This would be a full review but Konami chose to include Metal Gear Online in the game, which at any point a few months after the games release most people don’t come close to caring about, including the author. Instead of the author subjecting themselves to playing this mode, instead this article will be a discussion about how bad yet good(?) this game is.
Metal Gear Solid V is an open world third person cover shooter with stealth elements. This is possibly the safest genre choice possible besides a first person shooter. The open world element is the biggest offender here, with how tacked on it is. The world is somewhat similar to Xenoblade Chronicles X or BOTW especially, but unlike those games traveling in Metal Gear Solid V is pretty awful, rather than one of the most enjoyable things to do. The map in Afghanistan is a huge pain to travel around. Even if you ignore how slow the fastest you can go is, the map is full of huge rocks and hills that Snake can’t do anything about besides go around. This isn’t as much of an issue in other places but huge empty spaces is a common theme throughout the game. Many enemy camps can be approached from any angle as a result of this open world, which makes them feel like pretty much no effort went into designing them to be interesting to take on, as there are so many angles of approach that Konami couldn’t possibly consider everything and make a challenging experience for everyone. Many enemy camps solve this by only having one entrance, which brings into question what the point of moving through obscene amounts of empty space to get there was. Part of this open world stuff is the managing of your metal island and its employees which felt pretty pointless throughout the game.
As for the third person cover shooter with stealth elements parts, it is extremely far from original but probably the best execution ever of this type of gameplay. Snake controls like a dream and provides so many possibilities that are pretty much only second to the physics based approach used in BOTW. Even though the enemy encounters themselves aren’t especially well designed, they are still made fun by how well the game plays. Something that stands out in particular is how enemies somehow know to adapt to Snake’s most common techniques used to kill enemies, like if you use headshots too often enemies will start wearing helmets all the time. The only real issue is how little Snake develops in terms of gameplay throughout the game, which can be somewhat explained by the open world element, but as discussed earlier the game would have been better off without the open world element.
The amazing gameplay in Metal Gear Solid V is definitely helped by the equally if not more amazing Fox Engine. On the next-gen consoles (at the time anyways . . . as of this article they are current gen and near to being last gen) the game runs at an extremely stable 60 FPS pretty much all the time. It looks pretty great too. There was obviously a big focus on the character models and they look pretty great. The environments are also about as good/realistic as you could ask for. Overall its hard to see how Metal Gear Solid V could have run or looked better.
The sound in Metal Gear Solid V is pretty good too. None of the original songs stand out much but there is a pretty good selection of licensed music from around when the game takes place that makes up for it. Voice acting is unsurprisingly far above average the entire game, even despite the change in Snake’s voice actor being pretty jarring. Sound effects are about what you would expect.
The story in Metal Gear Solid V is OKish. The presentation is unsurprisingly amazing but what happens really isn’t. There are some pretty lame attempts at tackling real world issues like the child soldier thing but they are all extremely shallow. In the plot itself not much actually happens too. Still it was fun to watch besides the part where you sit in a car with the bad guy for like half an hour while nothing happens. The extremely drawn out beginning mission was not fun to watch or play, though.
As for value the game is obviously worth it. Theres an extremely long list of things to do and plenty of replayability. Just one playthrough is pretty long, too. Theres also that multiplayer mode this nonreview ignored which may last a good number of hours if you like it.
Overall just the main campaign of this game gets an 8.5 out of 10.
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