Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain Reviews
This isn't just the best Metal Gear game, nor is it just the best stealth game, it is one of the best games ever made.
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 more robust gameplay experience than its predecessors.
A fitting swansong.
As a game, The Phantom Pain excels. The stealth and action work beautifully in the open-world setting, and maintaining your Mother Base gives you plenty of rewards. It’s long, fun, and gives players tons of variety.
Such player-driven drama, comedy, and action eclipses anything in the disappointing scripted narrative. The Phantom Pain is one of the worst Metal Gear stories ever told. It functions neither as a standalone narrative nor as worthwhile insight into the series overall. And yet, The Phantom Pain is the best stealth-action game ever made, one where playing flawlessly is just as thrilling as outright failure. And boy – what a thrill.
Ultimately, the story isn't the thing in MGSV, or at least not the one that Kojima wrote like a funhouse for you to weave your way through. No, the real story is the one you make yourself as you play through each mission, making new decisions each time and writing an action thriller of your own making. That's what makes Metal Gear Solid V brilliant, and that's why people will still be talking about it years from now.
That I can be so critical of it, that it can have damn microtransactions in it, and still get one of my highest recommendations, speaks volumes about what Kojima's done. Because this is a game in which I made a tank fly away on balloons and then rode a horse that pooped whenever I told it to. Yes folks… this truly is a Hideo Kojima game.
As an intermittent admirer of the series, I found "The Phantom Pain" unexpectedly emotional, not as a story or as an arrangement of digital things to play with, but as a parting gesture to a community of which I have occasionally been a part.
Incredibly, unbelievably, what we have here is a nearly perfect finale to the Metal Gear franchise. I truly believe that The Phantom Pain is where Kojima always envisioned he would take the franchise. This is personalized, open-world infiltration at its finest.
The Phantom Pain strays from the formula to perfect a new one, offering the best in open-world emergent gameplay we've seen this generation. While the story sometimes falters under expectations, the characters, aesthetic, and polish of this game set it apart as one of the year's best. Thank you Kojima, for one last Metal Gear Masterpiece.
Perhaps MGSV's best quality is how in pulling gameplay to the foreground and letting much of the exposition remain optional, it opens it up to be enjoyed by people who have in the past been put off by its weirdness, serving as both the perfect entry point and a satisfying conclusion. MGSV takes the best of a great series and creates a series' best in the process.
The latest Metal Gear instalment somehow lives up to the hype and expectations, providing a luxurious cinematic gaming experience without equal
It’s a vast game that, some backtracking aside, could engross you with fresh ideas for dozens upon dozens of hours.
With Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, Hideo Kojima did not just create a final masterpiece but he wanted to leave a much stronger mark by renewing the series and literally reinventing the genre of infiltration.
Review in French | Read full review
Which is what makes Metal Gear Solid so relevant today: its unwavering capacity to adapt and evolve. It's a game that understands everything about itself and how it works. It's the best stealth game ever made and feels like a game-changer for the medium as a whole - through its scope, the freedom it offers its players, and its deft structure.
Overall, the release proves to be a fitting, brutally brilliant finale to Hideo Kojima's beloved saga.
If you didn't get the idea, I love this game. It is a marvelous addition to the open-world genre and another one I can add onto the short list that I love. I think I need to use my left hand now if we are counting. It's also a great addition to the Metal Gear Solid franchise, portraying it in ways I didn't believe possible until now.
The Phantom Pain is the kind of game that actually feels as if every seemingly insignificant gameplay detail actually has a real purpose. Every mission, side-op and minute spent assigning staff back at Mother Base makes a real difference to what can or cannot be achieved out on the field. At its core, it is still a stealth-action game, but it never ties you down to just being stealthy. Every mission can be approached in a multitude of different ways and it's left up to the player how to progress. The more manageable approach to storytelling may not seem true to the Metal Gear Solid series to date, but it fits in well with the game's more flexible approach, which lets people attack the game head on or play in smaller bites without needing to worry that at any moment they may have to set aside an hour purely to watch a surprise cut-scene.
Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain is a gameplay triumph, that's for sure. Kojima managed to marry the stealth/action elements of MGS with the open world setting in a way that no one could have predicted. While not perfect, this is a masterpiece that everyone should enjoy; let's just hope it's not the last we'll see of Snake.