Hideo Kojima isn’t normally one to practise what he preaches. The Metal Gear saga warns against puppet masters who would govern our lives from the shadows, but does so in adventures traditionally trussed up by directorial intent and a rigid script. Kojima’s self-contradictory nature is perfectly captured in The Phantom Pain when series mainstay Revolver Ocelot berates new recruits for “fighting as Hollywood taught them” only to spend a few seconds swivelling a six-shooter on his finger in slow motion. This is the same man who, two hours earlier, helped us unload a shotgun into a flaming unicorn. The series has made knowing nods to the conflict between authorial vision and agency in the past – think of Raiden at the end of MGS2 – but until The Phantom Pain (and its playable prologue, Ground Zeroes), it had not sought to remedy it.
Reconciliation begins in the topography of The Phantom Pain’s two regions: Afghanistan and the Angola-Zaire border. Wide open plains welcome free roaming and meandering flower-picking (Big Boss hasn’t turned peacenik; you craft blooms into potent tranquillisers), but predominantly exist to offer freedom of approach to the villages, palaces and military bases where missions play out. Sweeping the area with a pair of binoculars marks guards in the vicinity and begins to reveal a level designer’s hand at work – a convenient sewer channel under a bridge, a crate with which to hop a fence – but there’s never a single, clear entrance. A warren of alleys swarming with guards and a stretch of desert watched over by a gun turret represent two very different tactical demands, with even more variation when you factor in a day/night cycle that punishes dawdlers with a change of patrol pattern.
Nervous guard AI means your chosen path isn’t even guaranteed to play out the same way twice. A turn of the head or sneaky cigarette break might give them a glimpse of Big Boss belly-flopping behind a boulder, a sizzling white halo confirming that their curiosity has been piqued. Will they wander over, call for a friend, or register the movements on the radio? Not knowing allows trouble to bubble up organically, requiring a heart-thumping burst of improvisation to avoid further escalation. Crucially, guards are not gifted with the supernatural prescience that plagues most stealthaction games, so when a full alert does descend, there’s always a fighting chance to escape. Combined with the threat of lost progress – the result of wide checkpoint spacing – this instils a will to live, heightening the tension of the kind of escapes that in earlier Metal Gears might break down into Benny Hill-like chaos.
Moving away from easily predictable AI makes for a more demanding game, countered by the sheer volume of support systems that exist to scale The Phantom Pain’s stealth difficulty to your liking. Activating Reflex Mode grants you a slow-motion second to silence any guard that spots you. The stress of landing the shot, especially against heavily armoured soldiers, rules it out as an instant-win solution, and also makes the amplified thud of tranq dart meeting skull all the more satisfying. Reflex also inadvertently generates those ludicrous moments of slo-mo posturing Kojima usually crams into cutscenes: being spotted as we drove off a cliff rendered one helpless freefall as a majestic Thelma & Louise tribute. Louder film tastes are replicated in bombing runs that wipe all life from the map, but punish your end-of-level ranking in the process. There’s even a Nintendo-like solution in the Chicken Hat, a novelty costume unlocked if you fail repeatedly that sends those who spot you into paroxysms of laughter. It may be beneath your dignity, but it’s a playful safety net and makes for the most accessible Metal Gear yet.
At the other end of the difficulty spectrum lies a series of late-game mission remixes that force you to dig deeper into Big Boss’s core abilities. Total stealth runs take away Reflex and fail you on a single sighting, turning once-simple operations into painstaking crawls. Hardcore remakes are less subtle, crudely upping the challenge by reducing your health bar and arming grunts with rocket launchers. The best are Subsistence runs, in which Big Boss has to source his equipment in the field. Ambushing a soldier for his gun offers a tiny foothold, but when your objectives turn to demolition, you may find yourself scavenging landmines and lobbing magazine cartridges as makeshift detonators. Working as a lone agent to turn an army’s resources against it is tactical espionage action at its purest.
When it comes to the ‘action’ portion of that tagline, responsive over-the-shoulder aiming and a vast arsenal modelled to Kojima Productions’ normal fetishistic degree makes for a sturdy shooter, even if Big Boss’s frail body and end-of-level rankings that favour stealth prevent this from becoming another sandbox power fantasy. Or rather, the power it promotes is brainpower, building in the flexibility for ingenious solutions closer to the likes of Hitman: Blood Money than Crackdown. There’s a clockwork structure to many of The Phantom Pain’s missions that invites you to exploit anticipated movements. Why attempt a difficult sniper shot on a hunkered-down commander when you could plant C4 in his office before he arrives? Or even better, surreptitiously attach C4 to the soldier due to meet him, saving you having to enter the base at all. As the tech tree grows, beefing up shot range, arming your dog compatriot with a knife, or granting you a water pistol, so does the scope for malicious ingenuity.
Character development, meanwhile, relies on exploiting the battlefield in a more nuanced way than attending to the usual din of open-world collectibles. Everything pilfered, from materials to men (the latter swiped via Fulton balloons), feeds into the evolution of Big Boss’s offshore HQ, Mother Base. The destruction of its first iteration in Ground Zeroes serves as dramatic impetus for revenge, but also provides an opportunity to deepen its systems. It can be decked out in garish hues and explored on foot, but your management isn’t confined to downtime. Reassigning staff from the ground helps you adapt to new threats, be it hastening R&D’s discovery of an invaluable tool (avoiding those Deus Ex: Human Revolution quandaries where a stealth loadout collides with an immovable action set-piece) or investing in Intel to fill the map with enemy positions.
Grow accustomed to this degree of freedom and the arrival of more prescribed encounters can be jarring. Repeat meetings with the superhuman Parasite Squad are a particular low point. Not only are these teleporting mutants grossly overpowered, but the win conditions in engagements against them appear to shift arbitrarily. One moment you’re encouraged to flee; the next, to stand your ground and fight. Although you’re never more than a stolen tank or airdropped rocket launcher away from defeating the Parasites, the heart does sink when their name appears in a level’s pre-credits.
It’s a shame, since other story-critical missions – accounting for a quarter of the overall tasks – deliver the cinematic moments that so often fall flat in openworld games. Steep contours in the landscape subtly partition off stretches of land where traditional Metal Gear bombast can enjoy some privacy – a foggy jungle crevice where plastic soldiers mingle with the real thing to confusing effect, or a vast crumbling garden that’s home to a furious sniper. The latter gives a taste of what The End duel might have resembled without PS2’s limitations cutting the arena into smaller segments. It also showcases a Big Boss more up to starring in these moments, his smoother movement and the ability to press into cover and clamber up cracks opening up escape routes for a more urgent game of cat and mouse. Having a more capable hero means cinematic flair need not be relegated to the over-indulgent cutscenes of yore.
For longterm Kojima acolytes, news of a leaner Metal Gear Solid may sit uneasily. Yet it’s not that Kojima Productions has abandoned its wackier ways, rather it has tucked them where they won’t frighten off newcomers. And for an entry designed to tie Big Boss’s Cold War arc with Solid Snake’s later operations, this is a remarkably friendly jumping-in point. With backstory kept to a functional minimum, it falls to hours of optional recordings to fuel the conspiracy theorists. Playing through Big Boss’s headphones as he rambles around the world, it arguably allows weird moments to arise that out-Kojima Kojima: listening to Dr Emmerich babble his way through Metal Gear evolution as you tranquillise goats and tie balloons to them is so surreal it could only have arisen through emergent design.
Kojima’s games have never suffered for a lack of ideas, but the short dashes between cutscenes were never fertile ground for them. Planting them in open plains allows them to blossom, entwine and collide in fascinating ways. If Kojima’s less dictatorial and more systemic approach to communicating his themes results in a Metal Gear Solid that sacrifices some of this series’ more baffling character, it’s in the name of delivering its finest tactical espionage action yet.