Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain starts nine years after the events of Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes with Snake waking up from his coma. Snake’s goal is to rebuild his private military and get revenge on the people who wronged him in Ground Zeroes. Along the way you encounter new allies who join up with you on your quest for vengeance. This is the final entry in the Metal Gear Solid series and it wraps up all the questions from the previous games.
The game play is the best of the series. The biggest difference from past games is that all the missions are in an open world. You can approach the same mission multiple ways with different weapons and try different play styles. The game also has you develop weapons and buildings for your base and for mission. This happens in the background of your missions because these tasks can take anywhere between 3 hours to complete to 18 minutes of real world time. One of the ways that you can build the base faster is by sending your men out on missions around the world to gather more men, and materials for building.
The missions can be played multiple times over and at the end of each mission you will get a rating on how well you did. For most people this will keep them engaged replaying over and over trying to get the best score. On these missions you can take with you a buddy who will help out on the mission or distract enemies or find things that you possibly missed the first time through. The buddies can complete change how you approach a mission and provide backup when you need it most.
In total this game is a lot of fun and you can spend more than 100 hours replaying the missions exploring the world and trying new weapons out. This is a fitting end for a long running series and that’s why I’m giving it a 9/10. You can spend so much time running around and finding materials and approaching missions different ways that the time will fly by.
Pros: open world stealth, building creation, buddy system, mission replayability
Cons: have to play Ground Zeroes to know what’s going on.
