First Impression: Metal Gear Solid V – The Phantom Pain
There’s one metric fuck-ton of game here. I measured.
After an excrutiating intro level that ends with an invincible boss, a QTE, and a scripted vehicle scene – you know, a checklist of what not to do with gameplay – the video game proper begins. Revolver Ocelot drops Snake, sorry Big Boss, into a literal desert and tells him to have fun. And it is a lot of fun.
If you played Ground Zeroes the gameplay will be familiar to you. If you haven’t, spoiler: it’s great gameplay. Stealth and shooting mechanics are the most fluid and polished they’ve ever been. There’s some very videogamey collecting that goes on in the overworld and while I was worried about an “open-world” espionage game, it works. Objectives are clear-cut and accessible and mission areas don’t suffer from that generic design thing that usually accompanies a sandbox. While I do have a favorable opinion of the open-world here, I did find myself missing the more focused corridors and ventilation shafts of Shadow Moses and Big Shell. If I dwell on it too long I might start to think of the open-world as a negative here. I mean why would anyway take away the deliberate dose of claustrophobia in an espionage game and replace it with tan, chest-high walls and rocks as far as the eye can see?
But I digress…
The real success of The Phantom Pain is that it tries to do a lot of different things with the gameplay and succeeds at all of them. Barring the generic desert scenery at the beginning (which gives you an excuse to phone it in on color palette and diversity of terrain) nearly every aspect is executed well from guns, to stealth, to real-time day/night mechanics (which you can alter by smoking a drug-laced cigar; nice touch). Even the car controls are good and responsive. The horse mechanics are shit. Your equine vehicle wants to leap over every single obstacle from a small pebble to an alpaca. It’s not horrible since the alternative would be getting stuck or clipping and since every game fails at horses, I’ll give them a pass here.
The only real negative thing I have to say about the gameplay is that the CQC is very sluggish and Big Boss has very “short limbs” – it’s very, very close combat. Then again, if you’re not choking people out or sniping them from afar, you’re playing the game wrong.
All that said I have one very big issue with the game so far and that is the intro but that’s diatribe I’ve decided to relegate to its own future post.
As for story? There’s really not enough of it to talk about so far. Wait for the full review. Overall? Good game so far but the potential is there to go either way. If the story phones it in or it’s just tan palette desert horse racer forever, I’m not going to be very happy.