As fundamental as you'd imagine , a pair of games that are clearly a product of their time with heavily reliance to external help like manuals and even guides, only Enjoyable for the patient enough kind of people.

Metal Gear shows its age the most with key-cards that don't stack, mandatory breakable walls that look like regular walls, static bosses with blind spots, enemies with tunnel vision, unclear objectives, You don't even get to fight the titular Metal Gear, as Snake destroys it before it even gets the chance to activate, but under that dust hides a game that is enjoyable to play and satisfying to complete with the familiarity of the future Metal Gear games.

Metal gear 2 Solid Snake shares some unmentioned issues with the first game like insane backtracking and the lack of diagonal movement, it's improvements are clear however, you can crawl under spaces to better hide from enemies, key-cards stack, codec calls are more useful, better thought-out story, and those who like Metal Gear Solid will find the resemblance in thematic and design, the similarities are so blatant that this games almost feels like a prototype of it's sequel, A Hind D boss, a returning character as ninja, a chase sequence while climbing a tower, that infamous key that changes with temperature, a mysterious helping character behind codec calls.

I would only recommend to die-hard fans of the series that are curious to experience how everything began and to get this game on sale or included in a bundle since it lacks some basic emulation settings and display configurations that have been common for decades, otherwise I'd suggest skip to Metal Gear Solid and read it's "Previous Operations" summaries of these games if you're planning on playing the series in order.

MAN WE GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOD (The story is good though but good god the gameplay)