Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty

The Good
- Wide selection of weapons and items; grouping option in the menu made things easier to find

• Stellar graphics and locales

• Controls are great, although it seemed hard to target enemies in first person mode

• Fantastic sniper section
  
  The Bad
  - More reliant on shooting and killing instead of stealth; much more of an action platformer than Metal Gear Solid 1

• Story is so complex and thick you can cut it with a knife; they're trying to make so many points it's hard to keep track of

• Some of the cutscenes, especially the final two at the end, are WAAAYYY too long

• Raiden looks a bit too anime for a game such as this

• The final boss, Solidus Snake, looks like a Doctor Octopus ripoff, except with only two mechanical arms, he'd be Doctor Bipus!

The Bottom Line
Essentially, you play two characters in this Stealth/Action classic series, Solid Snake and Raiden. Snake fights through a prelude part of the game on an ocean tanker, while Raiden is used the bulk of the game on an ocean-based complex outside of New York City. Your job is to rescue the President from this complex, who has been taken hostage by terrorists. After many boss battles, challenges and plot twists, Raiden comes across Arsenal Gear; dozens of Metal Gear-type killing machines. I'm not going to get into the nitty-gritty of the story, but ultimately (SPOILER!!!) your entire mission was staged by AI entities determined to see if human behavior can be controlled. If so, they'll know that they can control the multitude of 'nonsense' information on the internet, decide what's most important, and pass that story down to later generations (the AI can't trust the stupid humans to know what's important or not). At least, that's how I understood it. A lot more to it, but that's the gist of it.

The game is highly addicting and enjoyable just like the first, but I think it lost some of the original's charm. It seems like it bit off more than it can chew when it came to the movie part of it, and I think it detracted from the overall experience.