A Shining Diamond Rough at the Edges
This is the larger part of the cake. MGSV:TPP is said to be 200 times larger than MGSV:GZ. The Phantom Pain is the last Metal Gear game made by Hideo Kojima and Kojima Productions. This is an expensive game to make and costs around 80 million dollars. By playing this game, I can say that Kojima Productions used the game development budget well. This game probably completes the whole Metal Gear Solid saga.
STORY
9 years after the Peace Walker incident and Ground Zeroes mission, Snake wakes up from a coma in a hospital in Cyprus where he's hidden. Weeks after, the hospital was attacked by an unknown group of soldiers, killing everyone in sight just to kill Snake. During his escape with the help of Ishmael, they were attacked by 2 mysterious enemies that have supernatural powers. They managed to escape the massacre but they ended up crashing their vehicle. Later Snake was rescued by Ocelot and gave him a mission to rescue Kazuhira Miller and rebuild his army.
The game give lots of backstory from the past games by hearing conversations from your Mother Base staff members that's patrolling around the base so newcomers to this game series will be put up to speed. Cassette tapes also gives a lot of backstory in a creative way, it's not boring to listen to these tapes.
The game's story is episodic. One main mission is equivalent to one episode. It's like you're watching a T.V. series complete with opening and closing credits. The game have 50 main missions and some of them are recycled but harder. The harder missions have [EXTREME], [SUBSISTENCE] and/or [TOTAL STEALTH] texts first then the name of the actual mission.
GAMEPLAY
MGSV:TPP is a huge open world game, it's colossal in scale than mGSV:GZ. It also features day/night cycle and dynamic weather that affects your overall mission, vision and hearing. Enemies are also affected by these features.
The game have huge open world locations: Afghanistan, Africa and the Mother Base. To travel around the map faster, you'll need a vehicle or your trusty steed. There are other methods for fast travel too. Enemy outposts are built around the two maps. They can be small like road check points or huge like villages or bases. You'll need the binoculars to scout the area and automatically mark the targets that you see.
Diamonds, processed materials and medicinal plants are scattered around the map. You can collect and spend them if you want to expand your Mother Base and create new weapons. As you deploy and use your items/weapons during your mission, you're spending Mother Base resources like GMP (money/diamonds) and medicinal plants (for your Phantom Cigar and tranquilizer guns)
If you played MGSV:GZ, you will be familiar with the basic controls of the game. Like I said in my MGSV:GZ review, the game have new weapon/item selection interface and Snake have new moves. These moves include: quick diving, sprinting, obstacle mantling/scaling and gap jumping.
The A.I. is more unpredictable than in MGS:GZ because of the day/night cycle that changes their patrol patterns. Random patrols/inspection team/backup also arive even after you captured the enemy outpost. The A.I. have better senses, they can see you and hear your gunshots even when you're very far away. Sometimes the A.I. have poor peripheral vision and they can also be stupid.
Sneaking past the guards is difficult and requires strategy, so better use those binoculars. If a guard see you he might call another available guard to help him search for you.
Reflex mode will trigger if you got spotted by the enemy. Time will slow down for a short time so that you can react and take down the one that spotted you and prevent the combat alert phase. If you're hardcore enough, you can disable this feature.
Gun fights are intense. Enemies take cover if you're aiming/shooting at them. They will flank and flush you out from your hiding spot. Enemies will use mortars and other weapon emplacements just to eliminate you. Adding intensity to the gun fight is that some objects that serves as your cover are destructible. The bullet physics also makes things a bit more difficult, still it's fun and challenging.
To compensate for the higher difficulty, Venom Snake have regenerating health but in case that he got injured or severely wounded, he can't regenerate and will have very poor performance in his mission. You need to take cover and cure him by pressing the action button (Triangle).
The game learns from your gameplay and makes the game harder. For example: if you shoot enemies often in the head, they will wear helmets later and if you use fulton too much, the enemies will shoot the fulton balloon preventing the extraction. You can prevent this by sending your combat unit in sabotage/ambush missions (Combat Deployment).
CQC mechanic is just the same as MGS:Peace Walker. You can CQC combo by slamming down one enemy first then tap R1 if you see a prompt to slam down another enemy near you. You can also interrogate enemies by grabbing them or by holding them up, you can't frisk them for items though.
MGSV:TPP have a buddy system that helps Venom Snake on the mission. There are 4 buddies with different equipment, skills and specialties. These buddies are: D-Horse (faster world traversing), D-Dog (Spots/attacks enemies, animals and medicinal plants), D-Walker (faster world traversing, mini customizable tank/Metal Gear Mk.2 on steroids) and Quiet (Sniper, scout, spots enemies and kills them from a distance). You can only pick one to join you on the field.
MGS:Peace Walker's Mother Base mechanic makes a return and it's improved. If you played Peace Walker, you'll be familiar with staff recruitment and base micro-management, like assigning staff members, developing weapons and deploying combat units. You manage your base by using your iDroid. Staff assignements are done automatically meaning staff management is optional. You can roam around your Mother Base, see its progress and raise the morale of your staff.
You can take a shower at the Mother Base if you got bloody and/or stinky. Blood affects your camouflage and your smell, making the enemies spot you easily. Hiding inside the dumpster for too long or not taking a shower for days will obviously make you stinky.
iDroid by the way also serves as your map. You can also request air support or supply drops if you're having trouble neutralizing enemies or if you ran out of bullets and items. With this device, you are the boss.
Developing weapons take real world time to develop and looks inspired by the free to play mobile game model where every weapon upgrade of takes more time to develop from minutes to hours. Same for the Combat Deployment, you'll have to wait for your unit to come back because their missions might last for minutes, hours or days in real time.
There are other mechanics in the game that are unlockable after completing a certain mission, like gun customization. Gun customization lets you customize your weapons by attaching/mixing better parts, add-ons and applying color, making your very own unique weapon.
Forward Operating Bases (FOBs) is the in-game multiplayer mode of MGSV:TPP. FOBs are extensions of your main Mother Base. The difference is that other players can intrude your FOB(s). You can increase the security of your FOB by developing equipment for your Security Team and increasing their alertness by spending GMP. Developing security devices gives the invaders a hard time infiltraing your FOB. You can also intrude an enemy FOB to extract soldiers/resources and go the the core of the strut. You're timed during your intrusion so go and finish the FOB missions ASAP.
My problem in FOBs is that the online servers are currently unstable (at the time of this review). One time, someone infiltrated my base and I want to stop the infiltrator myself, but I got disconnected as soon as I stepped on my FOB, spending my deployment GMP for nothing and lessen the chance of winning the FOB defense.
GRAPHICS
The game looks great on PS4, Xbox One and PC (high-spec). Fox Engine renders photorealistic quality graphics and effects. It sucks you in the world of MGSV, it feels like you're actually there.
Even though this game is huge and sports more graphical detail than MGSV:GZ, the Xbox 360 and PS3 (the one that I'm using) can run MGSV:TPP pretty well at 30-20FPS with less graphical texture detail and effects.
MUSIC/AUDIO
Voice acting is great. The characters have more serious tone and dialogue than in Peace Walker. Codec dialogues are short though and the soldiers doesn't speak their line while being interrogated, they just grunt in fear.
Venom Snake doesn't talk too much in this game, he's part silent protagonist and will only speak briefly during cutscenes. Sutherland's Snake sounds really cool and natural now. Troy Baker, the swiss knife of voice acting, is Revolver Ocelot's voice actor. Troy Baker's voice is a nice transition from young Ocelot (MGS3), adult Revolver Ocelot (MGSV) to old Liquid Ocelot (MGS, MGS2, MGS4).
Most of the conversations can be heard by playing cassette tapes you obtained after clearing a mission. This makes up for the lack of long cutscenes, it's effective but very lazy.
The guns sounds great, even better when you're in combat, you'll feel the rush of being a one-man-army fighting an entire unit with tanks, choppers and gun emplacements.
There are liscenced tracks from the 80's in the game. To listen to them on your iDroid, you must pick up first a cassette tape containing one song.
REPLAY VALUE
This will eat up most of your time, because MGS:TPP is a huge game with lots of missions, side ops, unlockables and in-game collectibles. FOB infiltration and defense increases the replay value of the game.
If you want to punish yourself more, the [SUBSISTENCE], [EXTREME] and [TOTAL STEALTH] versions of some of the story missions are unlocked that disables the Reflex Mode, Chicken Hat, Buddies and/or equipment (On-Site Procurement mode).
CLOSING REMARKS
Metal Gear Solid V: The Phatom Pain is the greatest Metal Gear game (gameplay-wise) made by Hideo Kojima and officially his swan song to one of the greatest and longest running game series of all time. This also almost closes the gap on the game's lore and history. This is what MGS:Peace Walker should have been if it's developed for home consoles. Gameplay is great, the open world map layout isn't boring. Easy controls and adapting difficulty makes the game fun and challenging. The game looks beautiful. To all Metal Gear fans and newcomers to the series, play this game, it's really good and probably deserves its high rating in the mainstream game reviews. To me game's not perfect and have flaws like random floating objects or sometimes the target didn't spawn during a Side Op mission. The game had a game-breaking glitch that involves Quiet (this has been fixed).
Here's an MGSV:TPP related post that focuses about the imperfections of this game.
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