Metal Gear Solid V is a bloody good video game.
There is no denying that, Hideo Kojima has put his life and soul in to what is turning out to be his swansong and it has paid off.
It’s no secret that Metal Gear Solid is a game largely about stealth, however, MGSV has taken a slightly different approach. Whilst it’s still largely stealth focused and will be far more difficult if you went loud, the sheer joy of playing MGSV comes from exactly that decision, you can go loud, you can sneak, you can do whatever you damn well please!
When Hideo Kojima revealed that MGSV would be an open world game where you can do anything you want, I was concerned. this generation has been constant open world games that take far more time than their worth to finish. I was worried that this would be the case but I’ve never been more happy to be wrong. The open world was perfectly executed. During mission, it is restricted to an area eliminating the need to travel ridiculous distances just to get to some of the objectives, looking at you Witcher 3.
Fans of the series will know that Hideo loves a convoluted story with hour long cut-scenes. He’s taken a different approach this time around, minimizing the length of the cut-scenes keeps the game flow nice and smooth and allows you to get back in to the game play as quickly as possible. Aside from these cut-scenes, the game offers the ability to listen to tapes both in the helicopter and out of it, this allows you to find out a little more about the story or find out how Kaz’s burger recipe is going. it’s a nice way to keep invested in the story without the need to stop the game play.
Sadly the story is where the game falls down. I’m a fan of MGS and have been for a very long time. I’d go so far to say that MGS3 may be the greatest game of all time. For those who don’t know the game, it is split in to two chapters. The first chapter is great, 10 out of 10. Perfect! The second chapter, not so much. For some unknown reason the second chapter consists largely of repeats of missions from chapter one, but with a special rule set. For example, one mission has the rule set of total stealth, meaning that if you are spotted at all, you’ve failed the mission.
Hideo Kojima is well known for having certain twists, shocking moments, or moments where everything goes bat-shit crazy, (MGS2) but that moment in MGSV felt like a kick in the teeth. Once that moment was revealed, it felt like I had been lied to for the entirety of the game. I played for 105 hours and that experience was soured by this ‘moment’
Overall MGSV was a brilliant game with near perfect game play however it was let down by a poor second chapter.