It’s whatever the situation calls for in most cases, but it’s also up for some player interpretation as well. Things can go from running smooth and quietly to a safeties off gun fight rather quickly. The Phantom Pain is also a game where missions can change on a dime. There’s a smoothness to the stealth gameplay that puts it in a league of its own when comparing it with its peers in the third person department. But Metal Gear Solid V just looks and plays better than all the previous iterations.
You can interrogate patrols if you catch them off guard, and you can still do all the luring and outwitting things that previous games have had before. Stealth gameplay has you trying to avoid enemy patrols, using weapons like tranquilizer guns to neutralize enemies and keep things on the hush. In missions MGS V feels close to its roots. In many ways, Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain is the stealth genre’s answer to games like Far Cry or Skyrim, something that builds a convincing world around the player and then gives them both great gameplay and systems to sink hours upon hours into. Everything feels meaningful, and this game’s triumph is that there is so much of it.
The maps are bigger, they feature large outposts, missions require multiple steps and treks across this massive world, side-missions have purpose and offer great rewards. There’s just more room to work with in The Phantom Pain.
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Staying out of sight will make things easier, as the core stealth gameplay that fans of the series have come to know and love is still very much the centerpiece of it all. Enemy outposts can be taken over and ransacked, or you can just explore if you wish. Missions have Big Boss dropping in on a sprawling map that’s littered with nothing but opportunity. This where the open world structure is a perfect fit for this Metal Gear game. That may or may not sit well with some fans. This time around though, Metal Gear doesn’t waste as much time on the story as it’s a much more compelling gameplay experience than ever before.
As in all Metal Gear games, the story gets a little more complicated than that. The Phantom Pain is the story of Big Boss and his quest to rebuild the private military group The Diamond Dogs. Regardless, in The Phantom Pain, players control Big Boss as he awakens from a nine year coma. The best thing you could do to prep yourself for the Phantom Pain is to play Ground Zeroes, as that will at least give you some frame of reference for the events that are set to unfold. The Phantom Pain storyline resides somewhere after Metal Gear Solid: Peacewalker and somewhere before the original Metal Gear NES title that launched in the 1980’s. It would be understandable if you didn’t know the minutiae behind the Metal Gear series, but you don’t necessarily need to have all the twists and turns processed to have fun with MGS V. You might not. After all, he kind of looks like Solid Snake. The Metal Gear series is a complicated beast from a story perspective and we’re not going to try to explain it here. These new and old gameplay aspects gel incredibly well with the best-in-class cinematography, voice acting, and beautiful in-game visuals. It’s also a game with more systems in it, more things to collect, more over-arching aspects to manage. This open world is combined with the stealth gameplay and gadgets that fans have come to expect from the series, and the results are nothing short of spectacular. The Phantom Pain differs most significantly from previous entries in the Metal Gear Solid series in that it is a open world game. Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain will go down as the best-looking, best-playing, and most ambitious game in the series - one that utilizes the new-gen hardware and the incredible Fox Engine to deliver both a visual masterpiece and a more robust gameplay experience than its predecessors. Hideo Kojima has been talking a lot in recent years about wanting to work on other projects, and he’ll now get his chance, but he leaves the Metal Gear series at the top of his game. Regardless of what Konami decides to do with the franchise, Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain is arguably the last true game in the series.