Just finished Missions 45 and 46. As fun as the core mechanics are, I'm pretty disappointed at the game on the whole. I found it to be the weakest MGS game among the 5 mainline titles. My main issues were as follows:
Fulton: Stealth design is undermined by the amount of fultoning a player is encouraged to do, even with volunteers. The ability to remove enemy soldiers permanently from the map should absolutely have a large penalty attached, but the game mindbogglingly does not, outside of negligible GMP costs. I held out on fultoning soldiers for as long as I could, but I fell too far behind on key items by doing so. For someone who used to replay older MGS titles to achieve the Big Boss equivalent ranks, every single fulton extraction made me feel dirty due to being conditioned to ghost as much of the previous games as possible.
Lack of Resource Management: A somewhat unique aspect to MGS 1-3 compared to many stealth games is that one's inventory persists for (almost) the entire length of the game, and there are no mission breaks to refill one's stock. For instance, during my first time through MGS1, I wasn't too careful with Chaff Grenades and Rations, and as a result, the Rex fight was like running into a brick wall. MGS4 began moving away from this design, and with TPP, this entire mechanic is thrown out of the window and the game is not adequately balanced to compensate for it; the unlimited supplies combined with the fulton and buddy system make most missions pushovers (apart from Mission 45).
Scoring System: Time taken to complete a mission is weighted far more relative to other criteria and one can essentially make a beeline for mission objectives nearly every time to be awarded the highest rank, irrespective of lack of stealth, numerous kills and alerts. The scoring system has been dumbed down so significantly compared to MGS2 and MGS3 that it's one of the biggest gameplay declines in the game.
Underwhelming Mission Design: I found the vast majority of the missions to be repetitive and dull, only salvaged by the strength of the core mechanics and the sandbox elements. The guard outposts and most bases barring 2-3 lacked the handcrafted feeling the earlier games provided. There was also a conspicuous lack of security cameras (I counted 3), indoor areas and general complexity to the level design. The earlier games had only a fraction of the tactical possibilities that TPP allows, but the non-mission based structure of the earlier games also made them far more memorable in hindsight. Many of the game's missions reminded me of Assassin's Creed 1's assassinations wherein I felt the game needed a bit more of the uniquely scripted encounters of a Hitman game to make the missions appear to have more variety in order to avoid feelings of fatigue. Still, as a Far Cry/Mercenaries 1 mashup, the game's missions get the job done from a sandbox mission design perspective, though like the aforementioned games, it has no answers to the cheap tactic of sniping away at guards from far away. As long as I tone down my expectations from the more deliberate stealth design of MGS 1-3, I am able to have dumb fun with the game's sandbox.
Poor Boss Fights: The game's poor boss fights are emblematic of the open world mechanics making balancing a nightmare. Dictated by the demands of regenerating health, unlimited supply drops and the buddy system, no boss fight even posed enough of a challenge to memorize their attack patterns. Easily the worst boss fights of the five games, which is a huge disappointment because I looked forward to MGS games to see what eccentric boss fights Kojima cooks up. That said, the Metal Gear in this one was the most menacing one from a visual standpoint.
Grinding and other F2P Nonsense: Having to replay older missions or grind out 2-3 side ops for missions to progress in Chapter 2 is an indefensible design decision that murders the already terrible pacing the game suffers from. The Mother Base research time became unbearable towards the second half, and unlike the shit Dragon Age Inquisition pulled last year, the time remaining cannot be circumvented by changing the system clock. Such mobile F2P garbage actually prompted me to look up cheatengine entries for the game.
Story Structure and Content: The episodic TV series format Kojima went for didn't work for me with one of the most poorly structured and paced game stories I've experienced in a while. There was very little buildup and and precious little foreshadowing of events for large stretches of the story. 9 out of 10 times I felt I was doing a random mission that was arbitrarily assigned as a main mission and was rewarded with a 30 second audio voiceover at the end that progressed the "story" further. Within the actual missions themselves, I seldom had any attachment to the prisoners I was rescuing or the generals I was eliminating because the game does a piss poor job of weaving them into the overall narrative in a satisfactory manner.
Regarding the actual story content, the Kojima twist in this game undermines so many characters and events in future games in the timeline that it is shockingly dumb. So many characters from MG1, 2 and MGS1 were begging for cameos in this game, and the game marches on oblivious of the storytelling potential in lieu of large expanses of nothingness for most of Afghanistan. Of the story arcs that are there, only Huey and Quiet felt like they had an actual story arc, with a glaring plot thread remaining unfinished. On the subject of retcons, the parasites were as bad as MGS4's nanomachines, especially after I (painfully) listened to the entirety of Code Talker's Research 4 tape. Kojima's obsession with connecting characters from previous games to his current one is in full flow here and worse than ever.
Finally, even the music was surprisingly understated given the often bombastic nature of the past games' soundtracks. I could remember just 3 tracks from the game -- the one involving the Metal Gear chase, the one that plays at the end of Paz's mission and Quiet's theme. I was not surprised at all to discover that there was a change in the composers, which helps explain the difference.
Overall, as a sandbox in the vein of Far Cry meets Mercenaries 1 it fares well, but I keep wishing the game was something it was not. One last time I would have loved to see an MGS game centered around infiltrating a base in the vein of MGS 1-3, with all the accompanying conspiracies, hysterics and insanity. Failing that, given the amount of filler content juxtaposed with unfinished content, I would have gladly sacrificed the poorly justified open world for a set of linearly progressing maps in the vein of Ground Zeroes. All in all, the game was one of my bigger gaming disappointments in recent times given my expectations of what an MGS game entails.
:
