Metal Gear Solid HD Collection

Metal Gear Solid HD Collection brought two of its era's most ambitious action-adventure games — Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty and Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater — to PlayStation Vita in reworked resolution and with all their bonus missions intact. For console owners, this meant getting games in their pocket that previously required a television and hours-long blocks of time, without losing anything essential. It was thus one of the most generous packages ever released on this platform. Both games also include extensive bonus and virtual missions, which push the total content into the dozens of hours.

Both games are built around stealth: the player skirts around guards, watches their fields of view and the sound of their own footsteps, and uses boxes, disguises, and a tranquilizer pistol, with direct combat generally being an admission of failure. The third game adds jungle terrain, camouflage matched to the environment, treating wounds, and managing your own food supply, making it one of the series' most detailed entries. The Vita lacked analog triggers and a second pair of shoulder buttons, so Armature Studio's port shifted part of the controls to the touch panels — aiming and certain actions are handled with your fingers, and it takes a while to get used to. The third game is also one of the few where a boss fight plays out as a long, silent wait in the grass, and on a small screen that feels surprisingly intimate.

Technically, the collection was one of the better ports on the console: the image is sharp, performance is mostly stable, and save transfers between Vita and PlayStation 3 worked. The audio remains extraordinary — cinematic orchestral themes, long codec conversations, and silence that works better during stealth than any music could. Contemporary reviews recommended the collection as one of the best reasons to own a Vita, with reservations about the controls. Today it's the most convenient way to play through Snake Eater on the go, a game that fundamentally shaped the entire stealth genre.