Metal Gear Solid V’s stealth sandbox still holds up 11 years on

Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain puts a one-eyed man with a prosthetic arm in Soviet-occupied Afghanistan in 1984 and hands the player a horse, a wolf pup, a cardboard box and no instructions. Konami released it on September 1, 2015, for PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, Windows, Xbox 360 and Xbox One. It is the ninth main installment in the Metal Gear franchise and the direct follow-up to Ground Zeroes, the stand-alone prologue that shipped the year before. It is also Hideo Kojima’s final work at Konami — he directed, wrote and produced it — and that fact hangs over every quiet stretch of its enormous map.

Trailer, via KONAMI公式.

Punished “Venom” Snake wakes up nine years late

The story picks up nine years after Ground Zeroes. Big Boss, voiced by Kiefer Sutherland in English and Akio Ōtsuka in Japanese, falls into a coma after the destruction of Militaires Sans Frontières. He wakes to help lead a new mercenary group, Diamond Dogs, and takes the codename Venom Snake. His old rival Ocelot, played by Troy Baker and Satoshi Mikami, is along for the ride. So is Kazuhira Miller, voiced by Robin Atkin Downes and Tomokazu Sugita, and the two of them want revenge on the people who wiped out MSF.

The hunt runs through Afghanistan during the Soviet–Afghan War and the Angola–Zaire border region during the Angolan Civil War. Along the way Snake meets Quiet, a mute sniper with supernatural abilities played by Stefanie Joosten, and unearths a Cipher plot to build a new Metal Gear model called the ST-84 “Sahelanthropus.”

That is a lot of proper nouns. The Phantom Pain wears them lightly. Its cut-scenes are fewer and shorter than earlier Metal Gear Solid titles, which is the single smartest decision in the game. The series used to stop being a game for twenty minutes at a time. Here it mostly doesn’t.

D-Horse, D-Dog, Quiet and D-Walker

The Phantom Pain is a stealth game played from a third-person perspective in an open world. Ground Zeroes established the mechanics and this game carries them over, then drops the linear corridor design that defined most earlier entries. You can cross the map on foot, on horseback, in a jeep or in a tank. Some locations are mountainous enough that rock climbing works as a shortcut.

Snake’s kit includes binoculars, explosives, a range of weapons, and stealth items like cardboard boxes and decoys. The series tradition of not killing anyone is intact — tranquilizer darts and other non-lethal tools let you subdue guards instead of dropping them. You can call a helicopter for support or request an airstrike that bombards an area or changes the weather.

The buddy system is where the game opens up. Four companions are available, and each one changes how you approach a base.

Their abilities and effectiveness depend on the player’s relationship with them. The buddy you neglect is the buddy who underperforms.

A real-time day and night cycle and weather effects feed into enemy behavior, visibility and sound. Sabotaging or destroying certain structures can affect other parts of the map. Most games give you a map. The Phantom Pain gives you a map that reacts.

Mother Base and the two multiplayer modes

Base building returns from Peace Walker. Enemy soldiers and resources found in the world can be transported back to Snake’s headquarters, Mother Base, which expands and develops further technology as you feed it. Recruitment of enemy soldiers and prisoners is back for exactly this purpose. The loop is simple: bring in a talented soldier, put him to work, unlock better gear, go find a better soldier.

There are two separate multiplayer modes. Metal Gear Online, also called Metal Gear Online 3, is the conventional one. Forward Operating Bases, or FOBs, is the strange one — players develop FOBs that other players can then invade. It is mean, and it is the most interesting thing Konami shipped alongside the campaign.

The voice production broke with series tradition. Kojima Productions recorded voice acting and motion capture with English-speaking actors and stuntmen first. Facial motion capture had been used before, in Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, but separately from the voice work. This time the Japanese cast dubbed over the English performances afterward. Since Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, the series had lip-synched characters to both languages. Konami confirmed at E3 2013 that Sutherland would provide Snake’s voice and motion capture.

Why the open world matters more than the revenge plot

The revenge story is the weakest thing here. Snake tracks the people who destroyed MSF, and the game keeps promising a reckoning it delivers in fragments. The Cipher plot and the Sahelanthropus reveal are fine, but they are not why anyone sinks a hundred hours into this.

The sandbox is. Afghanistan and the Angola–Zaire border give you terrain that punishes lazy routes and rewards patience. Weather rolls in and guards change how they see and hear. Knock out a structure and something else on the map shifts. The buddy you bring decides whether a base is a puzzle or a firefight.

Here is the comparison that matters most against the game’s own history.

The shift is not cosmetic. A linear corridor tells you where the guard is. An open world with a day/night cycle and weather that affects visibility and sound makes you find out. That is the whole game.

The verdict on Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain

A schedule note, since this is a 2015 release.

The Phantom Pain is the best-playing game in its series and it is not close. The stealth holds up, the buddies hold up, Mother Base holds up, and the day/night and weather systems do work that most open worlds still don’t attempt. Sutherland’s Snake is a quiet, deliberate read of a character who used to talk constantly, and the English-first motion capture gives the performances a physical coherence of their own.

What keeps it from perfection is the story it tells around all that. The revenge arc against Cipher sprawls, and the Sahelanthropus thread arrives late and asks you to care about a conspiracy when you would rather be back in Afghanistan testing whether a cardboard box survives a jeep. The game’s best moments are the ones with no dialogue at all — a wolf pup circling a guard post, rain cutting visibility to nothing, a plan that works because you read the terrain instead of the script.

Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain earns its reputation as Kojima’s farewell to the franchise he built. It is a stealth game that trusts the player with an unreasonable amount of freedom and then rewards every bit of it.

game review · Hideo Kojima · Konami · Metal Gear Solid V · Open World Games · stealth games