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Better Late Than Never Review: Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain



Well it should surprise no one that we're tackling this game now. After looking at Ground Zeroes a few weeks back it wouldn't due to go and play anything else next. This game takes off from where Ground Zeroes left off and continues in the same style. That means plenty of stealth, cutscenes, and well, more stealth. 

So spoilers if you haven't played Ground Zeroes. These games only work together. I already told you to play the other one. 

After the attack on Mother Base Big Boss has been in a coma for nine years. When he awakes in 1984 in a hospital he's lost his left arm and is being hunted by more than just conventional enemies. Ocelot brings him to Afghanistan, currently in the middle of its war with the Soviet Union, where Miller is rebuilding the Dimond Dogs. 

What follows is a combination of stealth, action, and base building. As Big Boss your primary objective is to rebuild Mother Base and take revenge on whoever attacked you. To this end you take missions in Afghanistan as a mercenary company that usually have you sneaking around Soviet camps and forts. 

Stealth is the name of the game and while you can pursue more direct approaches they are both more difficult and less fun than sneaking up on someone and interrogating them before you choke them out. 

You are also tasked to rebuild Mother Base and the Diamond Dogs.  The base building is fairly straightforward. You select which soldiers are in which unit and then upgrade base platforms as you have resources. It gets tedious when you have start trying to micro-manage the people into the best possible combination of their skills. 

This does lead to one of the neatest parts of the game. The futon recovery system. One of the main ways to get new soldiers for Mother Base is to literally kidnap them from the battlefield via futon balloon. It seems strange but it works well to merge the base building and stealth segments by giving you a reason to scope out Soviet checkpoints spread throughout the map for soldiers to kidnap and convert. 

In a game this polished the bad stuff does stand out a bit. The game tends to offer the 'chicken hat' easy mode after only two deaths, regardless of how you died. This is particularly annoying when your dying from an action rather than stealth segment. For a game that works being so grounded there are a lot of supernatural segments. Though not bad exactly, their inclusion seems strange. Finally the controls are a bit wonky at times, but I'll chock that up to me being new to the series. 

The good:
-tough but rewarding stealth mechanics
-the futon system!

The bad:
-the occasional supernatural elements are jarring
-no I don't want to equip the fucking chicken hat. 

MGSV is an impressive game. I didn't want to harp on it again since I already talked about the use of this medium as a way to tell a story in the Ground Zeroes review but it's another of its strengths. I enjoyed playing this game a great deal. It was long and at times strange but good. 

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