Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain
2015
Audio: Japanese, English · Subtitles: Japanese, Italian, Portuguese, English, Russian, German, French
- shooter
- tactical
- adventure
- action
- fantasy
- historical
- stealth
- open world
- single player
- multiplayer
The story
Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain is the sequel to Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes and a prequel to the original Metal Gear. The game has a complex story with long cut-scene sequences, but there are fewer and they are shorter compared to earlier Metal Gear Solid titles. Most of the gameplay mechanics introduced in Ground Zeroes are carried over: it is still an action game and stealth oriented but replaces the linear corridor design from most earlier titles with large open world environments that offer the player unrestricted freedom for the approach. The world has now a real-time day and night cycle and various weather effects that influence enemy behaviour, visibility and sound. Sabotaging or destroying certain structures can also influence other parts of the map.
What it’s like
Dusty, sun-bleached Afghan and Angolan-style landscapes stretch wide under hard midday light, then slide into blue pre-dawn and rain-smeared night, with weather that rolls across the map and changes how sound carries. The palette leans on ochre, scrub green and cold steel, and the camera hangs back behind the shoulder in a third-person view that makes open ground feel exposed and every sightline a choice. The score alternates between sparse, faintly melancholy guitar and tense percussive stingers, and long stretches of wind, insects and distant helicopter rotors do much of the work. The vibe is patient, wry and quietly bleak: a sun-bleached unease broken by sudden bursts of violence. Expect plenty of combat, blood, dismemberment and gunfire, mostly stylised rather than gratuitous, with a few disturbing themes around child soldiers and disease that land heavily in the cutscenes. Sessions suit long evenings alone or a weekend of wandering, not a light background game. It is for players who want freedom to plan their own infiltration, enjoy methodical stealth, and don't mind a story that arrives in long, talky, occasionally strange bursts.
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