I’ve been reading a lot of video game reviews regarding Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain and all the reviews that I’ve read have given this game a perfect score of 10/10. If all the big gaming websites are giving this game a perfect score of 10/10, does this compel me to do the same thing? Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain is a video game that lets you play the actual game without imposing the games storyline on you. There are video games out there that require you to finish missions in a certain way and by doing certain things. In Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain all you have to do is complete your objective and how you do it? Is completely up too you.
I’ll give you an example, there’s a mission where I had to recover a weapon of mass destruction developed by the US military and while on that mission I also had to free a prisoner who knows where this weapon is being held. I tried the stealth approach and while crawling from one cover point to the next, an enemy spotted me and the game went into a slow motion phase called Reflex Time and it gave me an opportunity to take out this enemy but sadly the suppressor on my rifle got worn out and whole camp heard my gunfire. My cover was blown and I basically had over 100 men shooting and throwing grenades at me. By now you can tell that the situation I was in was very messy and getting out of it would require additional fire power, so I pulled out my i-Droid and called for an airstrike to assist me. After taking a couple of hits and hundreds bodies laying everywhere, there I was walking around nervously in the caves of Afghanistan wondering what’s going to crawl out of these caves and attack me. How a situation changes in Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain is solely up to you, you can start a mini world war 3 by taking on enemies head first or use the stealth approach and try and complete missions without being detected.
There’s a huge plus in try to complete missions without being detected as you can knock out enemies and hook them up to a balloon, that will take them to Motherbase and they can be part of your own private army. Motherbase plays a huge role in Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain as it helps you develop weapons, send your private army on missions to generate GMP (money) that you’ll use to expand your base. In the beginning of the game I couldn’t hear what the enemy was saying because I didn’t understand the language they were speaking but I got inside information that a highly skilled translator was working for the enemy and I need to recruit him in order to get information on my enemy. The moment I hooked him up on to that balloon, I started seeing subtitles on my screen and I could understand what the enemy was saying. What I am trying highlight here is that you can use fire power here and there but you’ll need to constantly look for highly skilled soldiers that you need to recruit in order to expand your Motherbase.
I was taken away by the games scenery and how vast the Afghan landscape is, the transition between night and day is seamless and the moment you hear a siren ring when near a village you know that a sandstorm is 30 seconds away. All these factors are taken into consideration when planning a mission and when are trying to make your next move. A helicopter usually drops you off 2 to 3 km’s away from where your mission is and you jump on a horse to get to your destination. I used my i-droid to upgrade my buddy’s saddle and the horse I rode had some bulletproof padding and I could ride past a guard post while hanging on the side of my horse (Buddy) without being detected. The bulletproof padding came in handy when I was being chased by an enemy, keep in mind that some of the horses flesh was still exposed but I managed to get out of a really sticky situation.
Big budget video games usually have really dramatic cut scenes and yes Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain also suffered from that in the beginning but once that was over I was consumed by the gameplay, I had so much to do that I forget about that opening scene. If I wasn’t trying to flee a camp filled with enemy soldiers, I was crawling in a cave somewhere in the mountains of Afghanistan or I was plotting on how I could take down a bunch of tanks with the weapons that I had at my disposal. The storyline didn’t affect how I played the game or my missions outcome, as long as I got the job done and didn’t die along the way, the objective remained the same. Gathering intelligence along the way made the missions a bit easier and recruiting soldiers, gathering resources, made sure that my Motherbase kept on expanding. In the beginning I posed a question on whether would the 10/10 scores that major gaming reviewers gave this game would affect my overall score of the game. In all honesty it didn’t, because I get where those gamer’s are coming from and just like me, all they did is sit in front of the TV and play Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain without flinching and they only disturbance we tolerated was when mother nature called. 10/10 video games are rare and far in between I would suggest that you grab this masterpiece from Mr Hideo Kojima. It’s available on the PS4, Xbox One, PC, Xbox 360 and on the PS3 from the 1st of September.
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