Hideo Kojima’s Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain is a HUGE game. To give it the full review treatment after 10-15 hours would be to do it a disservice, so I’ll be doing so via this early impressions piece with a full review to follow in due course. There’s a moment, around eight hours into the ten and a half hours of my current playthrough, when I felt pretty confident in proclaiming that The Phantom Pain is already the best game I’ve played this year. It involves a recording of a violent bowel movement. No, really. You see, there are people out there who will tell you that the Metal Gear Solid franchise is all about the story and, therefore, The Phantom Pain is a lesser MGS game. And it’s true that The Phantom Pain does feature much less exposition on the surface than previous entries in the series. However, to call it a lesser game as a result is, frankly, complete nonsense. In many ways, this represents the pinnacle of the series, exactly because it has removed the exposition – and all the insanity that comes along with it – from the story and placed into the game’s mechanics. This brings us back to that violent bowel movement… I’m on a mission to steal an experimental weapon from a Russian outpost in Afghanistan. It’s heavily fortified, it’s in the dead of night and, as a result, it’s the most tense mission I’ve carried out so far. I’ve crawled about to avoid the lights of an enemy gunship, popped off about half a dozen tranquilliser headshots and spirited three soldiers away to my Mother Base by balloon (you’ll hear a lot more about that). However, I’ve then realised that I’ve veered from my planned path, and I’m now surrounded (but still out of sight) by a further four enemy soldiers. There’s not a chance that I’ll take all four out before my Reflex (an incredibly useful slow-motion sequence that allows you to deal with an enemy upon being spotted without them being able to alert their comrades) runs out. I’m quickly run out of ideas…and then I spot it…a portable loo. Hiding within its confines won’t be enough. My last takedown and balloon extraction drew some attention and they’re in search mode. And then I remember the recording. It seemed like nothing at the time. On my last excursion, I’d found a cassette of nothing more than a 15-second recording of a man explosively evacuating his bowels. Seemed weird, but fairly innocuous at the time. Now, thanks to upgrading my iDroid to include a speaker, I have my get out clause. A quick press of the play button and now they all think that I’m one of their colleagues who just happened to have eaten a dodgy curry the night before. They all wander off to look elsewhere, and I’m left free to wend my merry way onwards. It’s a perfect microcosm of everything that The Phantom Pain has done well so far. The standard stealth and shooting mechanics are rock-solid – I’d go as far as to say they’re nigh-on perfect – but it’s the added little opportunities for improvisation that put it over the top, be it a recording of a bowel movement or a rendition of an Afghan lullaby that puts enemies to sleep (no, seriously). This is made possible by the sheer density of the area in which you’re operating, which is a remarkable achievement for a setting as open and arid as the Afghan desert. It hasn’t all been perfect though, with two issues in particular plaguing my first few hours with it. Admittedly, the first issue may be down to my own personal preferences, as I find the gaps between checkpoints to be too wide at times, meaning one mistake at the end of a perfect 10-minute all-stealth run can see you put back to the start of those 10 minutes. The second issue is infinitely more egregious though with the game suffering from hard input locks, meaning another of those stealth runs can be ruined as Big Boss runs out into the open through no fault of your own. Hopefully though, that can be rectified with a patch, and to denigrate my time with the game so far for two reasonably small and fixable issues would be to do it a disservice. In the simplest terms possible, this game is special. These thoughts are based on the Xbox One version of the game.
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