You have a target, be it a person or a vehicle or a chrome gas tank, that needs to be captured or tagged (read: KILLED), and you should do so, well, the game would prefer you be careful, but you can do whatever you like. If you strip everything away - the characters, the story, the real world setting, the fact that at worse you're murdering hundreds of people, and at best, torturing them into joining your private military - Metal Gear Solid V is like an elementary school gym game. Hours have gone by riding a horse, seeing what there is to see, keeping an eye on the sun as it lowers beneath the horizon.
Its world - the people, the animals, the squat cliffs, the sprawling villages - are beautifully drawn and animated. I've shoveled dozens of hours into Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, more than I've given any other game this year. Maybe then I'm experiencing Stockholm syndrome, but the more I play the game, the more I believe Metal Gear Solid V is as elegant and inspired as it is tawdry, puerile, and ignorant.
All of the vulgarity and anachronistic politics survive, but any grace or artfulness in storytelling is replaced with a series of explosions and a sketch of a woman's disembodied chest. Playing Metal Gear Solid V is like watching Jerry Bruckheimer try to adapt The Taming of the Shrew from a fifth grader's book report written in Esperanto. Running deep beneath all of this is a paranoid, conspiratorial adoration of militarization and angst of the noble intentions of good men.
Underneath the game's surface is an unmanageable script, full of twists for the sake of twists, characters with thin motivations that can't be bothered to line up with their roles in previous entries in the series, and dubious use of pop music to give otherwise hollow moments some emotional spunk.
The locals are parodies of their actual locations, replete with cartoonish versions of real world horrors: the beginning of the game hints at the mass murder of insurgent forces, a mission in the middle of the game begins with the words "Guest starring Child Soldiers," and surely enough, child soldiers guest star in the mission.Īnd then there's the portrayal of the game's strongest female character: an abuse victim turned trained killer named Quiet, a woman who wears a poor-fitting bikini and torn stockings because, as the product of freak experiments, she must breathe through her skin - and as the product of a lecherous game designer, she must be fully exposed, so the camera can linger up her navel to her breasts.Īnd that's just the ground level.
Metal Gear Solid V is a better Blackwater simulator than the actual Blackwater video game.
Its violence is grotesque, but what mature-rated AAA video game isn't stacked with a nauseating surplus of bullets to the head? The game allows for stealth and non-lethal combat, but like so many shooters, it includes enough pistols, machine guns, and rocket launchers to launch a small army, which is fitting, because that's the protagonist's goal: a grizzled soldier named Snake spends the thrust of his time assembling his forces on a rapidly expanding offshore facility. As social commentary, it's shallow at best, and repugnant at worst. An espionage adventure, set in Afghanistan and a vague location in central Africa in the 1980s, it treats historical real world conflicts with the subtlety and complexity of a sledge hammer, casually aligning its perverted and non-sensical conspiracy theory plot alongside events that led to the deaths of thousands across the globe. Were it anything but a video game - a movie, a book, a television show, a Vine, anything really - I would despise it. My favorite video game this year is Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain.