Some of you probably don't care about the reviews and are going to play Metal Gear Solid 4. That's fine. Others of you are interested in what the critics are saying. Hit the jump for selected sound bites from Eurogamer's impressions of the game:
• Metal Gear Solid 4 is, in most senses, the biggest Metal Gear yet. But the best? Maybe not. If the super-slick thriller of the first Metal Gear Solid remains Kojima's masterpiece, then this operatic monster is his magnum opus.
• Tune out the details, and Guns of the Patriots is a properly gripping yarn, full of thrills, spectacle, laughs, and even tenderness and pathos. You won't understand, but you will care.
• The new gadgets are superb, the weapons are expertly realised and much easier to get hold of, and there are always plenty of options, even if stealth is still usually the best of them. Hand-to-hand combat feels more natural. The environments are more complex, but nothing like as large or open as you might expect, and this is still a linear game.
• Despite Kojima's downbeat sentiments on the PS3, he has produced a technical and presentational tour-de-force. The visuals do have rough edges but the art, especially the character art, is flawless, somehow maintaining extravagance and understated cool simultaneously. Harry Gregson Williams' music, whether providing scripted excitement or dynamic accompaniment, hits all the right cues, and musters a memorable, delicate theme. And the surround soundtrack is clearly a labour of love and extreme dedication, probably the best in gaming to date...
• In Guns of the Patriots' incredible, cathartic, climactic scenes, the lines are blurred so much that you can barely tell whether you're playing a videogame or watching a film. To some that might sound like an insult, but to Kojima and his fans, it's nirvana, something for which the series has been striving for ten years, and it could not be a more appropriate note to end on.
• An unbelievably lengthy and self-indulgent epilogue — you can't call it a cut-scene, it's an entire film in its own right, and a deeply boring one too — is how Solid Snake's career comes to a close. Too bad, but no hard feelings; you can ignore it if you wish. The drawn-out sentimentality is fitting, in a way. Snake may have started out as a gruff, two-dimensional cliché, but he bows out very gracefully in Metal Gear Solid 4, assuming the mantle of the world-weary samurai, or the enigmatic nameless cowboy from a spaghetti western, as if it were always his.
• You could not ask for a funnier, cleverer, more ambitious or inspired or over-the-top conclusion to the Metal Gear Solid series, but it's definitely time to move on.
Eurogamer gave the game an 8/10 for whatever that's worth.
Metal Gear Solid 4 Review [Eurogamer]