This game is a prologue to what is clearly going to be the next of Hideo Kojima's masterpieces. It is the new Pièce de résistance of the Metal Gear series.

You'll see complaints about the length of this game. To clarify, the main mission in this game averages around an hour and forty minutes long. There are also numerous side missions to complete, which bump the playtime up to an average of six hours long.

To complete the game 100%, that is collecting all cassette tapes, getting all accolades in-game, rescuing everybody you're supposed to, and getting the best rank you can in the game, unlocking absolutely everything there is to unlock, you're looking at an average of at least 16 and a half hours of game-play out of this game.

To reiterate, if you play it just for the main mission and put it down after that, you're going to be disappointed. The intent with the release of this product was for fans of the series to try out the new game, get performance statistics over a wide series of systems, and see how the community responded to major changes in how the game operated.

Choose your own destiny. Are you going to play this as a four minute speed-run of just one mission, or are you going to actually completely play the game and enjoy every last bit of what you paid for?


Performance is excellent. You can tell that the Fox engine has been given tons of love with a multiplatform focus being the centric point behind it. Running a GeForce 660, I'm able to achieve 60FPS constantly in all situations with all settings maxxed (with the exception of SSAO being on high as opposed to very high.)

The controls are excellent, keyboard and mouse users will not be disappointed - you can rebind any key to where you want. Yes, I know it sounds ridiculous for me to even have to say that, but you'd be surprised with the massive number of shoddy console ports that have left this most basic function out. There are also a number of default controller layouts available for users whom are using standardized gamepads.

Likewise, one of the most common complaints people have about the controls is the usage of arrow keys while in the menus - however they are not necessary. Somehow, everybody has overlooked the big prompts that say "1" and "3" in the menus, which should typically be enough to tell people that instead of relying on arrow keys to move the menus left and right, you can just use the "1" and "3" keys to scroll left and right respectively.

Story - 10/10. Yes, it's short, but this is intended as a prologue for the main game. The cassette tapes which can be found in all the missions provide more tastes of the story, making you desire for more.

Kojima-san, you magnificent bastard, why do you tease us so?

An absolute classic, MGS2 is one of my absolute all-time favorite games.

MGS2 serves as a warning regarding media manipulation in the digital age, especially with the usage of AI, being used to generate false contexts and outlooks. (The game itself was, intentionally, an example of deliberate media manipulation, by having all the advertising for the game only including Snake and completely excluding any mention of Raiden until they very day the game released, people were led to believe Snake would be the main character for the entire game.)

Without delving too far into spoiler territory, the game touches on high level digital societal concepts, such as echo chambers[en.wikipedia.org], and filter bubble[en.wikipedia.org], concepts that weren't even named until almost a full decade after the game's release, which has given the game, and by extension Kojima himself, an almost prophetic image in most critical analyses.

The game has a seemly infinite amount of content to ingest, with over 8 hours of Codec calls available, and almost 6 hours worth of cutscenes on top of that, there is NO shortage in the worldbuilding department here. Coupled with what was considered the best stealth gameplay of the early 2000, this game is an absolute gem that has kept me coming back time and time again - playing it to completion to at least ONCE a year since its release.

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Initially the Master Collection launched in a rough place, with crashing issues, in-game hangs, game speed running way too high, every game being locked to 720p, however all those issues have since been resolved by the numerous patches Konami has put out.

As of patch 2.0.0, Konami has fully reupscaled all the videos up to 4K (with an option to have the original videos), added fully ingame control customization (for both keyboard+mouse and controller), as well as added 1080p/1440p/4k resolution support for MG1/MG2/MGS2/MGS3, however their implementation is still slightly flawed.

While it is an official way to play at those higher resolutions, those resolutions higher than 720p are achieved through AMD FSR upscaling - which is slightly blurrier than a native implemention of the resolution. This is due to an ancient engine bug that's been around since the 2002 Xbox port of MGS2 Substance which causes Depth of Field and other post processing effects to be reduced the higher the resolution goes (this issue is even present in the 2011 PS3/X360 HD Collection versions) - an unfortunate trade-off to maintaining a 23+ year old game engine that's been modified time and time again over the years. For proper native resolution (as well as fixing numerous legacy bugs such as broken water reflections[github.com]), MGSHDFix is still very much recommended (see the mod section below.)


Presently the biggest remaining gripe there is to have about the collection is the audio compression issues with MGS2 & MGS3 due to the PC port reusing the Xbox 360's audio (which was encoded using a very low quality xWMA codec), however there are mods that replace the low quality audio with the higher quality PS4/PS5 audio, fully fixing the problem (Better Audio Mod, which is also included in the mod section below.)


I've spent thousands of hours playing, speed-running, and meticulously researching these games inside and out across all its many releases, cataloging the minuet differences that are present across each version, from touched up textures, to reframed cutscenes, and of course investigating every single bug I can find / gets reported to me.


I can say without a doubt in its present state, with the addition of bugfix mods, the Master Collection release has exceeded the quality of the 2011 PS3 & Xbox 360 HD Collection/Editions, and as of patch 2.0.1, is the definitive way to play these games (outside of their original PS1/PS2 releases on actual hardware using an actual CRT.)

With MGS2 specifically, to clarify why I state the original PS2 version still being the best (on an actual PS2, not through emulation), even the 2003 PS2 release of Substance had its own issues - ranging from broken skyboxes[imgur.com], missing voice lines, partially broken ocean textures[imgur.com], and the fact that Konami accidentally left all[www.movie-censorship.com] the EU censorship in the game (which unfortunately got carried over to all future versions.)


There are still plenty of minor cosmetic bugs in the Master Collection release of MGS2, however every single one of them can be traced to a previous version (with most of them originating from the 2002 Xbox port.)


I personally maintain a community driven tracker that catalogs all outstanding bugs/issues, as well as everything that Konami has fixed, which you can find here (be warned though, there are spoilers!): 
Metal Gear Solid Master Collection - Community Bug Tracker[docs.google.com]

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As previously stated, there are numerous mods on Nexusmods which improve the state of the game even further beyond what Konami has already done to get it up to spec, adding proper high-resolution support, correcting audio compression issues, unlocking the game’s frame-rate, fixing explosion / particle physics running at double speed, and correcting hundreds of texture issues. (You might even notice while going through all the mods that I’m the person who made a LOT of them. 😉)




Here's the current definitive list for all the current bugfix mods for the MC:


MG1/MG2: MGSHDFix[www.nexusmods.com] (Adds high resolution support, ultra-widescreen, and fixes some alt-tabbing issues.)


MGS1: MGSM2Fix[www.nexusmods.com] (Adds high resolution support, albeit it’s still a work in progress so there are some minor issues, widescreen support, and allows you to toggle on / off the censorship and other minor changes made due to copyright reasons in the collection.)


Then for MGS2 & 3, I maintain bugfix modpacks on Nexusmods which contain all the current bugfix mods preconfigured to install via Vortex mod manager or mod organizer 2 with a single click. You can find get them here:


MGS2

   
• Without AI Upscaled textures[next.nexusmods.com] 
     
• WITH AI Upscaled textures[next.nexusmods.com]

MGS3

   
• Without AI Upscaled textures[next.nexusmods.com]
     
• WITH AI Upscaled textures[next.nexusmods.com]

Lastly, for the Bonus Content: MGSHDFix[www.nexusmods.com] (Adds high resolution support, ultra-widescreen, and fixes some alt-tabbing issues.)