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Not having kept abreast of the series characters, I wasn’t certain at some points if I was playing a Metal Gear Solid game or a Silent Hill game. From being pursued by a flaming behemoth of a character with a floating Psycho kid with a gas mask in tow, to a flaming whale?! I kid you not – a flaming whale makes an appearance! I remember Metal Gear having a slightly eccentric feel to it, but this was outright mental.
I was aware of how the series had aged Snake at some point. I’m not a fan of such matters in games or comic – for example, I’d never want to play a Tomb Raider game with A 70-year-old Lara Croft. Gravity and varicose veins come to mind, and I was distraught to see my boyhood hero Judge Dredd evolve into the old Dead man character. The Snake is no longer the healthy looking young man he was in Metal Gear Solid on the PS One but he’s not a decrepit geriatric either. He’s as agile as he was back then. Yes, years of action now see him lacking a lower arm and he has a large chunk of shrapnel protruding from his forehead, which cannot be removed as it imbedded itself in his brain. This shrapnel gives him the appearance of a demon as it rather looks like a horn. He reminds me of one of the many lower demons you would see in the old Monkey Magic TV series. I suppose if you have seen as many combat operations as he has you can’t expect to just have a couple of grizzly scars as a war veteran would in a Hollywood movie.
I’ve digressed. Anyway, back to the game. After having made your escape – which saw you escaping more traditional foes in the form or armed soldiers also involved avoiding raining fire engines to being chased on horse, by the flaming behemoth on a flaming horse. It’s not all fantasy, though. During certain combat you can sustain injuries that will have a bearing upon your combat effectiveness. For example, if you dislocate a knee, you won’t be able to sprint. The same works for drawing a gun with an injured arm. Take too many hits to the torso and you will need a first aid kit. You need to head for cover to take time to reset dislocations or apply first aid. The game subtly guides you through these situations early on along with basic controls. Pressing the touch pad on the PS4 will bring up further insight on how to take cover if you desire. The hospital is effectively training delivered on the fly for the basic movement and the like, which is less obtrusive and good for those who just desire to get going with the game.
Once free of the hospital, the game begins proper and you are cast into an open world sandbox type game with missions across the regions of Afghanistan and Africa.
The action still involves stealth and as mentioned, from time to time if you fail to act stealthily during acts that necessitate stealth you will face instant death. During the course of a normal mission, though, if you are discovered, the game slows down time and goes into Reflex Mode. This affords you the opportunity to take foes out before they have the chance to alert someone. Just make certain you either kill or subdue them with a silenced weapon or your hands as firing an assault rifle is still going to put the base on alert and have guards come running to the location of the noise.
Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain Gameplay Walkthrough Part 3 – MKIceAndFire
As I was cutting my teeth in the first few missions, I epic-failed at keeping my cover. Each time I was discovered, I ended up in a huge gunfight with the whole base alerted. The game didn’t punish me directly for my incompetence; in fact, I was able to use the disturbance to my advantage. Taking out the soldier who had initially discovered me, and then circling around the soldiers who had flooded to the point where all the commotion had occurred, I then proceeded to use stealth takedowns where possible and repeat my tactic of gun and running to flank them and pick them off as they searched my last known location. It was then I realised I was having a hoot with a Metal Gear game. The way Snake moves is fluid and the controls feel natural (once you grow used to the button layout). Diving for cover out of the direct line of sight of a soldier before lining him up for a headshot was fun.
Before long, you will find yourself at Mother Base, which is as it sounds – your base of operations. Ocelot is there to inform you about resource management by collecting resources out in the field. These can be anything from diamonds you may spot lying around, to all types of wild flowers and herbs you may come across brief cases that carry various metals and composites in them, to the soldiers themselves who can be brainwashed and redeployed as personnel in your own Diamond Dogs army. I groaned inwardly at hearing all this. The last time I was forced into a different style of game play in an action/stealth game was Assassins Creed Brotherhood. The Tower Defense style battles in that were wooden and interrupted the flow of the game. Yes, I know you could ignore them, but it impeded your progress on the map and I felt like I wasn’t playing the game properly by not indulging in them. Thankfully, the resource management here doesn’t interrupt the main game, but complements it. Now I realised that even though the game didn’t punish me for killing all those guards, I just wasted an opportunity to recruit them to my cause. The need to develop Mother Base made me think twice about my previous tactics. Although, when the proverbial poop hit that proverbial pan, I still wasn’t averse to firing without prejudice. Still, I was less inclined to attempt lethal kills wherever possible, instead using the tranquiliser gun and Fultoning them (a tiny deployable balloon that floats them out of the theatre of battle back to Mother Base).
Use the tranquiliser gun too much though, and the guards on bases will take to wearing helmets. Luckily, while you are on Mother Base you have to opportunity to hone your hand-to-hand combat skills to take opponents down alive but unconscious. Side-op missions may also pop up to take down a storage facility or a manufacturing plant. Complete these and the guards will find themselves without equipment like helmets again, so as you can see there is a lot going on here. You can ignore the resource management of Mother Base if you prefer and you will still progress, but the game would be harder because as you play and your base develops, more items will become available to you – upgraded weapons for instance.
Go to page 3 for more thoughts on the game plus conclusions.
Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain Gameplay Walkthrough Part 4 – MKIceAndFire
I’m all about the Games and Gadgets. Rumoured to have been born with a mobile phone in his hand. (It’s not true. It was a Gameboy) You want to know more about my business? You better invest in it then hadn’t you.