Well the day has finally arrived for PSP owners. Snake has finally made his way onto the PSP in all his glory with a real Metal Gear Solid title outside of the Ac!D series. Konami finally came through and heard gamers cries of a real Metal Gear title on the PSP and what we got was Portable Ops. Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops is a direct sequel to Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater. So fans of the Metal Gear universe looking for some answers between MGS 3 and the original MGS will discover some in this new title. Time to take control of Naked Snake and find out what happened before the events of Outer Heaven.

Gameplay

Portable Ops takes place in 1970, three years after the events of Snake Eater. Snake is on his latest mission which sends him to South America where he is captured by members of his former FOX unit. Snake is then detained in a Soviet base stationed in South America. While detained in the Soviet base Snake meets and recruits a young Green Beret who turns out to be a young Roy Campbell. After meeting Campbell they discover an interesting situation between American forces and Soviet militants.

Portable Ops takes a significant change to the regular MGS formula by allowing players to recruit enemy soldiers to help Snake and Campbell fight for their cause. This addition definitely adds an interesting twist on the tradition Metal Gear Solid formula. In order to recruit an enemy soldier you first must partake in a mission and enter a section of the base. Once inside the base you will have to knock out an enemy and then drag him back to the mobile base or the truck. After recruiting an enemy soldier, you can use them in missions. So instead of only using Snake during the game you can also take control of several other characters such as plain enemy soldiers, Campbell, and many others. During an actual mission it takes strategy and planning when switching between characters to use during the mission. Each character handles overall the same and don't differ in overall control or move set. The biggest difference between each character you recruit is that they each excel at a certain attribute or have special skills. Each character will be rated on different weapons and skills. Since you can only control one character at a time you must hide the unused characters when they aren't in use in what else than a cardboard box.

Outside of using the new recruits in missions you can also use them in a variety of other ways. The more soldiers you recruit, the more soldiers you have to help your cause. Players will be able to assign soldiers to spy on particular territories, serve in the medical field to help heal your injured troops, or set them to your technical team that will create new items for you to use every so often. This is a welcome addition to the series and changes the overall feeling of the Metal Gear formula.

With the series transition to the portable market, the game retains much of the old formula of the console games. Without changing the games formula and making it into a purely portable experience the game features the same experience you would expect on the console version of MGS. The biggest difference in the overall gameplay is that you aren't in one location the entire game. At the start of the game Campbell and Snake develop a mobile base which allows them to move to locations at will to engage in missions and complete the games objectives. Players will choose locations on a map containing all the regions of the base and from the map you can select the location which you want to deploy spies on or which you want to infiltrate. As you move to different locations you will be able to choose what time of the day you want to infiltrate that region. By using the "Wait" command you can wait for the sun to set or rise based on certain conditions of the mission.