It gives us all the usual gumph about characters and weapons and items, and also tips on how to play the game itself, although this is hardly necessary as the game itself is easy enough to get to grips with. The guide covers all the VR and Alternative missions and comprises the bulk of the guide. You do get a dog-tag list which, for me, was the most handy thing in there, although it's such a shame there was a printing error in there, which makes the production of the guide look shoddy.

It was good to know what has to be done to unlock extra features, like the stealth camo item for example, but most of what you get in here can be found online anyway. Not the greatest of guides, this one.


More useful than the average strategy guide   September 20, 2003
 3 out of 4 found this review helpful

Unlike a certain other reviewer (cough), I actually found this guide to be quite useful. MGS2: Substance can be a frustratingly hard game, especially what with all the bonus missions and dog tags across the many difficulty levels, and this guide provides a few useful tactics for completing these parts of the game. The dog tag section comes with only a few errors (I sometimes found easier ways to obtain the tags than the methods the writers here had printed, for example) and there's even a dog tag checklist, which comes in VERY useful -- especially when it comes to backtracking over your SOL game to find those tags that didn't appear earlier on in the game.

The Missions section also comes with some nice tactics, but is a bit flawed -- some walkthroughs annoyingly just repeat information you already know, or simply rephrase the brief you get at the start of the mission (Cheers, guys), rendering them just useless. Also, bizarrely, some walkthrus give you the strategy to obtaining the Top Record score whereas others don't -- but given that this is the official guide, there's simply no reason for this. Why couldn't have the writers squeezed every single Top Record tactic out of the game developers? WHY?!

Concluding, then -- this is still more useful than the average game strategy guide, as most simply take the challenge out of a game that was simply too easy to begin with, whereas this guide helps to ease the pain of a very frustrating game. But be warned, only certain parts of this guide will help you. Everything else you need will probably be freely available on the Internet.


A virtually redundant guide useful only to the beginner.   June 17, 2003
 4 out of 4 found this review helpful

Metal Gear Solid 2: Substance is, in places, a very hard game. It caters for all players from the absolute beginner to the seasoned veteran, and provides a challenge for all at every step of the way. That's one reason why so many people love it to death.
However, for the more 'seasoned' among us, this strategy guide is almost useless. Heck, it's substandard even for use by the absolute beginner, as it contains no walkthrough for the main game, only for the Substance-specific extras. (To summarise, if one wished to own this company's strategies for every element of the game, one would have to shell out for no less than two strategy guides - this one, and the one for the original Sons of Liberty.)
But back onto the main focus of this review: The fact that this guide is of no use to the more veteran amongst us. Its main downfall is the solutions for the VR and Alternative missions; granted, anyone stuck on any one of default Raiden's missions is in for a strategical feast, but anyone stuck on the missions of, say, Snake, Ninja Raiden or Pliskin (not to mention the much more taxing Tuxedo Snake and MGS1 Snake) will find little to no help - missions that often perplex players attempting to improve their skill, such as a particularly nasty sniping mission for Solid Snake, are often summarised merely by referring directly back to Raiden's (vastly easier) equivalents of the mission. In addition, the Bomb Disposal missions (which require the player to stealthily dispose of the surrounding area's guards and then defuse the nearby bombs without setting off the proximity triggers) often make reference merely to the locations of the bombs, and not to how to dispatch the surrounding guards. As anyone who's got relatively far in these must know, sometimes disposing of those guards perfectly can mean the difference between a successfully defused bomb and Snake being blown into fish food.
So already, the guide has proved itself to supply insufficient information for this vast and sprawling game. The Snake Tales, for example, often have walkthroughs scarcely longer than half a page. However, the icing on the cake when it comes to this guide's inadequacies is the inaccurate information it sometimes provides; for example, its claim that the Casting Theatre and European Extreme modes are Substance-specific additions to the game is incorrect - in the European version of the game, these extras have been available since the original Sons of Liberty.
In short, pass this one over, people. Spending a few minutes looking around on online FAQ sites and gaming forums can get you much more detailed information. (For example, within ten minutes I found a shot-by-shot walkthrough for a particularly hard mission which this guide summed up with a one-sentence comment.) This guide is only useful if you're just getting to grips with the huge, sprawling challenge that is Metal Gear Solid 2: Substance, and even then, it's hardly worth the asking price given how little you'll end up using it.