izigame.me

I never had thought that I would find this game a masterpiece which went under my radar for 9 years.. Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain is damn solid and wholesome gaming experience and the way that how it succeeds to invent itself over and over again chaining me to my chair for hours and hours, made me realize how addicting and destructing the gaming can be to busy adult life. ^^
Jokes aside, the thing which makes it even more amazing is that its almost a decade old game and technically nothing becomes even close to the features that let's you to be an ultimate commando going guns and cannons blazing like Rambo or wiping an entire village of enemies in silence like a Predator. Stealth is one of or even the hardest genre to create properly for it needs so strict and delicate work to provide an outcome that gameplay won't feel too frustrating or too easy. The experience should be hard to master, but yet again so easy to learn and rewarding. This is the thing where the game shines like a diamond thanks to features like Reflex Mode and eternal freedom to choose your tactical approach on big wide open areas that gives you just the right amount of freedom and mercy to fix a mistake, but yet again won't forgive you much more than that. Although even if you should mess up bad you are usually gonna be okay for Snake can take a bullet or two, especially if you have handled most of the enemies at breaking point. In my whole playthrough I cursed unfairness only few times while messing my well proceeding stealth and all the rest of hundreds of times I knew that blowing was on me and only my own mistake. While stealth gets a bit more complicated when the game proceeds this is compensated by achieved technology making the game even more entertaining! By unlocking even better assets and weaponry with money achieved throughout main missions, side missions and sold resources you'll find yourself taking the enemies quicker and badassier and just when you might feel satisfied the game provides you with something even better. All this huge variety of tactical approach is set into big open world of two large areas welcoming you always with something fresh.
In addition of doing missions and earning money you also manage your base that is pretty straightforward, but adds a nice features to fill it by volunteers and enemies you extract from battlefields. Each recruited has different skills and especially in the beginning it is always exciting to be able to extract some very talented enemy to your ranks, especially after you have risked the whole operation to neutralize that one guy non lethally. The safest and most stable way is to kill enemies of course, but getting some specialist to your team can be that crucial it'll be wothy to take the chance. The better your staff is the better your stuff is - shortly describing this is about your gear, support, intel gathering tools, and medical assets. After certain point getting enemies extracted and volunteers become so easy that this is no longer so huge deal, but especially in the early missions the talented specialist or elite among normal soldiers is like a rare Pokemon waiting to be tamed.
After spending over 90 hours with it and beating the main storyline, only thing which bugs me could be described as phantom pain for the feeling that something is missing and was cut out - a flaw in the game which despite of this ranks so high in my book. The storyline is odd and unfinished and while it delivers some epic cutscenes with twists and turns somehow the execution dryes out a little bit, but just enough that it is obvious that devs and Hideo Kojima might have ran out of time to transcribe the plot and rearrange/recompose some scenes. Knowing that many mock this game for the story I therefore add that I am not claiming that the story would be bad, but rather a disappointment of the lost opportunity that had made this an ultimate game with a plot which the rest of the game's majesty should have deserved. On the other hand knowing Hideo's nature to create mysterious phenomons like P.T. it could have been a plan all along to leave the player wondering "whatta feck" time to time. Although there is some material of deleted scenes which prove that something was meant to be attached and this have made a fans all over the world to theorize and speculate how the things would have wrapped originally - some even say that the missing chapter is still hidden in the game never to be discovered and this just underlines how epic this game is and how its legend lives on. Lives on in Tabula Rasa, for Kojima got actually fired for the game, as ridiculous it sounds, but game industry is business like any other and this game took 80 million dollars to make, which technically shows, but the selling numbers did not match nearly with this.
Nevertheless, buy this game! I don't care in full price or in sale, for Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain is a classic and it's value priceless and solid like a platinum even with its loose end! Just remember to pick The Definitive Edition to pick the short, but vital introduction chapter Ground Zeroes.