You sneak through enemy bases avoiding guards' sightlines, using cardboard boxes and shadows to stay hidden rather than shooting your way through. This collects the first three main games in the series, along with extra material like screenplays, so you can see how the stealth style and story developed over time. The controls and camera feel dated compared to modern stealth games, which is worth knowing going in.
Gameplay video
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Screenshots & review notes
Why it lands
This collection is a fitting tribute to a series that changed how games tell stories, even if the presentation feels a bit bare-bones in places.
How it plays
Stealth mechanics that once felt revolutionary hold up better than expected, though some camera and control quirks show their age.
Style and score
Extras like digital screenplays add welcome context, though visual upgrades are minimal and some fans wanted more restoration work done.
Who it's for
A must-have for anyone who has never experienced the trilogy, though the lack of extensive modernization may frustrate longtime fans.
Frames captured from the gameplay video above; notes are our own take on the game.
What it's like to play
You get five classic Metal Gear games bundled together, starting with the original top-down stealth games and building up to the seminal Metal Gear Solid, where you sneak Solid Snake through a snowy military facility, hiding behind crates, watching guard patrol patterns on a radar, and using a codec radio to call allies for hints when you get stuck. Combat is something to avoid rather than seek out, alarms bring waves of guards, so most of your time is spent creeping carefully, tranquilizing or knocking out guards rather than shooting through them, and boss fights are memorable, tactical encounters that often require thinking outside the usual controls. The two sequels included, Sons of Liberty and Snake Eater, expand this stealth further, with Snake Eater in particular adding survival elements like camouflage that changes based on your surroundings and hunting for food in the jungle.
Your goal across these games is always some variant of infiltrating a heavily guarded location undetected to stop a plot from unfolding, told through lengthy, cinematic cutscenes that were groundbreaking for their time and still hold up as genuinely gripping storytelling. Alongside the main games, this collection bundles extra VR training missions, digital versions of graphic novels and screenplays, and full soundtracks, turning it into a genuine archive of the series' history rather than just the games themselves. A single game in the collection runs somewhere between ten and thirty hours depending on which one and how thoroughly you explore it.
Session to session these games reward patience and careful observation over fast reflexes, and stopping to actually take in the cutscenes and codec conversations is part of the intended experience. What may frustrate you is that this collection largely uses older versions of these games without modern visual upgrades, so they run at a lower frame rate with dated controls by today's standards. This is best suited to players curious about stealth game history who do not mind a slower, more deliberate pace than most modern action games.