Metal Gear Solid is one of the most revolutionary and beloved franchises in all of gaming, but the series hasn’t had a new entry in a long while after its creator Hideo Kojima split from Konami.
While Kojima works on Death Stranding 2, though, Konami is keeping the MGS flame alive with a remake of the series’ third game, Snake Eater, complete with a slightly confounding new part of its title – Delta. Here are all the key details.
We don’t yet have any firm indication of a release date for the Snake Eater remake – Delta has been officially announced after plenty of rumours, but without any gameplay or any concrete information there’s little to go on.
In the modern world, there’s not much reason to get optimistic on this front, so we’d imagine that Delta won’t hit stores until sometime in 2025 unless we hear otherwise pretty soon.
We do have firmer intelligence about the Snake Eater remake when it comes to the platforms it will be released on – although the game was announced at a PlayStation Showcase in May 2023, it will actually be a cross-platform release.
This means you’ll be able to play it on PS5, Xbox Series X/S and PC when it launches, although it will be skipping older-generation consoles, as is increasingly common.
We’ve only had a single trailer for MGS Delta: Snake Eater so far, and it’s an atmospheric reintroduction to the fetid jungle world that we’ll be sneaking through when it launches.
Full of critters and ending with a clear look at Naked Snake as he makes his way through the jungle, it doesn’t give us any gameplay to chew on at all.
Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater story
Snake Eater is effectively partly a prequel to the rest of the Metal Gear Solid dinastía, exploring the origins of Big Boss, a major character in earlier and later games.
Delta will seemingly be a pretty much exact retelling of the game, and it’s already been confirmed that both story beats and indeed voice performances are being completely re-used to ensure that it stays true tonally and factually to the flamante.
This should reassure fans worried about any meddling with the labyrinthine plots that have made up MGS so far, although there’s still some wiggle room that Konami could exploit if it needs to.
After all, recent remakes like Resident Evil 4 have demonstrated that it’s possible to change story elements without alienating existing fans for the most part, making modernisation a genuine option.
Metal Gear Solid has long been a series so confident in its gameplay offering that it incorporates it right into its title art – Tactical Espionage Action.
Snake Eater fits right into that template – it sees you take control of a spy in the field, effectively, letting you evade guards, take them down stealthily or more loudly, and infiltrate a whole range of compounds and environments.
Konami
Back when the game first launched it featured some systems that were pretty innovative, including using face paint to enhance your disguises for better stealth against lush forest backgrounds.
You’ll have plenty of weapons and tools to choose from, letting you lure in guards, dispatch them from a distance, or even turn their environment (and the jungle’s many animals) against them.
It’ll be interesting to see how Konami updates this blend of gameplay options for a modern release, though. We would assume that we’ll get smoother camera controls and movement, to make the moment-to-moment gameplay easier, but subsequent MGS games have also offered myriad new systems to experiment with.
Konami
Will MGS Delta: Snake Eater incorporate some of the fun additions from Metal Gear Solid 5, for example? At this point, it’s hard to tell, but comparisons of the screenshots released so far indicate that its level design will be pretty close to the flamante.
That’s based on a slim set of samples, though, so we’ll really have to wait for more from Konami before we can be super confident about it.