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Review: Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain

Review: Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain

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Out of all the games I’ve played, the first twenty-five minutes of Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain were not only the most bizarre, but also the most adrenaline fueled, kick-ass, graphics so good you weep, in your face, bitchin’ half hour of gameplay that’s ever had me on the verge of a coronary. Its opening is just THAT GOOD! The sounds, the sights, the sneaking. It was all so perfect. Weird. But perfect. And then things just started to wind down. In a terrible, terrible way.

Almost like someone was saying “Here! Behold, everything you’ve ever wanted in a Metal Gear game….aaaaand, it’s gone.” A point comes as Big Boss sits in his support chopper waiting what seems like forever to return to his half constructed motherbase and to do absolutely feck all, and for the first time ever in a game a thought enters my head that perhaps I’m wasting my life. The early missions include stealing sheep, rescuing prisoners from incredibly, repeatedly similar locations, routinely kidnapping soldiers to be used as your personal slave labour force while MGSV-The-Phantom-Pain-TGS-2014-Screen-Quiet-African-Jungle-Gameplay-2upgrading your base and acquiring random splotches of intelligence in the hopes that this one mission will progress the story.

On occasion you glimpse something weird and terrifying and your only option is to run to your chopper and get the hell out of dodge, but you will put ten hours into this game and you’ll only have a few extensions on your rig and a tricked out chopper to show for it, that’s pretty much it. Don’t get me wrong. The gameplay, the graphics, they are all top notch. Top notch in a way I haven’t seen before. Good enough to take a guess at the thread count on Big Boss’ bed kinda amazing. Unfortunately, with this large open world environment they’ve built, they’ve forgotten to actually fill it with interesting stuff to do. You find yourself just running between destination points on a map and shooting people periodically along the way. You also get the feeling early on that you might not necessarily be the good guys in all of this. Maybe it’s all the kidnapping? Just a guess.

For all the positive reviews the game has had, and it is a decent game they’ve made here don’t get me wrong, I can’t help but feel slightly disappointed with the finished product. We’ve all been waiting for Metal Gear for so long, and we’ve all paid good money for it; I’m not even going to go into the micro-transactions or bugs, which I hate with a passion, but for €70 odd, should we really be spending this much of our gaming time upgrading a base and tricking out helicopters? It sure doesn’t feel like it. Where’s the urgency? The adrenaline fueled, browned pants to the edge of your seat that we saw in the opening sequence? Where’s the point? Overall the main storyline comes in bits and pieces andMGSV-The-Phantom-Pain-E3-2014-Screen-Village isn’t enough to draw me into it fully. It literally takes a gaming lifetime of utterly repetitive missions and side missions before the main story will move an inch forward and even at that the plot seems convoluted at best.

And I’m not sure if anyone else knows, but those side missions actually sometimes turn out to be really crucial if not pivotal to your main ones, but it seems silly to be worrying about that one dude they said you might like to kidnap, right? Throughout the game you get the feeling that the story was never meant to take front and center with a focus more on the overall barren but stunningly beautiful environment. The problem with making a Metal Gear game and giving players the options to just frolic around the plains to their hearts desires is that if you don’t have a truly engaging storyline it doesn’t beckon you to continue and the player feels lost. There’s also a move away from the sneaking aspect that we all truly love. Infiltrating bases effectively becomes a case of running in, shooting everything that moves and getting the hell out with a sore lacking in hidey hole crawl spaces.

I know this might feel like a rant, and in a way it is, but with games like this I feel honesty is the best policy, especially when the official reviews so far have been so good. I’m going to repeat that it’s not a bad game, there are great things happening here. The gameplay itself is fantastic and the graphics are out of this world; seriously making use of the next gen console. The game is enjoyable and you will happily put mindless hours into it without question. My issue with Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain is that it’s lacking any kind of real engagement with the player. It feels lost amid its own next gen visual achievements and gimmicks, which is just so depressing when you consider the Konami and Kojima cataclysm.

Lost in the desert with no sign of the chopper.

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