This is the tale of men on a mission: the soldier with revenge in his heart and the game director out to rewrite the stealth rulebook. We spends two days with Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, the most ambitious action game of the year
“Kept you waiting, huh?” (Big Boss)
Things go very wrong for Big Boss in 1984. Things went pretty wrong for him in 1975 where, in Ground Zeroes, he saw his blossoming PMC sunk into the ocean and a human bomb send him into a nine-year coma. Even with his arm torn off and his flesh shredded by 108 foreign bodies - a mix of shrapnel and human teeth, explains the doctor - this is a mere scratch compared to the transformation he is to undergo in The Phantom Pain. Somewhere between his decade-long nap and the end of the game he is destined to become the villain, the man Solid Snake will one day be dispatched to assassinate. How does a good man go bad? For us, it involves a surprising amount of cardboard toboggans.
By 1984, cardboard box technology has really come on. Crouch inside Metal Gear's iconic disguise and a quick squeeze of the left trigger sees Big Boss burst from the top flap like an exotic dancer from a rude birthday cake. Stand up in the box and it hangs from his head, letting you punch a weapon through the front flap like a gun-toting cuckoo clock. Run and dive from the same standing position and he crushes the box in a belly-flop and skids across the ground. Perform the same trick on a slope and the box keeps going as you slalom all the way to the bottom. Great news for seekers of fun, not so great for the hostages put on hold in order to scout for the region's steepest hills.
Over two days with a near-final Metal Gear Solid V, we wrestle between pushing deeper into a story we've been waiting 20 years for Hideo Kojima to tell, and the urge to experiment in a world that it took him 20 years to build. As you'll read over the next few pages, the beauty of The Phantom Pain is how those two urges needn't be at odds. Every deed, no matter how trivial, feeds into rebuilding Big Boss' drowned Mother Base, while every step towards answering key mysteries unlocks more ways to enjoy his stealth playground.
It is that rarest of games: an intense study of revenge and military morality powered by impromptu street luging, '80s pop classics and, yes, zoo keeping. Hustle up solider, we've a lot to cover...
“Don’t take too long getting used to your new self” (Ocelot)
Most people do not leave nine-year comas stronger than when they went in to them. Big Boss isn't most people. Okay, his escape from a Cypriot hospital isn't the slickest of things - in a Kill Bill-ish touch his drugged limbs take time to warm up, acting as a handy lesson in the power of slithering - but back in the field he shows up his Ground Zeroes self. For starters, his prosthetic arm is able to emit noises to draw a guard's attention, fixing Ground Zeroes' grievous lack of wall-tapping. Stunned/dead soldiers can then be hidden in dumpsters or toilet cubicles - preferable to out in the open where changing guard shifts make it harder to predict where patrols will be looking.
Big Boss is a nimbler climber, too, able to shimmy up cracks in dirt walls to reach the rooftops of dilapidated Afghan huts. Back on Mother Base (more on that later) he makes like Spider-Man with a ludicrous pipe-hugging clamber - good for discovering hidden treats in the towering heights of his HQ. Throw in loads of climbable scenery -|from crates to jagged cliffs - and there's a noticeable shift towards vertical evasions, at least in the mountainous terrain of Northern Kabul (a later trip to the Angola-Zaire border seems flatter in comparison). Considering the importance of scouting ahead with binoculars, easy access to higher ground is always appreciated.
The maddest addition is the Phantom Cigar, a mix of medicinal herbs that alters Big Boss' perception of time to advance the in-game clock. Taking a puff zooms in on Snake's blissed-out face as a giant Seiko digital watch blazes on the screen. As the digits begin to speed up, a singer starts to wail in the background and the world enters a time-lapse state: shadows shift with the setting sun, weather effects flash into existence and, most usefully, guards change shifts. Of course, smoking can be very bad for your health - it's easy to leave a Phantom Cigar trance to discover Big Boss staring down the barrel of a newly-arrived gun.
The Cigar, and the passing of time in general, inform one of the big choices you take every mission: whether to go in by day or night. Sneaking is generally easier in the dark - there are fewer soldiers, with shorter range of view. On the other hand, it's harder for you to scout guards beforehand and you rely on the draining batteries of night vision goggles. Daytime has its own inconveniences. As well as added ground support, the Fox Engine's incredible lighting means eyes must adjust to the blazing sun when you exit dark interiors. A lot can go wrong in that fumbling microsecond. It's arguably worth the risk just to ogle the (almost) photo-realistic props adorning the landscape.
Getting spotted isn't the end of the story. Sure, it ends your infiltration, but it's just the beginning of a very competent third-person shooter. "Heresy!" shout (well, whisper) the stealth addicts, but we implore them to go full-Straw Dogs with Phantom Pain's shotguns and tell us that it didn't get their pulses racing. If you do go loud, why not radio for air support? You use your iDroid's map (a kind of PDA] to select where you want the helicopter to focus fire -fire that can be intensified by researching add-on guns back at Mother Base. The chopper can even spook the enemy by blasting out Wagner, or irritate them with some cheery pop. What's harder to get out of your head: a bullet or an A-На ditty?
Deploying aggressive air support limits the end of level ranking to an A (it makes it too easy to overpower most enemies], but helicopters can factor into stealthier runs. Send a bird flying down the eastern side of a village, for example, and it'll draw curious soldiers away from the western edge, letting Big Boss saunter through. Air support also comes in the non-lethal form of air supplies - packages of ammunition, kit and weapons ordered through iDroid and dropped on your command (this can become lethal if they end up being dumped on a man's head). You can also airdrop in a Buddy, starting with D-Horse and unlocking new allies as you encounter them throughout the game.
On paper, such a vast range of abilities may sound like overkill. Solid Snake never needed a helicopter and support crew. But then Solid Snake never entered an entire country that was out to kill him...
“Good news is you’re in the land of the living. The bad news is the whole world wants you dead” (Ishmael)
Afghanistan is in the grip of a dark and deadly force: Hall & Oates. For all they hate the capitalist pigs of the west, Northern Kabul's Soviet occupiers love a pop classic. From the lowliest guard post to a once-majestic palace turned makeshift prison you're never far from a boombox pumping out '80s gems. Find said radio and you can pocket the cassette to play on Snake's iDroid PDA. No offence to Harry Gregson-Williams' pulsing score, but sometimes you want to murder goons to a bit of preppy synth instead. More importantly, it reminds you that Big Boss is not in Ground Zeroes' formal military base anymore; out in the wilderness the rules, like the music, are very different.
Gone are Camp Omega's fences and cliffs, replaced with rolling plains and hills that invite many more angles of attack. It's almost too open at first. Entering mission one - a 'putting the band back together' sortie to free a captured Kaz - we're told to "remind the world what Big Boss is capable of", only to spend ten minutes showing |the world a man dithering over a holographic map. The trick, we soon catch on, is to impose your own sense of order. Find high ground and use binoculars to mark soldiers and it becomes easier to spy routes around threats or, if you must engage, the approaches with the best cover.
Fears that 'free' translates as 'flabby' are unfounded; within this sprawling landscape, every populated area has the level of hand-crafted design you loved in the earlier Metal Gear games. The snaking valley of the opening mission is a brilliantly conceived breadcrumb trail of ever-larger settlements that see you growing in confidence as you jump from a hut to a village of huts to a sea of huts squatting on an imposing cliff face. Weaving through the tight alleys of the latter, or trying to pass over its plodding guards by hopping between rooftops, is so palm-moisteningly tense that you forget that it's but a tiny speck on a map you're free to escape to at any time.
Story-rich missions tend to unfold in regions penned off by mountainous terrain. Big Boss' hunt for a secret Mujahideen hideout, for example, is channelled down a valley that forces him to scale an entire dam on the way - a location that's so large it would serve as a standalone level in any other stealth game. Just as you wonder if Kojima is cheating by splitting the map into manageable chunks he gives you a mission to destroy a battalion of tanks as they trundle across the entire world map. All of a sudden you've got 20 square miles in which to plant a CA welcoming party. Or if you hitch a ride on D-Horse, you could choose to radio for a rocket launcher airdrop and hope for the best. Whatever works.
Of course, Big Boss isn't the only one to benefit from increased scale. Alarmed Soviets in one part of the map can up the defence across the region, with newly manned turrets and mortars cutting off precious escape routes. Brilliantly, new soldiers don't magically spawn from monster closets but travel from nearby towns. It's possible to anticipate back-up and booby-trap the road access, or stop the cry for help entirely by sabotaging communication dishes before engaging. Ground Zeroes introduced the enticing idea of stealth with consequence - that the body found on one side of the base could trigger a crisis on the other - but seeing these repercussions play out for miles is awe-inspiring.
Retreat from populated areas and you find a much calmer game. Side-Ops, non-essential missions, tend to fill the spaces between bases, be it tasking you with hunting a legendary bear or capturing members of the 1975 Mother Base team who've gone mad in the wilderness. Hunting the former has a real Red Dead Redemption vibe, right down to quick time-у dodges to escape swinging claws, while the latter can channel lunatic strength to knock Big Boss out cold with a single punch. Our attempt to take out one jabbering madman becomes extra difficult when he draws Boss too close to a guard outpost - the resulting conga line of pursuit is straight out of Benny Hill. Another win for sandbox stealth.
“You will fight like a real soldier fights. You will forget what hollywood taught you” (Ocelot)
Your rough aim in The Phantom Pain is to build Mother Base Mk2 so to enact revenge on those who destroyed Mkl. As Kojima's plots go, it's easily his most accessible, glossing over much of Big Boss' tangled past to inject the relentless drive any good revenge story needs. Fans who want to dig deep can listen to hours and hours of interviews and briefings stored on iDroid cassette tapes, but the game never imposes its mythology on you. Instead it focuses on the business of running Mother Base and taking on jobs to boost the Gross Military Product (GMP) needed to fund expansion and pricey operations in the field. You're a super soldier-cum-accountant.
Aside from a few key story missions, such as extracting Kaz at the beginning, jobs arrive in batches to tackle in any order. The first three involve assassinating a Spetsnaz officer responsible for a 'scorched earth' campaign; extracting an engineer from heavily guarded barracks (very similar to rescuing Paz in Ground Zeroes); and destroying satellite dishes| in a communications base. Like Peace Walker's similarly structured missions, many episodes don't feature cutscenes to fill you in - Kaz briefs you by tape and leaves you to prepare. The absence of 20-minute cutscenes feels perverse in a Kojima game, but it soon clicks: open world Metal Gear is more about you telling your own stories.
Take our Spetsnaz friend. He's holed up in what was once a farmhouse -two large storage barns give his men good views of the surrounding fields, and a mountain ridge overlooks the scene from the south. Having identified the target with our INT-Scope (the binocular tech capable of marking all things military) through a tiny window slit we rule out a gunshot from outside. Our first, doomed, attempt involves a traditional approach, using a sea of low mud walls near the house only to be spotted by a solider we failed to tag earlier. Shouts. Gunshots. You know the rest. Thankfully, when you reload, any targets you'd marked remain so, to prevent tedious retreading of old ground.
Our second attempt is, foolishly, more ambitious: we spot an anti-air radar which, if destroyed, opens up new landing zones for the helicopter. A landing zone that would allow for us to extract the officer instead of killing him. Higher reward for a no-kill run, after all. We plant C4, sneak our way in (making liberal use of thrown cartridges to distract guards) and thud a tranq into his skull. Detonating the C4 unlocks a new LZ, but the explosion also draws all the soldiers in the area towards it. Legging it with a burly Russian over your shoulder is never ideal; Mr Spetsnaz clearly isn't liked, what with his friends' willingness to shoot at us both. Mission failed.
On the third try we remember the mighty Fulton recovery system. First appearing in Metal Gear Solid 3, but serving a key role in Peace Walker, the Fulton is a self-inflating balloon you attach to an object and then retrieve -at great speed - by plane. In Phantom Pain, it's an advanced kidnapping device - attach it to a prone body and you'll whisk them back to Mother Base in a matter of minutes. Back at base these captives are quickly flipped and put to work in various research teams, letting you develop new gear, improve air support time or build add-ons to the base itself. The beauty of Phantom Pain, compared to Peace Walker, is that this all happens in real-time and is managed in the field.
Exploring the tech trees in iDroid's RSD tab reveals a sniper rifle that would end this mission in a single bullet. RSD is one man short of the required criteria, so we swipe one of the officer's bodyguards, assign him the position, build the rifle (instantaneous), order it as an airdrop, unwrap the parcel like a kid on Christmas day (the animation involves Big Boss hungrily diving into the supply crate) and test it on Spetsnaz skull. The effect is totally intoxicating: the perfect marriage of five different systems to engineer the ideal outcome. And this is Mother Base in its infancy-ten hours later it has a private army to send on side missions and a zoo packed with kidnapped animals. The scale is dizzying.
All this for one run-through. You can always do better, and are encouraged to try: by a ranking system that champions non-lethal and unseen runs; by the promise of greater GMP for smarter play; by optional goals to earn intel tapes that take you further down Kojima's narrative rabbit hole. Only unveiled upon completion, these additional objectives reveal how elastic each scenario is. Why assassinate three generals when you could kidnap them on the way over? Can you defeat paranormal assassins without using the one weapon designed to kill them? Do you think you can blow up a tank and pick a rare medicinal herb? Okay, so some are easier than others.
Picture it this way: some people milked 20-plus hours in the pursuit of perfecting Ground Zeroes. Now imagine a map comprised of tens of interconnected Ground Zeroes. That wondrous thing in your mind's eye is The Phantom Pain.
“Heaven’s not my kind of place anyway” (Bigboss)
Two days is an unusually generous amount of time to spend with a game before the review code arrives, but in the case of The Phantom Pain it's essential to understand the complex web it weaves. Our session began with a cinematic prologue that could be none-more-Kojima, only for him to step aside an|d offer us his cherished director's chair. Soon we were choreographing thrillers and action films. Like the one where a prison break turned sour, forcing us to keep the guards busy with a David Bowie-spouting gunship as we pulled off a no-chance-in-hell Fulton extraction through a skylight. We're biased, obviously, but it made Dark Knight Rises' aeroplane escape look like Heathrow arrivals.
And every film you make rewards you with even better props and locations for the next shoot. What started with a tranq gun, a horse and nine-years of pent up aggression was, after two days, the tale of a man with a robotic arm that shoots electricity, an inflatable doll of himself and the world's t deadliest sniper hiding in a nearby bush. And that was just our path - talking to other writers about their diverging routes through the tech tree, or through individual missions, painted a different game. "What do you mean you never Fulton'd a vulture?" "I can't believe you haven't tried Mother Base's showers yet!" "Just wait until you find out who Eli is..."
There's so much we could tell you. Like what happens if you try to Fulton recover Revolver Ocelot. Or how we came to be in possession of a cassette tape of bear growls. Or how to manipulate the Afghani postal service. Or why punching your loyal men in the gob is actually a good idea. Or why fixing a loudspeaker to your iDroid can be a very bad move indeed. The magic of Metal Gear Solid is alchemy: if you think to put two systems together, they are all but guaranteed to react in some useful/surprising/ barmy way. The open world sandbox is the genre that challenges players to ask 'what if?'. In Kojima Productions, it feels like it finally has a master with all the answers.