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Greetings gamers, This is Locklear coming at you with Lock’s
Picks, where I review games that I think are worth talking about. All of my reviews are
split into sections rating different aspects of the game. This first review is for Metal
Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain. So:
The Metal Gear series. One of the longest running stories in the industry. This game
series is known best for its cardboard boxes, crazy boss fights, and its quirky, crazy,
and complicated story. I’ve never had to use a game wiki so many times to even start
to grasp all the little woven story threads that appear throughout all the games. That
may sound like a criticism, but I really do appreciate the depth that the series as a
whole provides. There are many characters that have deep histories and stay relevant
throughout the whole series. And while the overall metal gear story has a major plot
and theme, each metal gear game has its own focus and perspective. This is why it’s
important to appreciate the game as a part of the whole series. The Phantom Pain deviates
a bit from the norm of the other games, which isn’t always a bad thing. While the other
games seem to have a primary focus on their narrative, the Phantom Pain has a stronger
focus on the gameplay. Let’s start with the basics. The controls
are amazingly smooth, which is a massive improvement over previous metal gear titles. You can climb,
sprint, walk at any speed, crouch, and crawl. Transitioning between any of those movements
feels nice and natural. The gunplay feels great, switching weapons and items is easy,
and pulling out your weapon to aim takes less than a second. And since we’re mentioning
equipment: There are tons of items, abilities, and equipment
to research with the currency you get from completing missions. You have all your different
categories of guns, placed items like explosives and decoys, thrown items like grenades, armor,
and of course - boxes to hide under. Stealth is the best I’ve seen in awhile.
Enemy’s ability to see you changes depending on the time of day, the weather, and if you’re
crawling or walking. If an enemy notices you, you get a bullet time-esque slow motion reaction
that happens automatically, giving you time to take them out before they tell their friends.
Nothing beats spending the time and effort to knock out a base full of a dozen armed
guards that you scouted out, dodging spotlights, mines, flashlights, turrets, and vehicles.
It feels incredibly rewarding. A great thing about this game is that the
AI adapts to your choices. If you’re getting a lot of headshots, more helmets appear. If
you attack at night, they’ll start bringing flashlights. If you try and take stuff, they’ll
try and stop you. If you take stuff, they can notice things that are missing and alert
the rest of the base. If they see a man down, they’ll call it in. The enemies get tougher
as the game continues, adding riot suits, snipers, shields, and better guns. To counter
this, the game lets you send your combat forces on missions to hit the enemy supply lines.
You also have 4 buddies that you can bring with you on the missions that each add their
own unique advantages and strategies to your missions. More often than not though, I stuck
to one or two of them because they just seemed so much more useful. DDog automatically detects
enemies and objectives for you, which is one of the most valuable functions in the game.
Quiet can scout bases as well, just not as thoroughly, but she can cover you with sniper
fire if you make a mistake and get caught. As you gain bond by using them, you can unlock
hidden costumes or abilities - such as Quiet shooting a grenade you’ve thrown midair,
or DDog being able to stun. Upgrading your base feels more addicting than
a facebook game. You can build up different parts of your base using the resources you
capture. You use the soldiers you’ve converted to staff your different base platforms, and
increase their level depending on your soldiers’ abilities and how many you have. Every soldier
has different stats and abilities that might make them better to work in different areas,
or even to help you research a specific item. You can even send your soldiers on missions
to gain extra rewards. Capturing guards with different stats that can help your base in
different ways is heavily rewarding and feels like a glue that holds the metagame together
with the gameplay. There is an interesting problem that comes
with needing soldiers for your base - you have to knock them out or incapacitate them
in order to bring them back; you can’t kill them. That means that for most of the game
it’s better to use non-lethal guns and equipment. Your silenced sleep-inducing pistol will probably
be your primary gun for the entire game, which can cause you to force a lack of gameplay
variety on yourself. Overall though, the gameplay systems are phenomenal.
There are systems within systems working together to create a harmony of challenges and rewards
coming at you constantly. You go on missions to complete objectives which earns you cash.
That in itself is fun because of the smooth controls and the reactive AI. The metagame
base building and research aspects really bring it all together and give the whole thing
a sense of purpose. You receive anything you’ve found or fultoned to grow your base. You grow
your base to unlock better equipment, receive better intel, and everything else that helps
you do missions. It feel like you’re actually accomplishing something because you can literally
see it with your own eyes. You do all of this not only for the story, but to create more
opportunities for unique gameplay experiences with harder enemies, new equipment, and eventually
online play. The graphical fidelity of this game is wonderful.
Facial expressions are relied upon during cutscenes, and they actually did very well
with it compared to many other games. The guns don’t look bad and clothes are detailed
enough. Nothing really jumps out to me as bad really. The smooth, crisp visuals make
for a great action game. The one thing it could use would be more variety. There are
only 3 environments if you include mother base, and they include similar color palettes.
So while it could use a little spice, the visual quality of this game is definitely
above average and compliments the game as a whole.
Now let’s talk story. Typically we see Metal Gear Solid games as being linear story-driven
experiences with crazy boss fights and lengthy cutscenes. The Phantom Pain has taken this
and spun it around. While there are still a few long cutscenes, none of them compare
to the other games. The boss fights are few and far between. The focus here is on the
open world gameplay, which actually makes complete sense for the purposes of the story.
It’s a story of Big Boss restoring his former glory, figuring out his past and setting his
future plans in motion. So this game is set up to be the connecting piece between the
other games in the series. Knowing that, it had a lot to live up to - but it’s almost
impossible for it to do so. The ultimate fate of everyone in the metal gear series is already
known, so the only way to get creative is to fill in some blanks in interesting ways
- such as the big twist at the final story mission. Unfortunately, that’s all they
can do - fill in blanks. With all this in mind, the focus on gameplay is actually a
smart idea when they can’t lean on the story as heavily by default.
The quality of story sprinkled throughout the Phantom Pain is variable. For 80% of the
missions, it’s “rescue this guy who can help” or “take out this guy who is bad.”
Only a few of the missions in the game are actually meaningful or impactful. That’s
really disappointing because the quality you can see in the story driven missions leaves
you wanting more that you’ll never get, a phantom pain. In fact, much of the in-depth
story details appear from audio tapes that you receive over the course of the game instead
of cutscenes. While I believe this is intended to replace the classic “sit and talk over
comms for 15min to explain something” scenes metal gear is known for, I still ended up
sitting around listening to them anyway because if I would listen to them during a mission,
I would get too distracted to really absorb the information.
That being said, the story that does present itself is enjoyable. The sniper Quiet is controversially
almost naked and ridiculously oversexualized, but her character arc is the most interesting
one in the game. The Skull Face plot is a classic metal gear ridiculous grand scheme.
The twist at the end is surprising and left me with mixed feelings, but also finishes
the game’s connection with the rest of the metal gear series. The overarching connections
to other Metal Gear titles are neat and various key characters make for interesting cameos.And
though the ending is not particularly satisfying, it’s arguable that it fits with the themes
of the game. I enjoyed the story when it was given the
light of day, but after what felt like an appetizer and half a main course, I was looking
for the meat and dessert. It felt unfinished. It just left me wanting more. But honestly,
knowing Kojima, that might have been the whole point of the story. A meta-narrative commenting
on the game itself. The audio in Metal Gear Solid 5 is fantastic.
The music is subtle most of the time, but it is great. It reacts when enemies are nearby
and as the action increases. It’s full of electronic instruments and orchestras, deep
impactful basses and arpeggiations. A small driving fanfare plays every time you start
and complete missions. There are a few points in the narrative where the music is prominent
and it strives to either serve a thematic purpose (“The Man Who Sold the World”),
supplement an action scene, or to accent a quiet one.
The sound effects are all good quality. Guns sound great, the helicopter sounds real, your
dog is a dog. You can hear footsteps along with the ruffling of all the gear you have
on. During audio tapes, you can tell what people are doing at a few points by listening
for sound effects. The voice acting is great quality thanks to
a cast of A-list voice actors. The delivery is believable, which is good because unfortunately
most of the dialogue happens through audio tapes. I think the audio is a great supplement
to an already great game. No problems here. Let’s talk about the fox engine. Konami
had a brand new game engine built for the Phantom Pain - and it’s awesome. Everything
runs smoothly and I don’t recall any game breaking bugs I ran into, let alone small
ones. I don’t have a top of the line computer, but because this was optimized so well, I
didn’t feel like I needed one. This is actually one of the best-built AAA games I’ve experienced
in a while. One problem I did have was what I assumed
were loading times hidden by the same intro every time you start a mission. Before every
mission, there is a long sequence of a camera pan around Snake’s face in the helicopter,
with that driving musical melody I talked about earlier, followed by Snake opening the
helicopter door to prepare for his drop off with whatever partner you’ve chosen for
the mission. You have to watch it every time you land anywhere, you can’t skip it, and
while it didn’t frustrate me to the point of rage, it does take up quite a bit of game
time. The iDroid UI is cluttered with submenus because
of all the functions and features it has to fulfill. And while it was obviously made with
a controller in mind, I played with a mouse and keyboard. Even so, it controls well once
you get used to it. Overall, this is probably not the sequel Metal
Gear fans were expecting, but we all know Kojima likes to play with expectations. It
hits so many good points that the flaws seem insignificant in comparison. The Phantom Pain
is absolutely one of my favorite games of 2015. The gameplay is so well designed that
it keeps you playing after you beat it, wanting more. The crazy story it presents will keep
you thinking about it long after you finish. It’s a departure in style from the other
Metal Gear titles, and feels like a breath of fresh air in a world filled with ubisoft
sequels. I would recommend it to anyone who even slightly enjoys the stealth or shooter
genres, and even if you don’t - this game might change your mind.
Hey guys, thanks for watching my first video! Please like it and subscribe. My channel is
just getting started and I hope you’ll join me next time for more of Lock’s Picks.