Metal Gear is back, but it’s not your daddy’s stealth game this time. Sick of sneaking around, series mastermind Hideo Kojima has opted for balls-out action in Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance, switching protagonists and injecting the series with a newfound focus on hyper slice-and-dice swordplay.
Metal Gear debuted in 1987 on the NES, but it was 1998’s PlayStation classic Metal Gear Solid that branded the series in the hearts and minds of gamers. The franchise has sold over 30 million copies.
In Revengeance, longtime protagonist Solid Snake is persona non grata, and former second-stringer Raiden takes his place in the spotlight. Gone is Snake’s chameleon-camouflage nano suit, replaced by Raiden’s cyborg-lite body mods. In other words, the shock-blonde ninja’s chiseled chrome jaw isn’t the only part of him that’s been upgraded.
Armed with a razor-sharp katana and the ability to leap across missiles and chop helicopters into useless scrap metal, Raiden takes on Desperado Enterprises’ armies of enemy cyborgs mano-a-many-mano. His new “blade mode” slows time and slices his enemies’ bodies like mushy apples. For the purists, Raiden can also use Solid Snake’s stealth method, the iconic cardboard box, to tip-toe around enemies without being spotted.
The Metal Gear series is famous for its bombastic, sprawling plots, and with Kojima at the helm, Metal Gear Rising, which drops on February 19, is sure to live up to that reputation. With a made-up word like “Revengeance” in the already-epic title, how could it not?
