REVIEW

Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain Review

by Sam Foxall, September 5th, 2015

You’re down to your last clip of ammunition as your sniper buddy tries to take out the remaining horde of soldiers who are barrelling down on your position. A gunship is hovering overhead, ready to cut you in half with machine gun fire while a mortar team is ready to fire on your position. You call in an artillery strike and you run out into the Afghan twilight, blasting ‘The Final Countdown’ as the sky lights up with bullets. This was only a jaunt out into the desert yet it turned into a 20 minute long unscripted infiltration and escape mission, which would rival most action set pieces in other AAA shooters. With Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, Kojima and his team have created one of the finest open world experiences to date, with almost infinite gameplay choice which captures the feeling of being a legendary soldier. While the gameplay is unparalleled, the story is afflicted by Kojima’s constant want to lecture players about everything he knows on microbiology or nuclear deterrence, on top of having contrived twist on contrived twist. It’s the most ambitious Metal Gear to date and while it does fulfil many of its ambitions, some aspects fall just short of it being an absolute masterpiece.

I’ll get my biggest bugbear out of the way first. Kojima has still not learned how to write a well paced story. While this is certainly the most straight forward of all the Metal Gears in my opinion (no nanomachines or psychic essences locked in arms to deal with just yet), Kojima cannot stop jabbering on and filling his plots with technobabble and arbitrary twists. Now, if you aren’t versed in the Metal Gear lore, you’ll just have an alright revenge story which seems to run out of steam fairly quickly and has rather an abrupt ending. If you are a long time Metal Gear fan, the endings that The Phantom Pain presents will either be genius or you will think the whole series is ruined. The infamous Kojima ‘ruse cruise’ is in full effect, with the 3 endings you have to sit through only obfuscating the conclusion even more. It isn’t as awful or drawn out as Guns of the Patriots, but Kojima isn’t winning a prize for best narrative any time soon.

As for the voice acting, all the cast do the best they can with the script presented to them. Robin Atkin Downes and Troy Baker do excellent jobs as Miller and Ocelot, but you will become sick of Miller constantly asking if you are extracting that particular soldier every time you attach someone to a Fulton ballon. Kiefer Sutherland does well as Snake, bringing a forlorn gravity to the character, making this iteration of Snake feel like one who is finally being ground down by the horrors of war. The thousand yard stare Snake has when he returns to Mother Base, covered in blood, is so effective in showing the mounting fatigue of this eternal soldier. He is the least talkative of the main cast, with most of his dialogue being presented in tapes you get between missions but even then, his personality does not really shine through. This is a very particular choice, tying in with Kojima’s tale of identity but it does make you yearn for the goofier and more defined Snake voiced by David Hayter. Skull Face goes from possibly interesting antagonist to cartoon villain, with James Horan really phoning it in with the lacklustre script while it is just another day at the office for Christopher Randolph, bringing some top notch bitching and moaning with Huey Emmerich.

The mission tapes are again plagued by Kojima’s desire to lecture at you about a topic he has just read about. They act mainly as pleasant white noise to listen to as you plan your next mission or order the next platform to be built on Mother Base but don’t expect to be listening to Shakespeare. Right, enough about Kojima’s lack of writing skill, let’s get to the real meat and potatoes of Metal Gear Solid V, the actual experience of sneaking across Central Africa or commanding your private army and its headquarters.

Slamming fools and shooting down helis with D Walker is just the best.

Honestly, it’s nothing short of phenomenal. The moment to moment action of touching down in a helicopter, scoping out a base and then going through it in any way you see fit is so satisfying. Every playstyle is accommodated with veterans being able to take the perfect stealth route by turning off Reflex and aim assist, or you could go into and judo throw everyone, or roll a tank up and blow a base sky high or you could make a small pile of sleeping guards and slowly Fulton them back to base one by one. The feedback loop of clearing a base out, gathering more forces for Mother Base to research more equipment to go on more missions is well crafted that you can sink 5 hours in one sitting and not even notice how long you have been playing. The sheer number of side ops to tackle alongside main missions, along with the ability to free roam and make your own Metal Gear moments makes The Phantom Pain easily the most memorable open world game I have played in a long time.

The sacrifice for this almost complete freedom in how to play Metal Gear Solid V is that many of the main missions have to be made open ended in order for players to feel like they can tackle it in any way they see fit. There are some absolute belters, with mission 12 being a personal highlight but some of the missions around the mid-20s either feel too easy or just feel like they should have honestly been a side op. This has also translated to the game’s boss fights, which pale in comparison to the fights you’ve seen in MGS3 for example. Again, the desire to make missions open and be able to be cleared in hundreds of different ways have forced the team at Kojima Productions to downscale the scripted nature of scenes, so the player has full control. You do have moments like the hospital escape in the prologue which have that intense scripting which has been present in other Metal Gears but it is infrequent.

However, this trade off means that you are the decider on whether a side op or a main mission evolves into an unforgettable scenario, spiralling more often than not by your own actions rather than that of the game’s scripting. It makes you want to retry a mission and see if going loud with a machine gun would result in a better ranking, or if using that new buddy will get you that S Rank. You will want to continually push forward to see what fun you can make for yourself on your next excursion.

Managing Mother Base becomes a rewarding endeavour as you progress through Metal Gear Solid V. There is a great pleasure in returning to your sea fortress to see another platform rising up from the ocean or having your men salute you as you step off the chopper. It is rewarding to see the weapons which you have airlifted back to base appear at strategic points but Mother Base does seem quite lifeless at times. Besides hearing a snatch of repeated conversation, you sometimes feel that the base is locked in stasis, simply waiting for Big Boss to return back home for it to launch into action. If it had more rooms to explore, workmen actually building the site or guards goofing off as you walk around your base, it would seem more alive as an entity. There is also the problem of Mother Base developments reaching a bottleneck by around mission 25. The materials system is currently imbalanced, with Fuel Resources being essential for main developments yet being so hard to come by in large quantities. Fultoning containers full of materials helps but you still then have to wait for them to be processed by your staff on the Base Development platform.

Sometimes, you just want to hit that Phantom Cigar and watch the world go by.

It does seem that the looming spectre of microtransactions and mobile gaming has infected some areas of The Phantom Pain in some ways, seen most notable in the FOB system, platform building and combat ops. You have to wait real time for platforms to be built, certain high level weapons and gadgets to be researched as well as combat ops to be complete by your Combat Team. The main problem is that you can’t simply turn the game off for an hour and come back to see your base built, most developments require you to be playing The Phantom Pain for them to complete, forcing you to go and do more side ops or free roaming until you can access that new pistol or part for D Walker. You will want to go out and do more missions anyway but the persistent existence of timers throughout the latter half of the game just makes you feel like you are doing a hell of a lot of waiting.

As for the FOB system, you practically need more bases to get your Mother Base teams to the top level. You do get the first one free, but if you want to really delve into the PvP invasions of MGSV, you will have to put down some real cash in order to make your base a top military force. The game manufactures a way for you to get rid of many of your low level troops and it does alleviate the mid game staff bottleneck somewhat, but there is an overall feeling that you need to spend extra money on top of your initial £55 purchase if you want to get the most out of your Mother Base, which is a particularly nasty blot on an otherwise stellar game. Unfortunately, the servers have been dropping in and out of service during the course of my time with Metal Gear Solid V so I can’t give you a great assessment of the FOB system but I will update you sometime in the future, probably at the same time Metal Gear Online is released to console players in October.

On the presentation front, the Fox Engine produces some astounding visuals. The dawn light as it comes over the African savannah is breath taking, while the blinding lights of search towers cut through the darkness and add a constant sense of danger to night time infiltration. The sound design is as good, with footsteps squelching as you sneak through a rainstorm and each gun having a feeling of weight and power behind each shot. The soundtrack by Harry Gregson-Williams is up to par with the rest of the series but the licensed music choice for the tapes is ultimately disappointing. The lack of Toto’s Africa is simply unforgivable but PC players can always import their own soundtracks to fill in any gaps and find that perfect helicopter arrival music.

Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain is probably the best open world game I’ve ever played. The sheer number of gameplay possibilities when it comes to completing missions, the addicting feedback loop of infiltrating, Fultoning, researching and building keeps you coming back for another operation and while the story is plagued by the usual Kojima flaws, the personal setpieces that you create can easily override the 7th lecture about nuclear deterrence. Unless Fallout 4 completely knocks it out of the park, this is easily game of the year.