Game that's good to go

Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker
Console PSP
Rating 18

This game is the first good reason to dust off your PlayStation Portable in rather a long time. Sony pitched the gleaming hand-held PSP as the grown-up alternative to Nintendo's DS, which is infested with legions of pastel-hued children's games and pet simulators. But PSP has remained distinctly short on games worth playing until now.

The console has fallen on such hard times that when I went to buy a memory card to save my Peace Walker game, the store no longer had a PSP section.

But while this 70s-themed spy thriller has arrived late to the party, it is one of the very few hand-held titles to feel as good as a normal console game. The Metal Gear series (this is, broadly speaking, number five) is a legendary spy series with a rather eccentric Japanese flavour, and this sits comfortably alongside the full-sized versions on PS3. It is detailed, epic and atmospheric, with superb presentation that blends crisp digital menus with period details such as audio cassettes playing as you receive mission briefings.

The only real shortcoming is PSP's controls: the single analogue stick makes you feel slightly hobbled as you sneak into South American military installations armed with rifles and tranquilliser darts.

But the early levels are forgiving enough that you overcome your initial clumsiness and you soon find yourself feeling satisfyingly like your character Snake, a lethal assassin with a bandana and the growl of a 40-a-day smoker. Triggering alarms, then hiding in shadows watching the ‘alarm' monitor run down, creates surge after surge of adrenaline with an almost musical rhythm.

The tension ramps up constantly to the point where your blood genuinely runs cold every time you hear the scream of ‘Snake! Snaaaaake!' as you die. Squeezing solid 3-D graphics and sound like this out of a hand-held console is a technical miracle. Peace Walker blends realistic visuals and film-like music with hand-painted manga video sequences perfectly. As a game, it's also a labour of love, with so many dimensions to the gameplay, from stealth to army building and upgrading weaponry, that it's easy to get lost in.

As with many a Far East action movie, you swiftly give up any attempt to understand the plot - even by the standards of Japanese Manga comics, this one is incomprehensible, and that really is saying something. Little Red Riding Hood seems to be involved, as are the KGB and the CIA, and robots and nuclear bombs, but it's so utterly bonkers that you find yourself coasting through the plot sections just for the visuals.