would be losing out if they picked this up instead of the HD versions of the original trilogy. 

Fundamentally, Metal Gear Solid 3 remains one of the most interesting games ever made, and as a high-budget, faithful remake, the experience of playing Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater feels fantastic. It’s a thorough remake too, lifting not just the core game but also many of the weirder eccentricities, Easter eggs, and hidden bonuses of the original.

So it’s a great game, but is it a necessary one, when a lovely HD remaster of Kojima’s original is widely available? As great as Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater is, it’s not the version of Snake Eater I’d recommend to people.