Platform: PC
Price paid: £24.97
It was definitely made by Kojima. This might just be my favourite game of all time and the ultimate Metal Gear Solid experience. It isn't perfect and it isn't Snake Eater (which is damn near perfect) but it's the most advanced and polished one with just a few snags that Snake Eater managed to avoid. I spent 78 hours across 5 months with the game and I enjoyed almost every second of it.
Phantom Pain combines some of my favourite features of the previous games in the series, including Peace Walker's mother base and Fulton recovery. There's something really enjoyable about hunting staff for your imaginary military nation. Stalking larger bases at night-time searching of soldiers worthy of joining the ever-growing and ever-improving Soltaires Sans Frontiers makes for great fun as your arsenal of non-lethal weapons grows more effective and more extravagant with each capture. You start off with just a simple tranquliser pistol and Big Boss' Close Quarters Combat abilities but before long you're wielding non-lethal shotguns, riot SMGs and even tranq sniper rifles in the effective and rocket and tazer arms in the extravagant bracket. The arsenal extends to explosive, stun and sleep grenades and mines as well as EMP ones letting you set all manner of traps and the new Reflex Mode lets you react quickly to a guard discovering you. This new addition accounts for Big Boss' superhuman reflexes and gives you a five second or so window in slow-motion to down a guard who has just discovered you before he alarms his companions. All of these together allow for (at least) two very different approaches: the slow and the gung-ho.
When playing the slow approach, I found that a good, hour-and-a-half long session could be centred entirely around doing a single Side Op or conquering just a few camps. I'd creep up to a camp on the way to my objective and observe it from afar watching for the guards' patrol routes, taking notes of where they meet and what's in their view at any given point while marking them and making a note of an order I'd like to concuss them in. The safest method was a silenced tranq sniper followed by running over and taking the unconscious body far from view before extracting the soldier via Fulton recovery. The most enjoyable method was planting numerous mines and C4 leaving one or two guards to be sniped off at the end and using the C4 to lead guards into the mines. Time-consuming and risky as it was, it was a thing of beauty the two times I pulled it off right. The fast approach was a lot more Jack Bauer: simply jump into the throngs of enemies and quickly off them using the pistol and CQC with the help of Reflex Mode. Now, when this method backfires, it almost guaranties death, whereas with the slow method you're entrenched and are just facing a shootout. I found both methods to be equally valid and more or less useful depending on circumstance; there's utterly no need to set traps on a camp of four and absolutely no way I could conquer a base of thirty rushing in.
The game's perfect for when you have a couple of hours free and wanna take a stroll through war-torn Afghanistan, the 80s variant. When you wanna get a few side ops or a chapter done between dinner-time and bed-Time, though, you soon realise you're being subjected to Kojima-time. A lot less time is sacrificed towards cut-scenes in Kojima's endless audition as a Jollywood director/producer but that time is sacrificed in other, more frustrating, ways. MGS is open world now and with that comes the necessity of travel and fast-travel. Travel is bleeding awesome: you get given a tireless horse to start with and even without the horse at hand, Big Boss can sprint at an inhuman speed indefinitely without so much as panting. Must be all the tai-chi he does on the weekends. You get all sorts of vehicles as time goes on too: jeeps, trucks, bipedals. The driving is about what you'd expect from a Steal&Drive title ala Saints Row about a decade ago but it's serviceable enough and truly not necessary; in all honesty I Fulton recovered almost every vehicle I came across and only drove three times outside of the mission where it's mandatory.
Then there's the fast-travel (and fast it certainly is not). To move great distances across the map the player has to use the Mother Base helicopter piloted by Pequod which only allows travel between the safe landing zones scattered around the map. Now, I get the idea behind these - it's two war-torn areas in Africa, littered with enemy bases and Big Boss is all about stealth and picking off whole units on his own. Regardless of that, I still think the safe zones are too scattered, especially on the way out. It would've made sense to have landing zones far from the target on the way in but having a lot more escape routes once you clear the enemy bases - it's a helicopter, for goodness sake, not an Imperial Destroyer! Once you do finish your great pilgrimage to the promised 'copter you're rewarded with about 4 seconds waiting for lift-off, another 4-5 manning the cannons and enjoying the view and then. Loading screen before being transported to the interior of the helicopter (which is also the main menu background). Now, if you're trying to travel quickly between two points on the map, couple all that with another loading screen, another short sequence enjoying the view before being able to jump out (apparently Big Boss skimped out on parachutes) and crack on with the mission. All in all, moving from A to B in this manner costs about a minute and that's accounting for the loading screens only taking 3 seconds each. It's laborious and slow and breaks up the rhythm of the game in all the wrong ways, pretty much why it's taken me 5 months to get through 78 hours of it. Having to "fast-travel" more than twice in a day was painful, I was reminded of public transport too much, and twice a day is quite enough of that, thank you. I do completely appreciate why it's been done the way it has and Kojima is a true artist. The scenes of Big Boss approaching a low-flying helicopter and covering his face from the dust it kicks up, then climbing on and looking visibly relieved never fails to marvel a little; but seeing it ten times might've been enough. You might be thinking, "How can you dedicate your longest paragraph so far just to fast-travel?" But I dedicated a whole article to audio logs. Fast-travel was invented as a means for saving players' time, cutting out the boring part or at least giving them the option to get from A to B to C to Z instantaneously (bar loading screens). Here the process takes about a minute and a half each time, travel about 40 times and you've wasted an hour just on the faffing about with the awkward system. Now, think that you've fast-travelled for each of, say, 50 main missions and 72 side ops: you've "fast-travelled" 122 times, using up 183 minutes. Three hours and three minutes spent purely on seeing the same animations and the same loading screens that could've been spent dropping guards from high points on top of other guards to knock them out.
Time, then. I've already mentioned the two hours dedicated to audio logs and three hours dedicated to fast travel, I also have to account for Steam Time. I often left the game paused and had food or went to use the loo, I even left it on overnight a couple of times waiting for Combat Deployment missions to finish. All in all, I think (probably rounding down a lot again) about 15 hours of my playing time were idle. Therefore 78-15-3-2=58 hours of actual gameplay. That's more gameplay hours than the original three altogether including cut scenes (10+12+15=37) and narrowly less gameplay hours than all hours in the original four games (37+24=61). So you definitely get a lot of shooty bang-bang for your buck, even if a lot of it isn't much else than shooty bang-bang. At £50 full price, that's just under a pound per hour's play which is pretty decent in and of itself but more importantly, I never once grew tired of it or got bored with it even if some later missions caused frustration so I suppose we could chalk that one up as 58 quality hours. Even if they are surrounded by 20 hours of Boris Johnson grade faff.
The base management element from Peace Walker is a fitting addition here and expands on the old. Big Boss gives his Militaires Sans Frontier another go and this time you can even go sight-seeing. It's still not terribly deep though and I've not really seen any effects from languages spoken or quirks like troublemaker and peacemaker. As you progress through the game you literally expand your base until you need cars to get around it efficiently. Different deparments do different useful things and they all justify the non-lethal route where you capture your enemies instead of blowing their brains out. The only paradox in all this was that upgrading my R&D team rewarded me with ever deadlier assault and sniper rifles and rocket and grenade launchers. Getting around the base is a bit of a joke and this being a Hideo Game it may well be a deliberate one. Whenever the game required me to reach the top of some tower back in Mother Base it wouldn't be as simple as climbing a few flights of stairs. Instead, I always found myself climbing pipes and leaping between platforms in what I suspect is physical commentary on 'gaminess'. See, most games (Assassin's Creed ilk) will have you literally jumping through virtual hoops to get places and as ridiculous as that is, we just go with it. It could also mean that MB is doomed due to bad design, or that the work is never complete on it and we are traversing a building site. I've probably given this a lot more thought than I need to but Kojima is known for doing crazy hipster bullshit for his artistic vision and I think Mother Base is no exception.
Kojima's artistry manifests in the most interesting ways. We all know he's an over-writer by nature and his dialogue tends to be overbearing but I found that to not be the case in Phantom Pain. Instead, he manages to create an atmosphere that's consuming and a character whose sole trait seems to be heroism. When I first played Ground Zeroes and saw the amount of names accredited with 'lighting' I laughed; I must admit I laugh no more. The use of light in the two MGS V games is masterful and pleasing. Glare dances on the screen like a magician's glamorous assistant and there are a few pivotal scenes where a quick blinding flash truly opens yours eyes. The dark is gritty and groggy and the light is focused and fresh; when the two play together we're treated to a dynamic visual relationship that accents many scenes perfectly.
Kojima continues his habit of mixing realism with the fantastic here. Some fantastical things are typical video game conveniences like health regeneration and infinite stamina, dead-eye accuracy with all weapons, near sighted and hard of hearing guards, vehicles that never run out of petrol or acquire mechanical faults (well, except for blowing up), head shots being 100% fatal, tranquiliser darts working more effectively if the target is shot in the face, guards dropping from 20-foot-tall towers unharmed but unconscious, all recovered soldiers eventually agreeing to work for Big Boss, and obviously respawning and retrying. These exist to make games playable, our minds do a decent job of ignoring their downright ridiculousness. But then there are the ridiculous things that fail to serve such purpose. Some fall within reason, since MGS is effectively science fiction, like Huey's robot legs and Skull Face's skull face. Others are, well, inexplicable, like Quiet's get up and Eli's Londoner accent.
The plot of the game is a topic all of its own: we could go on for pages and hours about how well the retcon works and what the game is ultimately about but in this review I just want to discuss how the gameplay marries up with the plot. There will be no obvious spoilers but I will be including heavy, bipedal hints. So, now that we're in gear, let's start at the beginning. The first mission stands far out from the rest and feels most akin to the original trilogy: Big Boss (and we with him) is thrown straight into the action with little preparation and no equipment, and is tasked with saving the world (or at least himself, for now). We're introduced to Punished Snake, Big Boss' latest incarnation, skinny, scared and just barely crawling. After this short infancy, Snake starts slowly limping and eventually expertly sneaking around and headshotting the baddies in his maturity before being rescued by a mysterious friend and the game beginning proper. As tutorials go, this is one of the most exciting, fullfilling and justifiable within its own universe. It serves to set up within our minds just how important Big Boss is in this universe: there's a small private army and basically a demon coming to kill him and willing to level a hospital in the process. All missions after that are carried out from the New Mother Base with the help of Ocelot, Miller and Big Boss' private army. As the game goes on and Mother Base expands we're witness to a growing Big Brother-esque propaganda surrounding Big Boss. MB soldiers are excited to be manhandled by Big Boss and put up no resistance and there are numerous posters with his likeness and the slogan "Big Boss is watching you!" Depending on how you play then, you might see Big Boss' transformation into a despot or the slow process of him being painted as one. Pertaining to your moral choices (whether to kill or not to kill) Big Boss' shrapnel horn grows or shrinks in a hidden karma system. Personally, I went non-lethal for most of the game and my horn was tiny throughout the game so the ending cut-scene was all the more poignant for me, especially with Punished Snake now being out of my hands. I also didn't bother naming Punished Snake anything other than Big Boss so one of the big naming twists near the end was lost on me, again (MGS 2 blindsided me also).
Snake faces off against supernatural enemies again, including walking corpses, a burning, walking corpse, ghosts, the ghost of a swimsuit model and an adolescent androgynous cosplayer. Since the game is set in the 80s, these can't be explained away with secret advanced tech so instead they're explained away with secret advanced bio-tech. This aspect of the story is like Swiss cheese: full of holes and stinks but still somehow enjoyable. I guess a lot of the enjoyment is owed to that characteristic Japanese quirk that the likes of Deadly Premonition or Resident Evil also enjoy. Whole portions of MGS V play like a survival horror, especially early encounters with the Skulls. Even later on, when Snake has adequately powerful grenade launchers to deal with the beasts, the encounters are tense and unsettling but some of that is owed to their bullet-sponge (or even grenade-sponge) nature. Unfortunately, only the Sniper Skulls are enjoyable enemies; all the other Skulls break up the gameplay and turn it on its head more than tank or helicopter encounters do. The Skulls' source of power is also the vehicle for majority of the plot - parasites. I have no idea how parasites turn certain people superhuman but they do. They also infect and kill based on the language a person speaks and feature in a mid-game challenge which manages to raise the stakes, drive the danger home and make it personal. Mother Base suffers an outbreak and the soldiers you've been collecting are starting to get sick and die. Effectively this means that some of them are quarantined and die slowly until you finish enough plot missions to find a cure. Who gets infected seems mostly random and you can suffer some immense losses - I lost a fair share of my best Intel staff.
Phantom Pain is the most complete Metal Gear Solid experience but not the most gratifying one. It has virtually everything the other games before it had and improves on many mechanics but the more I continue to think about it the colder my heart gets. It could be the circus surrounding it. It could be the fact nothing can ever live up to Snake Eater expectations. I like the final twist and see it as Kojima's thank you note to the fans who helped make Snake the hero he is. I think this is Kojima's greatest work and yet not his masterpiece. I suppose Phantom Pain is the greatest subtitle the game could have had partly since there'll be a void left after the franchise leaves and partly because something is unmistakably missing from this latest iteration.
Metal Gear Solid V: the Phantom Pain is: watching your second favourite pet perfectly replicate your favourite pet's favourite trick/10
The game's perfect for when you have a couple of hours free and wanna take a stroll through war-torn Afghanistan, the 80s variant. When you wanna get a few side ops or a chapter done between dinner-time and bed-Time, though, you soon realise you're being subjected to Kojima-time. A lot less time is sacrificed towards cut-scenes in Kojima's endless audition as a Jollywood director/producer but that time is sacrificed in other, more frustrating, ways. MGS is open world now and with that comes the necessity of travel and fast-travel. Travel is bleeding awesome: you get given a tireless horse to start with and even without the horse at hand, Big Boss can sprint at an inhuman speed indefinitely without so much as panting. Must be all the tai-chi he does on the weekends. You get all sorts of vehicles as time goes on too: jeeps, trucks, bipedals. The driving is about what you'd expect from a Steal&Drive title ala Saints Row about a decade ago but it's serviceable enough and truly not necessary; in all honesty I Fulton recovered almost every vehicle I came across and only drove three times outside of the mission where it's mandatory.
The plot of the game is a topic all of its own: we could go on for pages and hours about how well the retcon works and what the game is ultimately about but in this review I just want to discuss how the gameplay marries up with the plot. There will be no obvious spoilers but I will be including heavy, bipedal hints. So, now that we're in gear, let's start at the beginning. The first mission stands far out from the rest and feels most akin to the original trilogy: Big Boss (and we with him) is thrown straight into the action with little preparation and no equipment, and is tasked with saving the world (or at least himself, for now). We're introduced to Punished Snake, Big Boss' latest incarnation, skinny, scared and just barely crawling. After this short infancy, Snake starts slowly limping and eventually expertly sneaking around and headshotting the baddies in his maturity before being rescued by a mysterious friend and the game beginning proper. As tutorials go, this is one of the most exciting, fullfilling and justifiable within its own universe. It serves to set up within our minds just how important Big Boss is in this universe: there's a small private army and basically a demon coming to kill him and willing to level a hospital in the process. All missions after that are carried out from the New Mother Base with the help of Ocelot, Miller and Big Boss' private army. As the game goes on and Mother Base expands we're witness to a growing Big Brother-esque propaganda surrounding Big Boss. MB soldiers are excited to be manhandled by Big Boss and put up no resistance and there are numerous posters with his likeness and the slogan "Big Boss is watching you!" Depending on how you play then, you might see Big Boss' transformation into a despot or the slow process of him being painted as one. Pertaining to your moral choices (whether to kill or not to kill) Big Boss' shrapnel horn grows or shrinks in a hidden karma system. Personally, I went non-lethal for most of the game and my horn was tiny throughout the game so the ending cut-scene was all the more poignant for me, especially with Punished Snake now being out of my hands. I also didn't bother naming Punished Snake anything other than Big Boss so one of the big naming twists near the end was lost on me, again (MGS 2 blindsided me also).
Snake faces off against supernatural enemies again, including walking corpses, a burning, walking corpse, ghosts, the ghost of a swimsuit model and an adolescent androgynous cosplayer. Since the game is set in the 80s, these can't be explained away with secret advanced tech so instead they're explained away with secret advanced bio-tech. This aspect of the story is like Swiss cheese: full of holes and stinks but still somehow enjoyable. I guess a lot of the enjoyment is owed to that characteristic Japanese quirk that the likes of Deadly Premonition or Resident Evil also enjoy. Whole portions of MGS V play like a survival horror, especially early encounters with the Skulls. Even later on, when Snake has adequately powerful grenade launchers to deal with the beasts, the encounters are tense and unsettling but some of that is owed to their bullet-sponge (or even grenade-sponge) nature. Unfortunately, only the Sniper Skulls are enjoyable enemies; all the other Skulls break up the gameplay and turn it on its head more than tank or helicopter encounters do. The Skulls' source of power is also the vehicle for majority of the plot - parasites. I have no idea how parasites turn certain people superhuman but they do. They also infect and kill based on the language a person speaks and feature in a mid-game challenge which manages to raise the stakes, drive the danger home and make it personal. Mother Base suffers an outbreak and the soldiers you've been collecting are starting to get sick and die. Effectively this means that some of them are quarantined and die slowly until you finish enough plot missions to find a cure. Who gets infected seems mostly random and you can suffer some immense losses - I lost a fair share of my best Intel staff.
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