Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain Review (XB1)

  The opening of Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain is one of the most memorable and effective scenes I've experienced while playing a video game. Laying helpless in a hospital bed, a cover of David Bowie's “The Man Who Sold the World” plays over a boombox as you slowly gain the ability to survey your surroundings from a first person perspective. Nurses change your intravenous drip and check your vitals, and all you can do is look on through blurry eyes. After vocalizing your discomfort, they realize you are coming to and fetch a doctor, who lays out your dire situation: you have shrapnel lodged in your body, you're missing an arm, and there are probably a lot of enemies looking to finish you off. That last part comes to fruition shortly thereafter as a large military force descends on the hospital, brutally gunning down any and all inhabitants to presumably end your existence. A guardian angel in the bed next to yours acts a guide to safety, shooting you full of a drug to get you (slowly) on your feet and away from the mayhem. A man fully engulfed in fire joins the hunt, stalking you and dispatching your enemies with impunity. He appears to be aided by a child in a gas mask and straight jacket, who can channel his power to make a helicopter-destroying, flaming space whale. The “man on fire” can absorb bullets and take a tank ramming into him full speed, but once the story calls for it an ambulance can pin him against a wall and a couple shotgun blasts send him reeling back. This is Metal Gear, after all... logic takes a back seat, and corny, anime style wins out over solid gameplay and tight controls. And it overstays it's welcome and goes on way too fucking long...

  This elaborate tutorial acts as a microcosm of what awaits you for the next hundred or so hours of the game: you can see something that's right on the cusp of greatness, but seems to revel in covering itself in layers of bullshit and mocking you by completely wasting your time. The Phantom Pain is a whole lot of game. No one can accuse it of having a dearth of content: “Over a hundred hours of playtime!”. “157 side ops and 50 main missions!”. “Base building and resource management!”. “Online multiplayer (a month after launch...)!”. You're not going to waste your $60 if you're just interested in having a checklist of activities to complete. The big question is if any or all of this is any fun to actually do. The answer is no.

  Stealth games rely on creating an atmosphere of unbearable tension to make them worthwhile rather than boring tests of patience, so setting one in an open world seems inadvisable. Metal Gear Solid V is a great example of this. For starters, the “open world” sucks. Hard. You're given not one, but TWO choices of environments to “explore”: a boring desert or a bland jungle. The choice is yours. These landscapes consist of small outposts where enemies patrol (and make you wish you were playing a Far Cry game instead) connected by linear pathways and empty, wasted space in between. There are a few larger set pieces like an airport or base, but none of it seems particularly well crafted or designed for anything other than to plop the player in large, boring areas. You can theoretically move from missions in these wastelands, but it's much easier to just call in a helicopter to pick your next target through menus. I hope you like chopper rides and menus, because that's the bulk of the game... Oh, and those outposts and bases... I hope you like those, too, because you're going to revisit them with some minor changes to rules and enemy make up over and over and over again.

  Missions range from “go here and take these guys out” to... that's about it. Some side ops mix it up a bit by having you disable landmines or tranquilizing and extracting animals, but the optimal route for roughly 90% of the missions is to knock dudes out and fulton them back to your base. The much touted Fulton Recovery System is basically a balloon you attach to enemies, animals, gun emplacements, cargo containers, etc. to extract them from the field and recruit them to work for you. The first couple times you attach the balloon to a sleeping sheep and send him skyward is pretty cute and funny. Around the hundredth or so time it's gotten old. Somewhere around the thousand mark it starts to set in that it's a pretty repetitive and annoying chore, and you more or less have to do it to keep your fucking mess of a convoluted, resource management mini-game that feels like it'd be at home on a free-to-play mobile game in check. Every now and then a unique objective will come through with a boss fight or vague, cryptic “puzzle” to solve, but these are more often than not bullshit. As an example: I was asked to fulton a certain truck out of hostile territory. It was in the middle of a convoy of tanks and APCs, driving to different outposts and picking up support along the way. I scouted and stalked the target, using my snake-like skills to pick off a couple soldiers in open-top vehicles, and setting EMP mines along it's predicted route. Once the mines stopped the convoy I called in some air support, blanketing the area with sleeping gas which laid down much of the problem. I still had two tanks and the target truck to deal with so I threw a trail of smoke grenades in a line, figuring I'd be able to use the cover to get close and balloon the truck away and deal with the tanks later. As I arrived at my destination, the Metal Gear-ness reared it's ugly head as a cutscene kicked in. Now... it wasn't particularly long, but after it played I was facing half a dozen armored enemies that had emerged from the truck, those two tanks, and I was stuck standing out in the open with no cover because my smoke screen had miraculously evaporated due to the cinema. Fuck you.

  The more time I spent with The Phantom Pain, the less I grew to like it. I'm not opposed to long games in the least, but soon after the initial excitement of experimenting with gadgets and strategies wore off (and it didn't take long) it started feeling less like a game and more like a job. The grind in Menu Gear is fucking real as real can be. A typical play session goes something like this: upon booting the game you're forced to button through a half dozen pages of announcements from Konami before even getting to the main menu. Continuing the game will put you in a chopper or at Mother Base. You're immediately harassed with messages popping up about away missions you've sent your forces on. Open your iDroid, clear that shit out, send them out again because you're constantly in need of money and resources. Maybe start some research/building projects while you're there and sort out your personnel (by clicking the right stick to do it automatically because you're not a maniac and don't want to sort through hundreds of stats manually). If you have any cassette tapes you feel like listening to, now's the time to start them up because Mother Base is a dull oil rig that looks like it was pulled out of a PS2 game and had some new textures slapped on top of it. You're going to have to drive for extended periods of time on this flat, barren structure so some shitty '80s music might dull the dullness. Do some shooting practice while you're here because it's easy money (and you need said money), and calling in the chopper to take you to a mission is another waste of time you aren't looking forward to sitting through. Maybe poke around to see if you can trigger a cutscence, because the game can't seriously be wasting your time like this, can it? Alright... call the chopper and get in... “Flight of the Valkyries” sure was novel as an entrance song a dozen hours ago... Sit through over a minute of flight, a load screen... now open the iDroid again. Flick through that shit some more, pick a mission, some more menus to pick your loadout, your buddy's loadout, your chopper's loadout... another load screen... more sitting in the chopper as it drops you off... Get out. Now open the iDroid again... Fuck... What cookie cutter bullshit was I doing again? Unlike most games of this length, at no point did I feel anything close to immersion; it's going to take a hundred hours, and I felt every painstaking second of it. The only real driving force to slog on is the promise of an end at some point, preying on your latent OCD and need to complete the game to stoke your gamer pride. I had more than a few moments of existential crisis when I thought, “Are games honestly just a complete fucking waste of time? I could have sworn they were fun and brought me joy at some point.”

  The biggest surprise I had with Metal Gear Solid V was the story and cinematics amazingly ended up being the best part of the experience. I've been an outspoken critic of the series in the past, expressing my frustration that the core gameplay always took a backseat to the nonsensical plot. The Phantom Pain is an honest to goodness Video Game (just not a good one), and as it turns out maybe focusing on the story was for the best. Snake's tale of revenge is legitimately compelling. All the bullshit base building and fultoning recruits serves a narrative purpose as you build an army to take on the stupidly named but fun to watch villain Skullface, who is the leader of the opposing forces and was behind the attack that left you scarred and an arm short (as detailed in the complete ripoff prequel/demo Ground Zeroes). Your path to him weaves in some truly creative and thought-provoking ideas, mainly the concept of using language as a subjugator. This is manifested as a physical virus that is spread through spoken words in the game; not exactly subtle, but effective. You team up with a rouge's gallery of allies, including the initially mysterious and badass female sniper, Quiet. She pegs a jet pilot with a bullet in a scene reminiscent of the original Soldier of Fortune, so that was cool. The main plot line culminates in a fight against a titular giant robot and getting some sweet, earned payback on Skullface by brutally relieving him of some body parts. It was satisfying, uncharacteristically coherent, and I while I was still more than a little sore at the poor, clunky gameplay and lack of respect for my time as a human being, I was borderline on whether I could classify this a good narrative experience that actually would have made a good movie once the credits started rolling. Then I was shown a “Next Time On...” stinger and a title card was shown, promising a Chapter 2...

  Fuck Chapter 2. Any goodwill the game earned from Chapter 1 is unceremoniously dribbled down it's ass cheeks in a flood of unchecked shit. I was already so sick of the repetition and reused content I'd been subjected to at that point that I was honestly shocked the game was capable of outdoing itself on that front. All those areas you were bored of revisiting? Do more of that. Even better, those main missions that were a cunthair different than those? Do the exact...same... fucking shit again. Only for a kicker: they're going to be “harder”. By that I mean they take away many of the concessions that made the game mindlessly easy like the “Oh Shit Button”, time stopping Reflex feature is gone, and that old school “get seen and it's mission failed”  stealth game bullshit hack trope is back. Re-fight those bosses, but this time they'll have ridiculous amounts of heath, so you can run around a building in circles like a retard and shoot rockets at them for half an hour. One hit from the enemy and you'll usually be starting over. Have fun... Fuck you. This isn't a difficulty curve increase, it's a fucking drop off a cliff that exposes the mountain of bullshit that is the main loop of this game: AI is inconsistent and has a tendency to just up and break. Yeah, it's hilarious when it breaks in your favor and there's a string of six idiots walking in a bee line letting you walk right up and choke them out like cartoon characters, or a soldier in a walker that thinks the best patrol route is staring at a wall for time immemorial, but it's certainly a fucking pain in the goddamn ass when they spot you when they shouldn't or rush like a troupe of actors late for the shoot right toward your position. Or when D-Dog says, “You didn't want me to mark THAT guy, did you? Because I decided not to. Oh, he saw you and now you wasted forty five minutes of your life? Whoopsy daisy.” These “extreme” missions ask a level of precision of the player the game is completely incapable of allowing in a manner that is any way fun and not complete D-Horse shit.

  Even the story beats in Chapter 2 are garbage, devolving into the Metal Gear nonsense about twins, clones, boring military double crosses I don't care about, and even a Travolta/Cage Face/Off “twist ending” that is ultimately unimpressive and retarded. I liked Quiet as a character up to that point, and they ruin it in anime, melodramatic, illogical fashion. And that opening scene that was the best part of the game? They even manage to drag their dirty asses on that, leaving a shockingly deep shit stain. You're forced to play that opening (in it's entirety) again, the only difference being small reveals that could have easily been contained in a few, minute-long flashbacks... Going through the second time around, in a game built on repetition and re-used assets, just kills any lasting impact it had in your naive memory when you started. Then we're treated to the true stinger; pages and pages of dates, names, events, organizations, some stupid voice-over about loyalty and more double crossing... Just fuck off. This might be fan service, but I'm not a fan of this series exactly because of disappointing, overwrought bullshit like this. What a fucking waste.

  I feel like I've spent way too much time writing this as is (the game already stole so much of my time already), but I'll just mention the online components briefly. Metal Gear Online isn't good. It feels tacked on and it's boring. There's more gadgets and shit to grind for... but again, enough already. I'll just go play a better game that's actually fun. There's also the option to “invade” other player's bases and steal their resources and personnel, but fuck that too. I tried it a couple times, but it's boring and being at your own Mother Base is a time sink already, and this causes more messages to flood your screen and more menu management for you to fuck with. Nope.

  Metal Gear  Solid V: The Phantom Pain could have been a good game, it just needed to focus down (way down...) and ditch the useless open world and recycled content. It desperately needed an editor. What we got instead is a test of patience (not in a good way) and a complete mess. If you're just head over heels in love with mindless grinding, think working with spreadsheets is a blast, and can look past clunky controls and a second half that completely shits the bed in every way possible, you might be able to enjoy the first act's intriguing story and ignore the multitude of glaring flaws in the rest of the game. I can't. What a waste of time.