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| Metal Gear Solid 5 The Panthom Pain Review |
If
this really is Hideo Kojima’s last Metal Gear, then you can't accuse gaming’s
great auteur of going out with a whimper. The Phantom Pain is everything you
ever wanted from a Metal Gear Solid – and possibly all the things you ever
wanted from all the Metal Gears crammed into one crazy last instalment.
Want
the complex interlocking systems of MGS3? You've got them. How about the
cinematic drive and gangs-all-here fan service of MGS2 and MGS4? Well, that's
here too. Like the knock-out recruiting and army management of the PSP’s Peace
Walker? It turns out that there’s room for that as well. And the emergent,
open-world gameplay of Metal Gear Solid: Ground Zeroes? Well, you hardly
needed to ask.
There's
also space for all of Kojima's varying obsessions, ranging from pointed looks
at cold war politics, revolution, capitalist greed, western hypocrisy, war and
violence, to echoes of the movies and music he loves. There are weird in-jokes,
bizarre head-scratching moments and young women clad in outfits so revealing
that it could be months before we entangle whether we're looking at a satire of
gaming sexism or just the sexism itself.
Most
of all, while it's a game that takes itself pretty seriously at times, The
Phantom Pain can be knowingly ridiculous and playful. From some bizarre side
activities to new variations on the good old cardboard box, MGS V is nowhere
near as po-faced as it could have been, even if it’s the darkest MGS of all.
One
criticism of Kojima has always been that his cinematic pretensions sometimes
get in the way of the gameplay; that he'd rather you sat back and watched the
movie than played the lead. Kojima seems to be toying with the idea himself in
the prologue; one of the greatest sustained gaming sequences I’ve played this
year or any other. Linear, but jammed with taut set-pieces, shock moments and
extraordinary build-ups of suspense and release, it’s an absolute stormer, and
by the time Kojima has pulled in some of his trademark oddball villains –
adversaries to rival MGS3’s Cobra Unit or Metal Gear Solid’s Foxhound – you’ll
be ready for some formidable action scenes and a storming climactic chase.
This,
it turns out, is The Phantom Pain just winding up.
Next
we’re off to Afghanistan, and it’s here that The Phantom Pain’s true character
emerges. This is the open-world, emergent tactical espionage of Ground Zeroes,
only played out on a truly epic scale. The map is huge, and while mountain
ranges impede your progress, you can traverse it completely on foot or – more
sensibly – on horseback.
There
are missions to complete, starting with a daring rescue of old comrade Kazuhiro
Miller, but how you complete them is up to you. Come in at daylight or at
night. Make your way through villages and guard posts, killing, capturing or
simply evading Russian soldiers.
While
the game holds your hand a little through the early stages, the actual way you
do things – and even the time of day that you do things – is pretty much up to
you.
And
there’s more to do here than just completing missions. As in Peace Walker, your
foes can be knocked our rather than slaughtered, then captured through the
Fulton Recovery System – the bizarre, balloon-powered ground-to-air retrieval
system that’s all the odder for being based on a real-world contraption.
Captured troops are then converted into new and fully willing employees.
Before
you know it, The Phantom Pain has you not only worried about your main
objectives, but busily stealing resources and capturing troops to cover the
ever-growing needs of Snake’s new Mother Base. Beyond your main missions –
mercenary contracts sponsored by different players in the Afghan wars – you’re
engaged in side ops to weaken the Russians, grab vital blueprints and target
promising if initially uncooperative new recruits.
Movement
and combat work pretty much as they did in Ground Zeroes, meaning the skills
you’ve developed there are transferrable to the new game. While the sheer
number of options makes for a fairly complex set of controls, it’s all
surprisingly fluid and intuitive, with context-sensitive close-quarters combat
and cover manoeuvres and shooting that flips quickly between third-person and
first-person views as the situation demands.
However,
The Phantom Pain also sees the addition of the D-Horse; the first of several
‘buddies’ you can call on during your adventures. Sorry, Roach, but D-Horse is
the finest steed yet found in a video game, beating the Witcher
3 and Red
Dead Redemption’s equine chums with a mixture of smooth controls, believable
horsey handling and a great set of sneaking and galloping manoeuvres.
You’ll
need all your moves, plus D-Horse’s and more, because The Phantom Pain really
isn’t interested in giving you an easy time. The missions are designed to make
you work and force you to plan and be strategic. Even early on it’s clear that
Snake’s most boring gadget – binoculars with scanning technology and a built-in
zoom mic – might actually be his best, because you can spot and tag Russian
troops so that they’re always visible within your current view, even when in
the distance or concealed behind a wall.
Missions
are designed in a way that you’ll nearly always have to deal with some of these
goons, and they’re always just smart and organised enough to pose a threat.
They’ll return to their patrols if you go to ground and keep quiet, but raise
an alert or keep stirring up the hornets and there’s predictably hell to pay.
While the all-guns-blazing approach works in some situations, The Phantom Pain
likes you to play things quieter, smarter and more patiently.
Luckily,
you have the tools for the job. Not only does Snake have his own moves and
gadgets, but you can play the environment to your advantage. Dust storms, for
example, might restrict your vision and movement, but they also do the same for
your enemies, making it possible to sneak into the heart of a base if you’re
quick and clever about it. An unplanned explosion or skirmish can be catastrophic,
but you can also twist it to your advantage, hoping troops will race towards
the point of contact to find you, leaving security weak elsewhere. Ground
Zeroes encouraged and rewarded just this kind of improvisation. The Phantom
Pain goes much further.
Missions
run the gamut from straight destruction and demolition missions to hostage
rescue missions, recon missions, infiltrations and assassinations. Some can be
tackled in minutes within a small area, while other require you to traverse
half the map, dealing with guard posts, recruiting and pinching resources all
the way.
And
just when you’re wondering ‘where’s the story?’, The Phantom Pain has an
ingeniously nasty habit of pulling the rug out from under you mid-mission,
transforming one straightforward mission into a deadly boss battle, or what
should be a eventless journey into a taut sniper duel. Kojima knows what he’s
doing here, effortlessly balancing the emergent, open-world gameplay of Ground
Zeroes with the big cinematic moments that Metal Gear has become famous for.
This is virtuoso games design.
Here’s
the really clever thing: while you’re trying to adapt to The Phantom Pain,
working out which approach or weapon is best for tackling each situation, The
Phantom Pain is busy adapting to you. Enemy bases, for example, have day and
night shifts. Keep attacking at night, and you’ll find more troops guarding
outside of daylight hours. Focus too heavily on headshots and your foes may
start donning helmets. Rely on the shotgun or assault rifle, and body armour
becomes the hot new style.
Meanwhile,
there’s a whole other side to the game going on at Mother Base, where you need
to assign your new recruits to different teams, like R&D, support or
medical, then keep a steady stream of weapon, suit and miscellaneous upgrades
coming, with new and improved items to unlock on a regular basis from guys in
R&D. There are also tangible benefits to be had from beefing up support
(more successful recoveries and better air support) and intelligence (more
useful intel while you’re on the ground).
The
Phantom Pain doesn’t go overboard on micromanagement, but there’s a lot of
stuff here to keep you busy between missions, and every bit feeds back into the
action on the ground. Mother Base adds an almost RPG-like element to the game,
helping you customise your character and support your own play style in a way
that goes beyond bigger guns and better armour.
Play
on, and you’ll find you’re still scratching the surface. Why not chill out for
a while collecting small critters and birds for the guys back home at Mother
Base? Fancy some music? Well, spend some time roaming around, collecting tapes
of eighties hits. And when it’s time, you’ll face down your key foes in
sequences that are more than just boss battles, but real tests of your skill,
intelligence and nerve. Sometimes you’re playing cat and mouse, at other times
just trying not to panic, but the game keeps dishing up memorable moments in
the way that you’d expect from MGS. Even when you think you’re just getting the
measure of Afghanistan, you find it’s not the only theatre of combat, with new
environments and new challenges to explore.
You’ll
also encounter new potential buddies and bring them over to your side, each one
with capabilities that you’ll find useful, whether we’re talking D-Dog’s
advanced canine recon powers or Quiet’s cool sniper support. It’s a shame that
one of the Metal Gear saga’s most intriguing female characters gets stuck in a
bikini and some strategically ripped tights, but it’s clear that Kojima is trying
to make a point here, even if it’s not quite clear what that point is.
The
Phantom Pain can be frustrating. The game checkpoints your progress at key
locations or when you reach a pivotal part of a mission, but miss the location
or fail to find that vital milestone and you can find yourself repeating the
same section over and over again. In one case I missed a visual cue that should
have led me to a key objective, spent half an hour wiping out what seemed like
every Russian in a large installation, then got wiped out by an unlucky barrage
of shotgun blasts – about forty minutes down the drain. Something similar
happened in a prison rescue, while I kept failing one mission because it wasn’t
clear that you could delay a key objective to tackle at your leisure.
Yet,
while I found these things mildly irritating – and sometimes more than mildly –
you always feel like you only have your own impatience, bad attitude or
clumsiness to blame. As with other tricky games, the ‘seat of the pants’ feel
is part of the pleasure. When nothing is predictable, and things could go wrong
or go right at any moment, you’re never short of tension or suspense.
This
is also a big game; big enough that after twenty hours or so of play we still
haven’t come close to finishing the storyline or understanding where all
Kojima’s heroes, villains, traitors and antiheroes all fit in. There are dark,
twisted things going on here, and one thing Kiefer Sutherland’s excellent
voicework brings to this version of Snake is a quiet kind of moral ambivalence,
where you no longer really know whether the end will justify the means, or even
whether you can trust your closest allies. The Phantom Pain is still very much
a fantasy – and a comical fantasy at times – but the grittiness of Ground
Zeroes is only more present here.
Visually,
it’s little short of astonishing. With the FOX Engine, Kojima finally has
technology capable of realising his cinematic ambitions, handling
near-photorealistic close-ups and big, sweeping landscape shots with equal
power, and rarely conceding any screen tear or dropped frames. The way The
Phantom Pain uses light and textural detail is incredible, and while it’s
possible to make complaints about the repetitive, generic trooper models or the
limited variety of the scenery, it still feels like you’re picking holes. The
weather effects, meanwhile, are about as good as we’ve seen in any action game,
if not better. I’d hate to guess at The Phantom Pain’s budget, but given the
art, the voices, the size of the team and the music involved it must be huge.
If so, not a penny has gone to waste.
The
worst thing you can say about The Phantom Pain is that there are times when it
doesn’t quite gel, when the missions threaten to grow repetitive and it’s hard
to see where the action is heading. Yet these moments never last long, and the
big surprise is how coherent it ends up becoming.
It’s
amazing, really, that The Phantom Pain can feel like the natural continuation
of games as disparate as MGS3: Snake Eater and MGS4: Guns of the Patriots, yet
somehow it does. In fact, it’s the Metal Gear that ties all the Metal Gears
together. It can be strange, unsettling, silly and surreal, but you’re never
left doubting that you’re playing a masterwork, and one of the most exciting,
unpredictable games of a console generation where too few games have been
either. For this reason alone the Phantom Pain would be worth playing but,
believe us, The Phantom Pain demands it.
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