yes, it's a huge step ahead compared to the rudimentary first game. is it any better tho? not that much

the major issue with this game is the overabundant backtracking. moreover, some guards are inexplicably over-perceptive and will ALWAYS spot you as soon as you cross a new area, causing neverending chases which are tedious to say the least. all the progress made since the first Metal Gear gets almost completely buried by stuff like this.
in any case, the presentation is amazing (from its intro, to some of the dialogue and all the shenanigans/odds and sods in true Kojima's fashion) and the soundtrack is killer. sadly, the aforementioned flaws make the game just too over-stretched and convoluted for its own nature, and story-wise there isn't really anything worth checking out that isn't already summarised in MGS1's "Previous operations". it still can be fun at times, just like the first one was in a vintage kind of way, but I would recommend both only for the die-hard MGS fans.

oh, and also thank god for the changes that Subsistence applied to the CODEC models. now they're cool as hell; in the original MSX2 ver. they were so atrociously '80s that you couldn't help but laugh