Snake Pliskin enters a heavily guarded office. Gru soldiers wait, scanning their line-of-sight for heroes and a reason for their pay. Snake’s bulk stands in the ready position, framed in the doorway as the camera crawls in toward a face staring well beyond the veteran’s usual 1000 yards. Do you a) use the desks as hiding holes and work your way across the room, b) set your claymore mine cards on their patrol route after using the PSG against the bloke with the flamethrower thus starting a chain reaction of boom or… no, there’s no choice just yet. This is a Metal Gear game and so your ‘sneak’ training is going to have to take a powder while the screen snaps with boxes full of talking heads spouting excessive exposition for the next three minutes. The guards won’t mind. As far as they care you may have well just popped into a Starbucks equipped with a Wi-fi hotspot for your laptop so you could send a few emails. Have a coffee.

Talk and chatter, gabble, blarney and lots of answers given as questions. Just because it isn’t designed by Hideo Kojima doesn’t mean Ac!d 2 doesn’t feel just like a Metal Gear game. Not a bad trick considering it’s played with a deck of over 500 available cards. Tricks don’t come into it since not only is this an improvement of the original Metal Gear Ac!d, it’s a genius Metal Gear title when set against the rest of the series. It doesn’t feel like you’re playing Konami’s more famous card game Yu-Gi- Oh! It feels like your playing a natural part of the MGS opus that, despite the tight cellshaded graphics, bouncing ‘water-bomb’ breasts and stereoscopic gimmickry could have been released at any time since 1987. You could recreate the game with specially designed cards and squared paper and it would still work as an elegant game of card management and tactical espionage. Now prepare for unfair bafflement as we try and cover the rules.

Initially two cards are dealt each turn – you can hold up to six or forgo a turn and discard two new. Equipment cards can be set to act as modifiers or you can link equipment cards to modify the effect of the modifier. If you’re attacked with an evasion card held you dodge or counter-attack automatically. Any kind of card can be spent on movement and you can spend earned points during the intermission between missions to upgrade existing cards or buy new ones as they are unlocked during the single-player campaign.

Now forget all of that tosh. Ac!d is so slick and features such a graceful training curve that you can mostly forget that the game uses cards at all. Just think of it as a strategy title and remember how all strategy titles have an element of luck. This is often represented when you’re shooting an unconscious guard at point-black range (one square away) with an 80% accuracy rating and miss totally. When you play a special card, for example the cyborg ninja Grey Fox, you’re certainly laying a card down but it feels natural to the flow of any PlayStation strategy title. And you get to see as invisible swords slice an enemy while they’re nonethe- wiser to your location. Sweet.

Because it’s turn-based you can be far sneakier that you could if it we’re a realtime MGS title with infinitely less dexterity. There’s no need to hold down three buttons at once, targeting fire extinguishers to create confusion is simple and you can check the enemies’ line-of sight while the game is effectively paused as you plan your move. You just have to be philosophical and learn how to use the cards you are dealt to maximum advantage and you’ve got the time to plan. You will use more varied techniques than usual because you can never be sure what cards you will have. You’ll set more traps and learn to fake out opponents with grenades. You’ll even shoot grenades before they’ve had a chance to run away from them. Joy. Despite the fate of the deck you feel more in control and because of the game’s turnbased nature it’s simply perfect for portable play. Portable joy.

Ac!d 2’s new and welcome visual style, refined camera controls and a more ingratiating interface belie the depths on offer. Each mission can be replayed in a variety of modes, Ad-Hoc play will devour the longest train journey and, we have to admit it, tweaking your deck to be more powerful creates a sense that you’ve designed your own personal stockpile of wonderful sneaky aggression.

Portable consoles need games that cater for how and why people actually play portable consoles. MGA2 was built to fit perfectly inside a PSP. Minimum loading, bite-sized yet filling gameplay. All PSP games should aim for these ideas but few do, which makes for something very special indeed.

Will Johnston