by Marcuse » Fri Aug 11, 2017 9:59 pm
I'm always late to the party, but I've played up until the end of mission 32 and I have absolutely no desire to keep on playing this game. I'm sorry, but it's a complete mess.
I'll start on the positives, because I don't want to be unfair. Generally, the movement, shooting and driving all feels great. Travelling around the sandboxes is easy enough and I rarely got lost. The wackiness in the game is definitely in keeping with the Metal Gear franchise, and I didn't mind it at all. Fultoning everything doesn't really ever get old, especially when it's the optimal tactic 99% of the time. The side ops, while a little samey after a while, are plentiful and don't get old. I love that there's licensed music from the 80s in there.
But, really, aside from those things the game is a poorly designed, poorly laid out mess.
Let's start from the beginning, with the GMP/Mother Base/FOB system. First of all, fuck a game that forces you to be online lest you lose about 80% of your starting resources. That's a mean trick to get people involved in the bullshit online play. I've never played metal gear for anything other than the story and the single player gameplay, and being heavily restricted in my ability to play that because I took it offline is incredibly annoying.
The GMP system sounds like a great idea, but just ends up being a boring burden requiring you to grind all the time. I saw no reason to upgrade things like the helicopter because it has no use to you and costs seven times the GMP to call it in every time with the first engine upgrade. Given how between command posts there's a vast wasteland with nothing to threaten it, there's no reason to waste your GMP at all. The very fact that basic things like having the helicopter come and pick you up costs so much really makes the game more of a calculation game than anything else, and it doesn't add anything for me. I come for the shooting, sneaking and bonkers story. I didn't need book keeping adding in to that, thanks.
Mother Base is just numbers, really. They fob off all the actual day to day management of the base to your subordinates, who do everything without asking you. All you do is grab new peeps, order new platforms and punch the staff when you do turn up. The only reason you do turn up is to shower because it makes reflex mode a little longer. The whole of Mother Base is a bland expanse with nothing interesting in it, and I saw no reason to go visiting the other platforms. No, throwing rough diamonds about the new platforms for no reason isn't enough of a draw for me to spend a fucking hour travelling to each platform to look about, find nothing to interact with, then go do somethings.
The bit where you have to manually select everyone who speaks Kikongo to quarantine them is shit and awful and has no place in any stealth action game. Ever.
The buddy system is bizarre. They make a huge thing about how you're not doing solo infiltration any more and have backup and stuff, then make all your comrades mute. Then they make only two of them truly useful for sneaking at all. D-Horse isn't awful, but the first thing you do when you infiltrate something is leave him behind. D-Dog is utterly game breakingly good, and removes any need to scout or view a base before diving right in. I won't comment on Quiet because she's bullshit fanservice and I killed her in mission 7 to avoid having to explain to my wife who she is. By the way, doing that makes none of the plot make sense. D-Walker is nothing to do with sneaking at all, and is just a weapon platform. There's no way to sneak on it, and it sucks except in the mission where you have to fight the Skulls. D-Dog regularly alerts guards to your presence, and walks into your sights when you're sniping.
So now we've reached the characters, let's go through them.
Venom Snake is a silent protagonist, for some reason. Why doesn't he even try to question Skull Face on their little jeep journey? Why does he say nothing to Code Talker? Why doesn't this guy speak? They hired freaking Kiefer Sutherland to voice him, and the only way to get that acting is if you sit through hours of tapes? What the fuck is that? When was that Metal Gear?
Miller is unfathomable to me. He seems to be some author self-insert character, given way more prominence than the actual contribution to the plot that the character makes. I'm all for continuity, but I really found myself repelled by the violent, angry and generally unpleasant manner they gave the character. It didn't remotely resemble the "Master Miller" character I remember from MGS1 and it didn't appeal at all.
What the fuck happened to Ocelot? In Snake Eater he was a cocky asshole triple agent. Now, the closest to contribution he makes is torture and dog training. He...can't be out doing things while I'm out doing things? He can't be getting intel for me that helps me with missions? He just turns up in weird half hearted cutscenes and tells us stuff. Given he's supposed to be in on the whole "venom snake ain't big boss" thing, I feel like they could have played that up more.
On that note, what the hell with the "here's how Big Boss went bad, nah not really" shit? Charting someone's downfall from heroic soldier to callous villain would be genuinely interesting. But they never portray anything they're doing as bad, not really. I know there's the one mission where you kill some faceless mooks you recruited, but that's not evil more than it's just necessary. Even so, none of it actually affects Big Boss himself, because you're not playing him. I would have been interested to see a game put you in the position where circumstances force you, the player, to choose a path that would make you seem evil. Remember in MGS3 when you were confronted by the ghosts of everyone you ever killed in the game? That kind of thing? Nothing remotely that powerful happens here.
What the hell was Skull Face? He has no presence, no backstory, no motivation, no purpose. His plan makes no sense. He wants to...get rid of English because of a slightly racist point that only 5% of the world speaks it but it's called a lingua franca at the UN. He wants to proliferate nuclear weapons...for no reason and it's quickly forgotten. He also wants to unleash Sehelanthropus on the world...because the game needs a walking mech with a dick gun that makes monkey sounds I guess.
The Man on Fire was a huge crock. He's just The Fury from MGS3 but with no reason to be like that. He's never a real threat and he just commits suicide because the Psycho Kid tells him to. Psycho kid never speaks and has no reason to be doing anything. Nothing he does makes any sense, and it's not remotely interesting anyway. I like his aesthetic, and his connection with Eli, but there's not enough there to make him a compelling villain.
Dafuq was the Skulls unit? It made no sense, and just annoyed every time it appeared.
But on to gamplay gripes. The big one for me is that there's no real way to plan what equipment you're going to bring. Often, the "reactive" system allows the enemy to correct for your player habits. Cool beans, but you don't get any sense of the enemy force disposition aside from one mission where it recommends you bring a rocket launcher. Why isn't that part of a briefing you get before each mission? Why not make that Ocelot's job? Why am I taking a tranq sniper rifle to free a prisoner from three heavily armoured guys on walker gears? Because I had no fucking clue I was going to be facing them. Why did I bring lethal weapons to the child soldier level? Because until I got onto the level I had no idea that I had to face them alone and a lethal weapon would be effectively useless. At least in the Nuclear Warhead Storage Building, my weapons were only temporarily disabled. The fact all that shit makes you waste your GMP on dropping in weapons to compensate for the fact you basically head in blind is even more galling.
The mission design is just awful. Some of the missions are incredibly easy, and I completed them in five minutes. Others were so extremely difficult that I nearly threw my controller across the room. Now I'm on the same missions but even harder, I have no incentive to carry on. Chapter 2 is just bullshit through and through. It's a half finished project with none of the design polish I would expect from a Metal Gear game. A lot of the missions rely on stealthing on a timer, lest you get to take on a harder challenge, lose prisoners, or have to hot foot it several hundred meters to find your target again. The idea of stealth conflicts with timed missions so much that it becomes really frustrating, because often you're hiding while the game tells you how you're failing. The mission to follow the Afrikaans interpreter is done way more easily by running everywhere at a sprint and just beating the clock. The recommended method to S rank the mission Skull Face is to drive a tank all the way through the castle and run up the stairs before anyone can kill you. When your game is designed to reward that, something's wrong.
But that's the problem here. The game can't decide if it's a military game, or a stealth game. It's really hard, in this stealth game, to get silenced weapons. But you have a generous complement of grenade launchers, bombs, C4 and missile launchers.
Overall, I found the casual completion of side missions fun and interesting. I could do them at my own pace with whatever equipment I chose to use. I couldn't just walk in and kill everyone but I could take them out if I needed to and was careful. The main missions are almost all either boring or not fun to play through. I haven't had as much fun as I thought I would have, and I think that's because of the wafer thin story, the bullshit base management, and the poor design choices in terms of missions and equipment. It's a shame, because I really want to like it, but it's become too much for me. Maybe I'll have a break from it and come back later, but there doesn't seem to be much worth doing in the replay missions in chapter 2.