metal gear solid 5 the phantom pain reviews

MGS5's wealth of options empower you to write new stories with every replay – the game will yield astonishing acts of skill and creativity for months, if not years, to come. GTA5 offers greater geographical variety, but its controls are Duplo bricks to MGS5's Technic lego. If you consider MGS: Ground Zeroes – derided for its length despite its staggering tactical depth – then MGS5 feels around 50 times bigger (while the actual Phantom Pain map is 200 times bigger than Ground Zeroes), with a dazzling variety of missions. Fuelled by time pressure, I completed several missions covered in blood, sprinting with a hostage on my shoulders, alerts blaring and with mortars raining down all around. It's a real challenge for the more traditionally-orderly MGS gamer, who might regard any mission as a failure, unless they've nailed an S rank with zero kills and zero alerts. That said, it's huge, and I recall staring at screens of options, 20 hours in (at around 25% or less completion), with 19 pending R&D projects, 30+ un-listened audio tapes, scores of 'completed' missions with at least four hidden sub-objectives blanked out, and ten un-tackled side-ops. You're usually given a veiled dry-run with every new piece of equipment – for example, against a lone guard – and the game 'locks' unnecessary menu options when introducing a new Mother Base or iDroid function to make learning easier. For example, the Forward Operating Base (FOB) elements – where online rivals can infiltrate your remote base – doesn't unlock until way, way into the game. It sounds daunting, but MSG5 drip feeds its depths. So with some fairly major caveats laid bare – is MGS5 everything we were all hoping for? Extended access under duress is better than none but, twinned to our NDA, makes this a 'review' of what I can't and won't say. Sending out retail review copies would lead to ruinous spoilers, but the alternative is no pre-release reviews.

On one hand, you're finally immersed in one of the deepest, most experimental, open-worlds in history – overwhelmed by side-missions, upgrades and secrets – on the other, haunted by a tick-tock race to reach the 'end' without knowing when that is. So you're trying to complete a 35-50 hour game (or longer, depending on your play style and the nature of your 'completion'… I can't say more), that you've been anticipating for five years, in a realistic window of 30-35 hours. That's a maximum play time of 40 hours, assuming no stoppages for eating, drinking, stretching… or reality. We played between 9am to 5pm, with no unsupervised play outside these hours. For fear of spoilers, Konami invited journalists to review the game at five-day 'boot camps' tied to strict NDAs (non-disclosure agreements).

Metal gear solid 5 the phantom pain reviews