Familiar tough guy Solid Snake makes his return in a not-so-familiar environment: a first-person shooter for the iPhone. If previous installments required you to sneak around trying your best to avoid trouble, Metal Gear Solid Touch asks you to go looking for it.
Like earlier Metal Gear editions, an intricate storyline of espionage governs the action, but Solid Touch allows you to easily skip over the plot and get right down to business, if that’s where you want to be.
Enemies start out as easy targets, but they become more and more advanced as the game progresses. Some appear front and center and others loom in the distance, begging you to trade in your clumsy M4 assault rifle for the eagle-eyed SVD sniper rifle. Other missions have you blowing up helicopters with a rocket launcher.
Solid Snake Snipin'.
With a little practice, scrolling a finger across the screen allows you to place the crosshairs of your scope right between the enemy’s eyes, and a tap anywhere on the screen will fire a round. You can toggle between weapons in a flash by using two fingers in the same way you would to zoom in and out on a photo.
With shooters forever emerging from cover to pick you off, it’s easy to forget that simply keeping your paws off the screen will put Snake in a crouching position and give you a momentary escape from the line of fire. You won't be out of every enemy's range, but Snake’s health slowly creeps back up when you’re in “stealth mode.”
It’s not the Metal Gear you remember, but Solid Touch gives you twenty unique missions that will have you tapping your screen like a maniac, and cool touches like the ability to clean dirt and debris off the screen by shaking your iPhone make you see just what all the hype was about.
Get Metal Gear Solid Touch.
