Players can count on two things from a new "Metal Gear Solid" game: innovative game-play features and a heck of a lot of chatter.

Espionage's talkiest series heads back a few decades in "Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater," which takes place a few years after the Cuban missile crisis. In the game, it turns out there was another, even deadlier crisis a couple of years later, one involving a renegade Russian colonel, an American defector and a nuclear-equipped tank.

Of course, the only thing that can stop the whole thing is a superspy with a ton of high-tech gear. Oh wait, no. This is the 1960s. Our Snake character this time around is low on gear; he doesn't have his successor's handy radar, nor some of his fancier electronic gadgets. What he does have is a bunch of camouflage gear, some face paint and a willingness to eat anything he can find in the wild.

While previous games have taken place largely in or around installations, much of "Snake Eater" occurs in a jungle setting. The greenery makes for a very different way of playing the game, one that revolves around hiding in plain sight.

The core game play is similar to previous games; anyone who has played them will be able to pick things up quickly. Snake can use a number of weapons, crouch, shimmy, back up against walls, lean around corners and so forth. He also has several new close-combat techniques - a welcome change from the older games' thin hand-to-hand options.

He's got a lot of new tricks, but the loss of that radar means hiding is all the more important. He'll collect camouflage patterns perfect for blending into bricks, trees and other foliage, industrial settings and plenty of other backgrounds. Matching them with the right face paint enhances the effect, and defeating bosses in a nonlethal manner often yields special patterns.

So Snake can beat people up real good, disappear from sight on a sunny day and use any gun he picks up. Sounds unstoppable, right? Not quite. The title gives a hint: Snake has to eat to stay in top form, and to do that he has to forage or hunt for his food. Different food items - python, scorpion, nutrient wafers - restore different amounts of stamina. Some foods can even make Snake sick if poisonous or spoiled.

Stamina is important because it lets Snake run around, fight and, most importantly, heal himself. Aside from losing life, which returns after time, Snake will occasionally take serious wounds, such as a bullet to the gut, a burn to the arm or a cut to the thigh.

Whatever the damage, Snake won't be able to heal past a certain point unless he splints, stitches or bandages the trouble spot. While a neat touch, the treatment can get aggravating at times, especially since some wounds take four or so steps to heal.

All this hiding and healing comes into play against the game's bosses. Each is unique, from the familiar - though much younger - sharpshooter Ocelot to a cadre of bizarre commandos called the Cobra Unit. This collection of freaks certainly lives up to the weirdos from the previous games.

That about wraps it up for the new game-play elements. Now let's take a look at the chatter-to-game ratio.

It's pretty high. Whether in carefully produced movie sequences or interminable radio conversations, all characters in "Snake Eater" love to jabber on about, well, whatever they feel like, apparently.

Snake's medical adviser talks about B movies, while The Boss, EVA and Snake himself pontificate on friendship, patriotism, betrayal and moral relativism - and that's in the first few hours.

The plot is good and the characters interesting - particularly Snake's relationship with the American turncoat, The Boss - but gamers may find themselves struggling through the endless navel-gazing and dime-store philosophy. It's nice to see a game try to reach a higher message, but "Snake Eater" is heavy-handed in the extreme, and the pacing suffers.

But this is familiar to series vets, as will be the game's other sticking point: the perspective. "Snake Eater" is played from the same top-down point of view as the others. Snake can look around in a first-person mode when standing still, but for moving, the view is almost always of the top of his head. Without radar, this means it can be very hard to get a bead on where enemies are and whether Snake is walking right into them. It makes the game more challenging, to be sure, but also more frustrating.

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Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater

3 stars

SYSTEM: Sony PlayStation 2

PUBLISHER: Konami

HOW MUCH: $49.99

AGE RATING: Mature