First 15

The game starts off very slow. Following the opening cutscene in which Snake is injured, you spend the first 15 minutes of the game sitting in a hospital bed. There really isn’t much else to say because not much else happens. You spend a lot of time moving your head around and simply observing the doctor and nurses as they take care of you and the patient next to you. You even have to be sedated a few times after you have a panic attack over some of the things the doctor tells you. I will say it was interesting to see a game that’s not afraid to have such a boring opening in favor of a more cinematic feel. That said, I did feel like the game had made its point about how long it takes Snake to recover from his injuries long before the first actually interesting thing happened.

Of course, once things got interesting, they got really interesting.

Story

The story is quite dark and revolves around a world similar to our own history in which war is the norm and lives are given the same value as ammunition. Most countries use private military contractors to carry out their less savory work while keeping their own hands clean. In the midst of all of this, there is Solid Snake and his company which tries to bring a little good to the world. Unfortunately, that mentality invites predators whom ultimately destroy the organization in the opening cinematic.

The beginning of the game is about Snake literally dragging himself back from the dead so that he can start anew. The opening story mission is graphic, gut wrenching, and not for the faint of heart. It paints a very bleak picture of the world that has developed while its best champion has been out of commission. The first mission, minus the seemingly endless time spent stuck in bed, is precisely what I want to play. It is the kind of story/gameplay that has made the Metal Gear Solid series such a powerful force.

There are two major highlights of this series that Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain does not forget. The first is people with powers and abilities that go beyond the norm. In this game those characters are front and center right from the start and every time you encounter them they bring a sense of both dread and wonder. The second is the metal gears, from which the series gains its name. Here too the game hits its mark as the player slowly catches tantalizing glimpses of a metal gear as the story progresses.

All this probably sounds fantastic, and it is. The problem is, the story comes to a screeching halt once you gain access to the base. Now with a base of your own, you must go out and gather resources in order to upgrade your base, research weapons, recruit soldiers, and whole host of other management type things that frankly do absolutely nothing to further the storyline. I’ll go into this more in the Gameplay section, but suffice it to say that the game does a great job of starting strong only to shoot itself in the foot.

One thing that never made any sense to me was the way in which you recruit new soldiers. Some are earned through mission rewards which makes sense, but the majority of early recruits you get by incapacitating enemy soldiers and then having them airlifted back to base where suddenly they convert from wanting to kill you on sight to deciding that you’re the commander they’ve always wanted to follow and they will lay down their lives for your cause. The game offers some sorry excuse about “reprogramming” them as justification, but frankly the whole thing just felt weird every time.

Interface

One thing I will say for the developers, despite the fact that there are a million different things you need to do in a menu, for the most part everything is laid out in such a way that you can very quickly and easily find what you need. There are a few exceptions, but for the most part if I needed to see something, I could find it without any real trouble. The one big exception to this was I wish they would put extraction points on the normal map. If you want to know where to go for an extraction, you have to navigate away from the map and pull up the extraction menu to see where they are. It’s a minor issue, but you run into it at the end of every mission so it’s quite noticeable.

They make clever use of the PS4 touchpad in that the bottom left corner brings up a menu while the bottom right corner takes you directly to the map. It feels natural to use despite technically being the same button. I have a feeling I’ll start seeing other games doing the same.

I very much dislike that you can’t see optional objectives until after you complete a mission. Often times the optional objectives require only a minor variation on what you’re already doing, but you won’t know that until after you’ve completed a mission which then forces you to repeat the mission if you want to go after them. Frankly it just feels like a cheap way to add “replayability” without having to actually add anything to the game.

I don’t know why, but it seems like every time anything at all happens, the game decides that it’s a good time to start putting some credits on the screen. I probably saw Hideo Kojima’s name ten times in the first three hours of the game alone. Eventually I started wondering if this was some kind of gag (the series is famous for its subtle jokes), but they never really presented it as one. So I’m just left to wonder if I really need another reminder of the people who made this game.

Gameplay

The core gameplay is quite well done and each of the systems works rather well with the others. The main flow is to approach a new town or outpost, scan for threats from afar and mark them using the binoculars, then move in and systematically kill or incapacitate all of the threats without being spotted. Once all of the threats have been eliminated, finish up any mission objectives, collect any available resources, and then move on to the next area. Eliminating enemies generally takes up the lion’s share of your time due to waiting on opportunities to separate one soldier from the rest in order to take him down without alerting the others. This gameplay and the tools the game provides to facilitate it mesh very well with one another into a coherent whole. On the other hand, you can certainly go in guns blazing. But even if you prefer the direct approach, it’s still probably worth your while to do a bit of sneaking to eliminate a few enemies before you open fire.

Reflex mode is a new addition to the series wherein after being spotted the player has a few seconds during which everything slows down. This allows you a brief window to try and quickly take out the enemy before they have time to call out of backup. These moments are very high tension and create a nice sense of spiking adrenaline. This contrasts nicely with the more slow and even stealth gameplay.

The evac system is both extremely useful and somewhat hilarious. You gain the ability to attach a balloon to an unconscious character (human or large animal) which causes them to rise up into the air for a few seconds, before they go rocketing into the sky to be picked up by a recon plane. The game does this very tongue in cheek as the person or animal being evaced gives a very amusing cries of dismay whenever he/she/it goes rocketing into the sky. From a gameplay perspective this system strikes a nice balance between still having to carry a person you wish to evac (since you can’t evac a person while indoors) while thankfully not forcing you to carry a person for leagues and leagues to a landing zone as you have to do in the prologue mission if you wish to rescue all of the prisoners.

One thing I found extremely annoying was that the silencer has durability. This means that you can only fire a weapon ten or so times before the silencer breaks. This might have been fine if I could bring some backup silencers with me, but I can’t. And once the silencer breaks, I have to call in a chopper to airlift me out before I can get another one. You can eventually research better weapons which have silencers that last longer, but it takes a lot of time to unlock those upgrades and in the meantime you’re stuck with the worst silencers in the history of any video game ever.

As I alluded to in the Story section, the joy of the game comes to a grinding halt once you start getting invested in the base. The storyline vanishes and you’re forced to grind through a dozen or more nearly identical missions whose sole purpose seems to be to prolong the game while enabling to the designers to reuse the same assets. Sometimes you have to kill a general, others are to extract a prisoner, or maybe even collect some intel. But in the end all of the missions basically play out the same and you very quickly start to get bored with the repetitiveness of it all. Every mission basically comes down to: approach settlement, scan for threats with binoculars, sneak around eliminating enemies (unless you just use the direct approach because you’re so tired of waiting for enemies to patrol), finish eliminating enemies, gather resources, complete objectives (if any), and move on to the next settlement. Rinse and repeat. It’s fun at first, but when you do this three to five times a mission with almost nothing to change it up, by mission thirteen the fun is pretty much used up.

There is even a daily login bonus. A daily login bonus! This alone should have thrown up giant red warning signs to the developers that something was desperately wrong and the game had gone quite far astray. I bought this game to play a gripping single player story campaign, not so I would have to treat it like a free-to-play iPhone game.

Conclusion

You will like this game if you enjoy micromanaging a base and a roster of recruits or if you’re willing to at least wade through a ton of menus and side missions each time you wish to advance the story.

You will not enjoy this game if you don’t like repetitive missions or if you don’t like sifting through dozens of menus after each mission.

Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain is a game that contains two games. The first is the exactly the kind of game I was hoping for from a sequel to the excellent Metal Gear Solid IV: Guns of the Patriots. Sadly though, that game is trapped behind another game which is a mess of menus and repetitive side missions that you must wade through in order to play the game you actually want to play. You would think that in the Definitive Edition at least they would have given you the option to bypass the busy work, but sadly they are sticking to their guns and the game as a whole suffers for it.