Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain:
Just by sheer playtime alone this is by far and away should be my game of the year.
And yet, i have a hard time admitting it. I have no right saying that i don't like this game having spent 200+ hours in it, and yet i
kinda want to say it.
This is a game that simultaneously shows off all the bests and worsts of what modern videogame developer can do all in one idiosyncratic package.
Graphical and technical tour de force and exploitative free to play practices. Game design mastery and obnoxious late-game grind. Great voice-acting (yes, Kiefer included) and glaringly unfinished and disjointed story. Amazingly directed cutscenes and unsatisfactory ending to 25 year old series.
Phantom Pain picks up amazing Ground Zeroes gameplay and controls and wraps them in open-world skin. This was meant to provide a living evolving ecosystem that you can influence and game somewhat delivers on that, but the biggest impact it makes is this:
Because of how empty the world is, you will be running towards some distant points a LOT. Upgrading Snake so he could run at 4x the speed is basically mandatory. Of course there is a horse and vehicles but both have their downsides of their own.
Breadth of tactical options available to you is astounding. TPP provides easily the most varied gameplay of the series, whether you play lethally or non-lethally, use weapons or helicopter, dispatch soldiers with your bare hands or hold them up -- it's all fair game.
As you get more and more weapons and items you become almost overpowered and that's where the game starts to actively push back. Enemies are setting up landmines, start to wear body armours and shields and are aware that Big Boss is out there kidnapping their comrades.
Buddies make you even more overpowered, especially Quiet and D-Dog. Having a dog around means that you will never ever get caught by an enemy you didn't see because "dog" will automatically marks everyone for you. While Quiet straight up kills dudes and can just kill everyone around if you don't stop her.
As to Quiet, her boss battle is a traditional sniper battle and it's the only good boss battle in the game (out of like two the game has). It's very good though -- you're constantly on your toes hiding and trying to find Quiet constantly changing sniper spots looking all around you with binoculars and listening for her song.
In a good MGS tradition -- there are a TON of ways you approach this, including some absolutely
ludicrous ones.
Because the game is divided into missions and is non-linear you're not forced to do entirely non-lethal playthrough. You can retry mission and basically time travel to relive previous adventure in different way and as a bonus open world design enforces permanency on everything.
Taking out outposts, destroying comm equipment, disrupting power generators and anti-air systems -- this status is kept throughout even if you go back to previous mission and find out that radar that you just destroyed is destroyed there too.
Game is leniently balanced so you can S-ranks even if you kill people. I mostly got S-ranks on my first try and had to retry them only to hit additional in-mission challenges.
Out of these missions "listen to all conversations" type is the most tiresome to get. It's dependant on enemies AI and how they interact with each other. There are a conditions: obviously, both soldiers should be present (so taking them out before conversation is out of the question), conversation might happen during specific time of day and in specific place and oh, sometimes if there has been an alert previously (any alert -- even from across the map) -- conversation isn't gonna happen. And sometimes conversation doesn't happen because the game glitched out or something.
Conversation that are not part of mission objectives are actually nice when they happen. It's cool to see soviet soldiers in Afghanistan portrayed as human beings, like one soldier wanting to come back to see his daughter, another advising his comrade to wear warm sweater to not to catch cold in freezing night shifts and so on.
Spoken russian is occasionally wonky (american accents) but translation is very good.
Sometimes climbing over a rock is kinda janky and interestingly they knew it because one mission optional objective places diamond in a place where you can only get by "skyrim-ing" yourself up a rock.
Story:
First fake ending was pretty bad, it gave no resolution whatsoever, more it actually had the gall to tease what will happen next should you just proceed playing the game further. Compare to Peace Walker which had a very definitive first ending and should you want you could have stopped there.
Bad ending is made worse by the last terrible two missions, first you get story heavy mission with the main villain explaining his nefarious and barely motivated plan in a classic Bond fashion while Snake just silently sits there. And that scene is just so bizarre.
And then "final" boss which is a damage sponge which is impossible to beat unless you grind your rocket launchers or helicopter. Boss' design is very shallow as well -- just keep shooting at it. Grind in advance and then just shoot.
And after that first ending you get post game which is even more underwhelming in terms of content.
Good thing that main gameplay is SO GOOD i don't mind playing it more. And even 50-100 hours i was STILL getting new and new weapons and ways to change up the game in new ways.
Story is a disjointed mess. It's disjointed because of episodic format, and a mess in other ways.
Characters are all weird -- Snake is suddenly a mute, Huey is now a shady mad scientist (think Baxter Stockman), Revolver Ocelot is Ocelot only by name. In every other games Ocelot is a very memorable, cartoony character, outrageous, smarmy, dramatic.
Compare
With THIS guy:
And then the second ending which i didn't even understood and had to listen to podcast to realize the significance of it. And even there i was like: "that's it?".
Post- post- game missions are amazingly even more terrible, especially "A Quiet Exit" which is awful. It requires you to grind but doesn't tell you this. And if you entered this mission without knowing it in advance -- "YOU CAN'T EXIT, SUCKER!". The option to abort the mission is disabled in this mission and this mission alone. I was trying to beat it with what i measly equipment i had for three days, all to no success.
Overall, my favorite missions were Subsistence missions where you are thrown in having nothing -- no weapons, no items, no armour -- no NOTHING and have to get everything on-site. It really forces you to tackle these missions creatively. My solution to the mission where i have to destroy communication equipment was just grabbing a landmine nearby set it up in a room and step on it on purpose destroying comm in the process (just one mine won't kill Snake).
Late game stuff was just me grinding while running around with invisible suit.
Collecting all animals took a long time in particular. By the time i was finished with main content i already had all animals that you can actually encounter in the game, but apparently there are "invisible" enemies that you can only catch with cages left in very specific areas.
It is just so lazy -- it's like a collectible that is not shown on the map, you can't see it in game and there is about 60% chance cage will catch an useless gerbil instead of animal you wanted. They didn't even model these animals -- all you see is 2d picture of what the cage caught.
And then there is online stuff where Konami uses all their dark knowledge of mobile gaming to entice you to pay microtransations by using artificial resources with contrived economy. They even use nukes to encourage you into their online mode.
Overall:
Amazing, great game. Variety in situations and in ways you can tackle game challenges is staggering.
But just like with Peace Walker grinding can get obnoxious. Especially when this grinding is not just used to prolong your game time but also to force your hand to pay real money.
Thank you and curse you, Konami former videogame maker.
Topic: What is the last game you beat? Thoughts/impressions? (Read 637937 times)
