A Singular and Crowning Achievment: Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain Review

The Metal Gear series spans over 30 years of gaming and technology. It has set standards among the video game community, and is one of the most recognizable game franchises next to Super Mario and Call of Duty. Even with its age, it still continues to roll out innovative and entertaining games. Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain is easily one of our favorite games of 2015.

We've decided to write this review from the perspective of a person who has never played any other title in the Metal Gear series. This 2015 release has generated so many Metal Gear first-timers, and has revived the love and respect for the 30 year old franchise. Metal Gear is a stealth and action series surrounded by interweaving plot lines and characters. It has bounced around time from sequels to prequels over the years, which makes its wild story a bit difficult to follow. For a recap, this edition in the series follows the merry misadventures of Big Boss (Kiefer Sutherland), a legendary soldier in command of a private army during the 1970s and 80s. He's the original bad guy in the very first Metal Gear game, but has always had a fascinated and complex past. This game explores that past in a stunning and unapologetic fashion, resulting in one of the best video games of 2015.

Following the events of Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeros, a short prequel game to The Phantom Pain, Big Boss and his comrade suffer a terrible defeat. A secret organization called Cipher deploys its strike force called XOF to dispatch Big Boss and his soldiers. After a series of manipulative moves, Big Boss's Caribbean Sea fort called Mother Base is destroyed, and Big Boss falls into a coma. Nine years later he awakens to rebuild his army and take revenge in honor of his lost friends. Get to work.

It's 1984, and the somber but very pissed Big Boss is finally wake, and he's ready to kick some ass. He's lost a lot - his arm, his army and many of his friends. Upon waking, he is rescued and brought to a new Mother Base with the goal of enhancing and growing it. This is where The Phantom Pain begins. Players are quite delicately introduced to the open world of the game in Northern Kabul, Afghanistan. There, you are reborn in the glorious stealth mechanics of Big Boss, also known by his nickname Punished "Venom" Snake. Sneaking around Soviet desert camps is thrilling, and switching to loud combat is dangerous and exciting. The Phantom Pain wants players to genuinely think about how they approach their infiltration missions. Are there mines? Is there a spotlight? What do the enemy patrols look like? Never before have we seen a stealth based game feature so many realistic (and frustratingly so) factors. Being spotted by an enemy triggers an automatic reaction from Snake, but players have to be quick to act on it in order to stay hidden, and even that isn't enough sometimes.

We have nothing but praise for this game's gameplay mechanics. It's smooth, easy to use and damn cool looking. Snake's stealth abilities are quite literally seamless, as players can go from sprinting across a palm grove to sneaking on their bellies in seconds. Movement, whether it's running, walking or crawling is very user-friendly. While roaming around an enemy base, Big Boss can use his binoculars to survey the area, or get a readout on enemies if you upgrade. Along those lines, Boss can also switch from third-person to first while aiming down the sights of his weapon. This is a fantastic feature that allows players to line up shot more accurately. Close quarters combat, a patent of Snake, is useful for apprehending combatants. If you're quiet enough, you can get the drop on some soldiers and interrogate, dispatch or capture them. Capturing and extracting is simply amazing, for lack a less enthusiastic term. Using a Fulton device, you can blast unconscious enemies into the sky with a balloon for your Diamond Dogs to extract. Needless to say, The Phantom Pain's gameplay features are a powerhouse of fun.

Big Boss's best friend and fellow injured/angry comrade is Kaz Miller. Miller spent the past nine years setting up a new private army, a company called Diamond Dogs. Your new Mother Base is an amazing edition of the Metal Gear series' base-building system. While out on missions, players can apprehend enemies and convince them to join the Diamond Dog family. Their skills and abilities help grow Mother Base and give Snake more options for weapons, gear and vehicles. Kaz, and your other advisor Ocelot, a former Russian operative, are constantly there to ease your mind and keep everything from becoming too overwhelming. One of the best accomplishments of The Phantom Pain's game design is its ability to keep players from freaking out over the scale of the game. There's so much to see and do that it can be a bit daunting. Konami should be proud of their style, because players rarely submit to the feelings of being a little fish in a big pond. A feeling that many large open world games often inspire inmost casual gamers.

The Phantom Pain features a buddy system. It works exactly like it sounds - Snake can have a buddy come out with him on missions to provide a variety of tactical advantages. These buddies include a trusty steed, a herculean dog-wolf and a variety of others. One of these others is a character called Quiet. A sniper with paranormal abilities, and a very quiet personality. These buddies are all unique and can tip the scale in during an infiltration or encounter, if they are used appropriately by the player. To cite an example, we used D-Walker during a mission during our play-through. This rather large bipedal combat-walker is not the stealthiest of buddies, and it became very hard to preserve our element of surprise while riding a robot through a camp in the desert.

A classic and still interesting component of games that exist in Metal Gear's universe is their realism (or lack thereof). Outlandish characters, superhuman abilities and a litany of insane plot twists have made Metal Gear a bit unrealistic, to say the least. Yet, the games have always boasted some pretty phenomenal examples of ultra-realism. Gun silencers don't last forever, guards aren't as blind or deaf as they are in some games and you have to maintain order and stability at your Mother Base. The expert blend of wildly unrealistic and very realistic is strangely beautiful. The game's villains, such as the "Man on Fire," are some of the best examples of the surreal entering the reality of the game.

Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain takes players on a fascinating chutes and ladders ride to revenge, and will most likely be just the beginning (or middle, or whatever)! Players can expect a fantastic gaming experience, married to a wonderfully wild story full of drama and intrigue. The trials and tribulations of Punished "Venom" Snake, Big Boss is always a must-play for those who appreciate a studio improving upon decades of gaming history.