Metal Gear Solid Touch (iOS, 2009)

My long quest to play every Metal Gear game ever released has taken me to some odd places. I traveled halfway across the country to an arcade in Bury that claimed to have a Metal Gear Arcade cabinet (they didn’t), mastered the N-Gage to resurrect Metal Gear Solid Mobile, and can now add fiddling with the ancient guts of an iPhone 4 to play Metal Gear Solid Touch.

Released in 2009, the origins of Metal Gear Solid Touch aren’t difficult to figure out. Konami beancounters looked on enviously at the amount of money being made on the App Store for very little outlay, decided to release Apps based on their biggest franchises, and told Kojima Productions to get a Metal Gear Solid game on iPhone as quickly as possible.

Boktai director Ikuya Nakamura and KojiPro website designer Yasuyo Watanabe were given the brief. Announced with what was in retrospect a touch too much fanfare (many assumed the logo was hinting at Xbox 360 MGS4 port), the game was released to mixed reviews and almost instantly forgotten.

Then came the “appocalypse”. In 2017 Apple announced that their new devices wouldn’t support 32-bit apps, meaning hundreds of older iOS games suddenly disappeared. Metal Gear Solid Touch was cast into the digital abyss, never to return.

Well, not unless you’re prepared to put in some elbow work. I bought an iPhone 4 (on the basis that it was the most popular phone around the time of release), jailbroke it via some incredibly shady 2010-era Chinese program, tracked down an .ipa of the game (it’s actually available in full on archive.org), spent a few hours trawling defunct Cydia repos for software that’d lets me install unsigned files, figured out how the software works and… ta dah! Metal Gear Solid Touch.

Was it worth all that effort? Hell no.

Touch retells the story of Metal Gear Solid 4 as a 20-level static shooter. Snake sits at the bottom of the screen, you control a crosshair with the touch screen. Tapping the screen fires your machine gun and pinching raises your scope for distant enemies. The key is to dispatch the enemies before they fire on you, or dodge their attacks by hiding behind cover.

Simplicity isn’t necessarily bad, but there’s precious little Metal Gear atmosphere here. The highlights are the boss battles, which mix up the formula simply by giving you an enemy that doesn’t just pop up and fire at you. A late recreation of the Rex vs Ray fight is probably the game’s high point, if only because switching between homing missiles and miniguns actually feels like a decent simulation of the original gameplay.

The real pits are the sudden difficulty spikes. Each stage lasts about 90 seconds, meaning a motivated and skilled player could see the ending very quickly. However, someone clearly realised people would complain about the length and compensated by cranking up the difficulty. From about stage ten onwards the game essentially demands perfection. Fail to clear out enemies as they appear and they multiply in numbers, which means Game Over.

But I’m persistent and though later stages took maybe 20-30 attempts until I had everything memorised I eventually triumphed. Then I got to level 18/20 and the Screaming Mantis boss fight. The gimmick is that you must grab her dolls then shake the phone to hurt her. I shook that phone ridiculously hard and… nothing.

The shake functionality is working fine in other apps but some update must have rendered Touch incompatible. Not even the ‘shake’ emulation via the accessibility virtual buttons worked. Sod it, I’ll just watch someone play the last two levels on YouTube.

Metal Gear Solid Touch is not a disaster. In fact, in the sunniest possible light, it’s about as good as a shooting gallery MGS-themed title that recycles existing assets could be. The really frustrating thing is that there are way more imaginative things that KojiPro could have done with the hardware than this – how about a game where you play the support to Snake on a mission unlocking doors, distracting guards, and providing items as he sneaks about. Hell, why not just make Metal Gear Ac!d 3?

At least I’ve played it (well, 90% of it) and can put it down. Sadly my mission to play every MGS game will ultimately result in failure as Japan-only online card game Metal Gear Solid: Social Ops will remain forever out of reach due to its server-based nature. But maybe one day some enterprising fan will find the files on a phone and extract them… maybe?

Oh well, at least I can put Metal Gear Solid Touch behind me.