metal gear solid V - Used

The year is 1984. The Space Shuttle Discovery has set off on its maiden voyage, Ronald Reagan is running for re-election and Bruce Springsteen is playing on the radio. In Afghanistan, the resistance towards the Soviet-backed regime is mounting. This new reality awaits Snake when he opens his eyes after nine years in coma.

Having lost some of his best years, along with his home, an arm and his comrades, the events from Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes have left Snake scarred and broken. Where does he go from here? Should he build a new home? Start a new army? Avenge his fallen brothers? All of these questions must wait. Snake is brutally awoken from his hospital bed, only to find that he is the prime target for multiple adversaries.

With several cut-scenes, a few mysteries and some obligatory toilet humor, the first scenes from Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain certainly seem familiar. It's only when the prologue is finished and you'€™re sitting on horseback with an enormous chunk of Afghanistan at your feet, that you realise that Hideo Kojima's latest endeavour is unlike anything he'€™s done before. At least in terms of scale. This is Ground Zeroes times a hundred. The controls and the stealth might be similar, but there is more ground to cover, more missions to embark on, more gadgets, better graphics, dynamic weather, sandstorms, brown bears, herbs to be gathered and small animals to be captured. In short, Metal Gear Solid has gone open world.

With a huge sandbox comes great responsibility, and the fans of the series might not be pleased to hear that the carefully crafted mission areas that have helped earn Metal Gear Solid its fame have been replaced with enormous, open maps, dotted with generic outposts and military bases. Indeed, the world of Metal Gear Solid is no longer a carefully constructed artwork in the same way it used to be. Rather, it is an ever-changing empty canvas, and the painters are you, the enemy and circumstance.

It'€™s no longer enough to know the maps inside-out. You need to be able to adapt. Take for instance, a mission where we were supposed to track down and hijack a truck carrying valuable cargo. At the beginning of the mission, we had no idea where the truck was located, but by sneaking into an enemy camp we were able to get hold off some documents describing the predicted route of the military escort.

At that point, we had some choices to make. Do we camp somewhere along the route, preparing to surprise the convoy with a healthy dose of explosives, hopefully not damaging the truck in the process? Or do we try to reach the truck before it can link up with its military escort? Maybe, just maybe, we could try to take out the military escort with an air strike before they can even reach the truck. The opportunities are many and even if Snake has sported some large, varied arsenals before, the freedom of movement and action is more reminiscent of Hitman than of any other Metal Gear game.