For me it's the most conflicting game ever. The core gameplay loop is just so fucking great. When the game is doing what it does best, it's one of the finest games I've played. And it's not as if those moments are few in number either, the game was constantly wowing me with tense scenarios of stealth and action, better than the best set pieces around and all very much organic. It's the poster boy for emergent gameplay. It gave me more satisfying moments than any of the previous games in the series and it was doing it over and over and over again. In that sense, it should be 11/10, best game of all time type shit.
But then it comes with so much fucking baggage, so many missed opportunities, and straight up stupid design choices.
Mother base is a total drag. It's just boring. I'd almost rather have mother base relegated to a menu like Peace Walker. For a while I wondered why it was this way, but then I gave FOB's an honest chance and realized that that's just it. The base was designed specifically for super tense sneaking scenarios. It was designed for FOB, not to be a home and hub for the single player experience.
The open world is dead. This game is an amazing sandbox, but it's a lifeless open world. And I don't mean that in the sense that I want civilians, towns, merchants, or any nonsense like that. I want a battlefield. A war zone. What are all of these soviets posted up for? Where are the Mujahideen forces and why aren't there skirmishes playing out at random? There should be some guerrilla warfare going down. Similar deal in Africa, we have these rival PMC's, yet no face offs ever. And to further that point, it would allow us to deploy our own Diamond Dogs onto the field and bring to life the fact that we're running a small army. Why do tanks, walkers and choppers only show up during active missions? Why aren't there deadly convoys moving through the field at random, doing there own thing? Why aren't there search parties out there, when these bases are alerted to your presence there should be people hunting you down. When you've been wrecking bases and stealing resources there should be a price on your head.
Instead, all we get is the occasional pair of radio men walking down the road, or the same old armored truck moving from base to base. Oh and the occasional bear. It's ridiculous. Everything that would make the world more engaging is already in the game, but never put to proper use.
Then there is the environment itself as well as a lack of player interaction. So somehow Venom Snake can't swim. Every body of water is conveniently ankle high, but if it happens to get deeper than that it's instant death. Immersion breaker and an option denied. Or how about when you know you should be able to traverse to lower ground (the cliff and lake next to OKB Zero, or some of the areas in Lufwa valley), but Snake instantly dies in mid air because the game says you can't go there. You also have all these high ground areas that you simply can't go to. I get it that in some ways the game has to funnel you in certain directions, but it's overkill really. The amount of map space that serves as boundaries rather than vantage points is way the **** too much. Combine this with all the other invisible walls and "Snake that's outside of the designated mission area" and you end up with something unconvincing.
I know some of that sounds nit picky, but it all adds up to make the world feel very unnatural.
And on the topic of environments, Africa. Man oh man. So maybe this is just personal preference. The other night I was playing that mission where you have to get Code Talkers cargo crates out of the jungle. It was amazing! Stupid goal, but super tense and very immersive. It felt like MGS3 on steroids. Every spot in Africa that has you trekking through dense jungle is just amazing... yet those spots are so damn limited. Most of Africa is just an open field with next to nothing in it. Why? Honestly, the majority of that map should have been dense jungle with varying elevations. That shit is great. Even if the map was only half the size, I would have been cool with that.
Bosses. Now to be fair, I'm not in the camp that thinks these bosses are cancer. Eli wasn't a great boss fight, but he's far better than many of the other similar fights in the series. Better than MGS1 Liquid. Better than MGS1 Gray Fox. Better than Rockem Sockem MGS4 Ocelot. Quiet sucks as a Sniper fight compared to The End, but it's still a better fight than Sniper Wolf that everyone raves about. And those Skull Snipers on extreme? That's some intense shit. And Sahelanthropus? I don't care what anybody says, that's the first Metal Gear battle in the series that I actually enjoyed, it was a legit boss fight. Man on Fire was a total fucking missed opportunity though. That shit hurts me, they could've done so much more with him. And the other skull battles? Those guys should have just been deployed on high alerts or as random events in the field. They had no place being actual bosses imo.
My biggest disappointment with the bosses in this game is that only one of them really made good use of the open environment (Sahel). So much potential for some great bosses, given the scale of the environments and the quality of the mechanics, and they blew it.
Tons of other small nit picks too. Like why the **** do I have to wait on items to develop when I worked to meet the staff requirements, spent the resources and gmp, and in some cases acquired the blueprints and/or specialists? I already put in the work, give me my shit guys. Why does d horse even count as a buddy? He should just be a default...
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