Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes
Only two hours long and still the best game on PS4 so far? Yeah, Kojima’s still got it…
Metal Gear Solid is ridiculous. It’s remarkable, when you think about it, that people have such love, such passion, for a story that involves characters called Decoy Octopus, Fatman and Big Boss. But we do love it, in part for that very reason. Metal Gear Solid is a rare thing in games: a series straight from the heart, in this case that of Hideo Kojima. The man clearly loves what he does, and it shows, coming through in games that have personality, great gameplay and iconic (not to mention bizarrely-named) characters.
Ground Zeroes opens in suitably unsubtle fashion, with Skull Face (because he has a burnt face that looks like a skull), the leader of shadowy organization XOF (that’s FOX, Snake’s old unit, backwards, see) chatting with prisoner Chico, who some of you may remember from the excellent Peace Walker. A quick roundup of Peace Walker is included on the main menu of Ground Zeroes, but it’s worth playing all the same: not only is it great, but the story this time follows on almost immediately. Snake/Big Boss has to infi ltrate an American black site on Cuban soil to rescue Chico and Cipher (bad guys) agent Paz, captured by her own organization under suspicion of being a spy.
That’s all you get in terms of setup:infi ltrate this camp and rescue these two people. Sounds simple, and it is. The game dumps you on the outskirts, and it’s up to you how to continue. We see here how Metal Gear Solid has changed. Gone are the relatively linear areas of before. This is a stealth sandbox, a large open stage with multiple ways to approach and accomplish each objective.
Control is again similar to the console version of Peace Walker, with a few refi nements. Square sends Snake into a quick dive in any direction, excellent for getting out of sight at the last second. It’s such a great, integral addition that you’ll start to wonder how you ever coped without it. Otherwise, this is business as usual: the usual third-person shooter layout of aim and shoot on the shoulder buttons, D-pad changing weapons and items and face buttons making Snake crouch, reload and perform actions. It feels like a Metal Gear game, and while that may sound arbitrary (and obvious), it’s incredibly important.
Long-time fans will know that feeling, the incredible solidness (pun intended) in both design and mechanics that tells you this is a game made by people who both very good at and love what they do. Snake can interact with practically the whole environment, peeking round corners, vaulting over ledges and climbing into the back of enemy vehicles to catch a free ride. Your mobility and ease of movement around the world makes it easy to visualise potential routes through enemy-infested terrain. Planning ahead is more important than ever now thanks to the far more open design. This is aided by your trusty binoculars, which can now mark guards and items of interest by focusing on them for a second or two. It’s exactly the same mechanic we’ve seen in games like Far Cry 3, but it’s a bloody good mechanic so we don’t particularly mind. Foes stop being tracked if you get too far away too, adding a bit of balance.
Getting about the base without being seen at all is tough. There are a ton of guards about, often patrolling in pairs, and search towers dot the premises. Your best option 95 per cent of the time is still the silenced tranquilliser pistol, which yes, still seems a bit game-breaking. Sure, you can just not use it, but peppering guards from afar with darts is still the easy way out of most situations, sadly.
Elsewhere, CQC again works similarly to Peace Walker. Get behind an enemy, grab him round the neck and you will have three options: interrogate him for information (revealed item locations get marked on your map, a helpful touch), choke him until he is unconscious or kill him with a quick stab to the neck. Pulling a gun on an unsuspecting foe from behind again allows you to hold them up, giving similar results. Bodies can be picked up and hidden, a necessity if you don’t want other guards fi nding your leftovers and raising an alarm.
Of course, if you get spotted (or if you just can’t be arsed with stealth), going in all guns blazing is still entirely possible, perhaps even too much so. A large complaint of MGS is that, at least on default diffi culty settings, it’s been too easy to disregard stealth altogether and go in full Rambo. We’d argue that the proper way to play a Metal Gear game is to up the difficulty to a point where getting seen really does mean death, but it’s a shame that it still feels a bit too forgiving at a standard level.
The most glaring example of this is a new mechanic, giving you a second of slow-motion whenever spotted to take out the guard before he raises the alarm. Hitting L2 in this brief moment will automatically snap your aim to the guard in question, and taking him down is usually far too easy. It’s one nod to accessibility too far, making it way more forgiving than a stealth game should be. Players may come to rely on it like a crutch, removing the need for careful planning and execution that makes the game so fun. Luckily, Kojima and company obviously know that ‘Snake Time’ will be divisive, and it’s incredibly easy to turn off in the options menu. Players also earn bonuses in their mission rankings for never using the mechanic, so the pros will come to ignore it for that reason alone.
Snake is equipped with an iDroid, a device that in no conceivable way could ever exist in 1975, the year the game is set. This holographic marvel displays the map, mission objectives, collected intel and audio tapes. Interestingly, bringing up the iDroid doesn’t pause the game, and players can still move about when they use it – don’t worry, there’s still a proper pause button, too. Audio tapes can be played in the background while controlling Snake, saving some time. This non-stop approach applies to the Codec too: there isn’t one. Instead, pressing the radio button always calls Miller, who offers advice on whatever is nearby. Again, the game doesn’t pause while these little chats take place. We were happy to sit through 15-minute Codec chats about whether love can bloom on a battlefield back in the day but today, we aren’t sure whether our poor minds could maintain attention that long. Now, the whole game is fastpaced – a wise, fresh decision.
Unfortunately, that fast pace applies to everything, including the story. This is a very short tale – it’s undeniable. Ground Zeroes is to Metal Gear Solid V what the tanker section was to Metal Gear Solid 2: a lengthy prologue that introduces the characters and concepts while setting up the story. Ten years ago, this would have been part of the main game. Today, it is a separate entity, costing almost as much as a full game. We can’t help but wonder if DLC and digital distribution had been prominent a decade ago, whether the MGS2 tanker would have been the same.
It shouldn’t take most people any more than two hours to see off the main mission, and once you know the layout and order of the thing you could probably blast through it in ten minutes. To be fair though, there is a lot of other stuff to see and do – this may not be a long experience, but it is a wide one.
There are a bunch of ways to explore the base and complete the mission, and diehards will enjoy trying to do the entire thing undetected. There are expositionheavy guard conversations to overhear, audio tapes to find, and nine hidden XOF badges that may or may not unlock something if you get them all – we don’t want to spoil anything. The first time we finished the main story, it took us 90 minutes. Going back to the main menu, we saw our total game completion: nine per cent. Short it may be, but there is a huge amount of replay value here.
Ground Zeroes also includes five side-ops, new missions set on the same map that will each take around 30-45 minutes. Some are action-focussed while another tasks you with taking out two specific targets. The fifth is the platform-exclusive Deja Vu mission, with the player re-creating various scenes from the original Metal Gear game. Make sure you do them all… you’ll be rewarded.
The game looks lovely on PS4, Konami’s new Fox Engine really singing for the first time on the powerful hardware. A Metal Gear Solid game with amazing graphics shouldn’t be news by now, but once again the series is at the forefront of current visual technology. From obvious things like the character models, closer to photorealism than ever, to subtle touches like cloth flapping in the wind or some of the best-looking rain we’ve seen in a game, the whole thing is wonderfully realised and extremely pretty. As is quickly becoming the norm, the PS4 version is considerably prettier than the Xbox One version, too.
It also sounds great, with the return of some iconic sound effects and another great soundtrack. The English voice acting is excellent, although one aspect may take a while to get used to for fans. While practically every returning character is voiced by the same actor as before, our main man has seen a change in vocal chords. The need for full, motion-tracked acting and facial scanning apparently led Kojima to ditch the gravelly tones of David Hayter in favour of a more considered performance by Kiefer Sutherland. You might have heard of him.
Initially, the change is extremely jarring. If you’ve been playing MGS since 1998 like us lot, Hayter is Snake, it’s as simple as that. Kiefer really does put in a good performance though, world-weary and tired while retaining that gravel that makes the character. Once you put Jack Bauer out of your mind and take the time to get used to it, you might find yourself quite fond of this new Snake. We love Hayter as much as anyone, but as the years progressed, his performances became more of a caricature: deeper and more rugged with each game. We know, that’s the appeal, but hearing a more realistic, nuanced Snake is an interesting take on the character all the same.
Fans that remember MGS4, a game that was approximately five per cent actual gameplay, will be pleased to hear that Ground Zeroes only features two proper cut-scenes, one at the beginning and another at the end of the game. Of course, considering the length of the main mission, this is understandable, and The Phantom Pain will likely have far more to go with its full length. Thing is, nobody in the industry does cut-scenes as well as Kojima – the fact we still love MGS4 is testament to this fact. The ending is one of the most thrilling, exciting cut-scenes we’ve seen in a videogame, also containing one of the few genuinely disturbing moments we’ve ever experienced in the medium.
Still, this is the least that Kojima has relied on cut-scenes since he started, with most exposition and plot movement happening as you play, Half-Life style. It’s more proof that Kojima knows the industry, and while he is still neck-deep in his own idiosyncrasies (and the game is all the better for it), he clearly understands the direction that games are going. Keeping players engaged is more important than ever.
The one huge, glaring issue with Ground Zeroes is the price. For £10, this would be the easiest recommendation ever. For £20, we’d still argue that you get more than your money’s worth. Once you reach the £30 mark, though, we start to wonder. Sure, you can replay it a ton of different ways, but this is still a very short prologue to a game that we aren’t going to be seeing for some time.
We are huge Metal Gear fans, and even if we feel ripped off, we are still going to buy it. But we are not the people Konami needs to convince. All but the most hardcore will question paying almost full price for a few hours of entertainment in an age when a £5 indie game can provide hundreds. Claims of Ground Zeroes being a glorified demo are wildly exaggerated, but the core message is the same: Konami is charging too much money for this. It’s an excellent game, a wonderful combination of classic Metal Gear with great new mechanics, and getting a 100 per cent completion rating will take much longer than two hours, but the issue of price is just too large to ignore, especially with a £10 premium on the PS4 version.
It will be extremely interesting to see how people judge Ground Zeroes: as a game, product, or combination of both. All we know is we can’t wait to play through it a few more times. Sam Smith
