Snake's Revenge review - Nintendo Entertainment System

A message is received over the emergency frequency. “Lt. Snake.” It says “the enemy have a new weapon with which to crush our defences. It's the Metal Gear II, an upgrade of the deadly killer war robot you destroyed three years ago in your last flick-screen arcade action game. Your mission is to attempt a sabotage operation in the same style as your last. Sneak in under cover of darkness, explore the four-way flick screen environment for hostages, rations, ammunition and equipment. Then you must break into the heavily guarded maximum security base in which the Metal Gear project is housed, destroy the prototype and demolish the base so no further evil mechanoids can ever terrorise the peace-loving populace of our country.”

Never being one to disobey orders, you recruit two crack soldiers and set off deep into enemy territory to put an end to their vile plans of conquest once and for all.

What the Mean Machines staff thought

On paper, Snake's Revenge looks like it could be one hell of a game. In reality it's unfortunately a big disappointment. Not only are the controls irritating to say the least, but there is very little variety in the gameplay, and what could have been an exciting, action-packed mission quickly becomes a tedious chore. The dreadful graphics and sound bang the final nails in the coffin, and the end result is a very poor exploration combat game which you end up thinking could have been so much better.

Just when you though Metal Gear was the worst example of this type of game on the NES, along comes this sequel, determined to outdo it's predecessor in every respect - including that of being miserably dull and tedious. The main fault lies in the control method. Snake is sadly incapable of moving in a diagonal direction. This might not sound so bad, but when there are just three or four enemies who just sit where they are and shoot at you without fear of retaliation (unless you spend all day charging around the screen) it gets more than a tad annoying. The gameplay is also very repetitive. There's little difference between each screen either graphically or gameplay-wise. The graphics themselves are very disappointing. The sprites are malformed and indistinct and the backgrounds are all pretty much the same within each level. The ropey collision detection doesn't add to the playability of the title either. To think you could get Mario 3 for the same money.

Retrospective comments

It's hard to find anything positive to say about this game. I am a huge fan of Metal Gear 1, 2 +3 on the Playstation, so when I saw this on eBay, I thought that it would make a nice addition to my games collection. It did make a nice addition to my collection but only in that it increased my total number of NES games by one.

All of the seeds are there for what would later become one of the biggest games in history, but nobody told the great videogame gardener to water them.

I never played this game back when it was first released (small boy, even smaller pocket money allowance, very few games, Boo Hoo) but this is another one of my recent eBay acquisitions. Let's see what we have:

Stealth - Check
Messaging Codec - Check
Big-Ass Ed-209 robot thing - Check
Gameplay of any sort - Whoops, there's the problem.

This should have been great, it has loads of ideas that all point in the right direction, but none of them seem to gel into a cohesive package.

The man from Del Monte, he says “No”.

- MOB