At the risk of evoking
pj my wife anyone's wrath I'll admit that I bought it on release
Having put some hours into it, several missions and a few side missions (including re-playing a campaign mission over again) here are my thoughts. Take with a grain of salt. Your mileage may vary. One size does not fit all.
THIRD PERSON - it's a third person game. Simply put. You can engage a first person mode when using weapons and driving vehicles. It automatically switches to to FP if you crawl under a low lying object like a bed or a very low footbridge over a shallow creek, etc. You can technically bring up a tactical map (your "iDroid") and switch it to become a minimap of sorts and this forces you into a first person mode.
So ultimately *in theory* you could play this game almost entirely in first person, but my God you would have to be a masochist. It's hard enough to play it third person. Playing it as an FPS would be a frustrating mess of not having sufficient situational awareness, fighting with the controls (which are ostensibly designed around third person view) and hating the feel of the FPS responsiveness. This game is in no way (at this time) optimized for FPS shooting. The controls are... loose and don't feel good with a mouse / keyboard combination. Which brings me to:
CONTROLS - Once again we are faced with a console port. At least this time the game is a LOT more complex and doesn't feel quite as "dumbed down" or "casualized", but it's still a port and PC is still on the backburner. This can be evidenced by a number of things not the least of which is all onscreen prompts use gamepad icons (i.e. "Use [shows rightstick icon] + press RB to select the blahblahblah"). Now I know a lot of people play with gamepads and if you do this may be a non-issue for you, but for those who don't it's a bit of an annoyance. Coupled with no mouse support in the menus (you have to use keyboard and space bar to select many options) it's a little frustrating. Frankly you can tell from controlling the main character that the game was definitely designed for use with a controller. Some of the movements are oddly mapped (surprise surprise) to the point of watching me try to turn snake while he is crawling prone is akin to watching your grandmother try to play Call of Duty. It's painful.
Many of the default mappings are a little odd (C instead of Control for crouch) to a lot odd (Hold F for binoculars and while holding that press V to change zoom and while doing THAT press Q to get intel on the object you are observing and so forth). Selecting the "Phantom Cigar" (which is kind of cool) to pass time is a royal PITA. There's a myriad of control options and I did remap things only to have them mysteriously revert to default later. Maybe this is a bug. Maybe several of these are. Maybe they can be modded. Dunno yet but for now it's an annoyance and if the game didn't shine in other areas I may have said screw it and moved on to other games until it was fixed or I could watch a video, read a tutorial, or something to figure out how to make this game less labor to play. Hell I still may do that anyway.
EDIT - they just released a patch for controls accidentally resetting to their defaults when you restart the game.
Regardless there are a LOT of controls and a variety of situations where you have use different ones. I like that the game has a level of complexity to it and a lot of different options. I don't like that it feels cumbersome and that you can tell there was some "lost in translation" here between the GUI team and the rest of the game (gee what other game has problems like that I wonder? Hmmmm). I think whether it was Hideo Kojima, Japanese games/gamers in general or just Metal Gears legacy of always trying to be a bit odd - something is taking this from a great easy to control game to a somewhat cumbersome one.
Again - may not apply to the reader as you may use a controller or be more adept at surfing the option menus and set it up to work a lot easier and so forth. I'm just dealing with MY inability to gel with the default controls.
STORY - Well first and foremost this is a Metal Gear game so that means - Modern FICTIONAL Military meets Anime action. So obviously this isn't Tom Clancy. It's Hideo Kojima game. And you know that because it's presented to you like NINETY FREAKING TIMES in the first hour of the game. Seriously. It's obnoxious. To the point of a joke where on the movies credits it's like:
Direct by: Bob Smith
Produced by: Bob Smith
Based on a screenplay by Bob Smith
Starring: Bob Smith
etc.
Holy crap. We get it... I think maybe people have told old HK a few too many times what great games he makes. Anyway I digress. The point here is that the game uses an unsual... or unique depending on your perspective fake movie credits style at the beginning and end of each chapter (i.e. Starring Solid "Venom" Snake, Ocelot "Shashanka" Revolver, The Spetznatz Commander, etc.) Not a big deal, but I'm already tired of seeing a series of end screens proclaiming HK names and Konami (yep there's a big old Konami splashscreen - the kind you usually get at startup of a video game - after ever single campaign chapter while playing the game... okkk... moving on)
Now that I got that out of my system I will say the game is VERY cinematic with the cutscenes. I really do like them. I think he DID do a great job of putting together really interesting stuff and I've only seen the first bits of it. Dialog wise... well... it's fine, but the Japanime thing shines through occasionally and sometimes the dialog may seem odd. Overall though Kiefer Sutherland does an AMAZING job as Snake and I love the way he delivers his lines. Troy Baker's voice is in the game as well and of course all the voice acting is top notch.
The intro level was something I've never seen before and kudos to them for making an intro where the hero is a battered shell of a man on his last legs and you LITERALLY have to drag him inch by inch away from danger. And danger never lets up. He starts in a bad place and you have to get him out of it. I don't want to reveal any spoilers, but suffice it to say it's not the typical "oh the hero is hurt, but he finds his second wind!" type of thing. They break the hero into a thousand pieces and hand you the mess. Granted a great deal of it is scripted, but I was impressed with it and it really drew me into the game.
Now during that (very long BTW) intro you do see/encounter several anime style enemies and there are times when you are wondering if this is a military shooter or a superhero game. This is very par for the course with Metal Gear and one of the hallmarks of the game is it's villians which act more like supervillians or Final Fantasy boss enemies than any kind of remotely realistic enemy.
Fortunately that aspect of the game is generally reserved strictly for the boss enemies and otherwise the game hedges towards a modern military stealth game.
Point being the story is good. Acting is great. Overarching plot is most likely going to be confusing. I would imagine this game makes MGS fans squee with all of the inside references and cameo appearances. I have only a basic knowledge of the games (played several, never finished any) so most of this usually goes over my head, but it doesn't seem critical to understanding the game.
STEALTH PLAY - Fantastic. Absolutely great. Makes me want to rage quit, because it's just that good. I'm NOT used to the level of intelligence that the AI posesses and so it's easy for me to constantly misjudge them or make mistakes. I don't think I've cleared anything other than a small checkpoint of 4 guys without raising some kind of alarm and generally it turns into a massive firefight involving me calling in a support chopper to lay down minigun fire (complete with Ride of the Valkyries blaring from the speakers - GOD I LOVE THAT! - you can customize the chopper music)
AI has all sorts of ranges to detect you based on whether it's day or night, there's a sandstorm, are you running or crouching or crawling? etc. There are even camos you can research that give bonuses when you lay prone on different terrain types (you can even use Splinter camo if you are in a vehicle or on a mounted gun to reduce them spotting you).
There's a variety of gadgets (some silly like the old cardboard box) you can use. Most of them are "loud" and set everyone off, but there's some distraction ones and incapacitating ones (I was surprised that smoke grenades not only limited sight but enemies caught in them were incapacitated with coughing fits). Snake can throw empty magazines ala Jason/Ajays rocks to distract guards, but the range isn't great on them and you have to arc them like grenades.
In general the game rewards the patient player who carefully stakes out the area and observes where all of the enemies are, their patrol routes (some are random grr) and so forth. Wait too long though and at sunup / sundown the shifts change and so you have to re-asses.
There are lots of tactical opportunities you can explore like shutting off generators or sabotaging radio dishes so they can't radio for reinforcements and so one. Unlike Far Cry the enemies are all assumed to have wireless radio on them and they won't run to an alarm box. Instead they will just shout out to one another over their radios and so it's harder to "shut down" an outpost. Fortunately (?) you are patched in and can hear them talking. You can even capture interpreters who if they know the language will put up subtitles so you can understand what the enemies are saying.
You can cause uproars in one place to pull in reinforcements from other locations to soften those up and so on. All sorts of fun stuff.
Apparently as you play the game the enemies will change up equipment to try and counter things you are doing too much. So if you use a ton of headshots with the tranq gun they will wear steel helmets, too much smoke/gas and they wear gas masks, attack mostly at night and they bring out more lights and night vision gear and so on. I haven't actually played far enough in for this to happen yet.
Bottom line the stealth and taking out enemy outposts is the strong point of the game (as it should be)
OPEN WORLD - so "open world" name is a bit of a stretch. You do get a large combat area, but the maps are broken up into into very big "combat zones" and in order to explore them you need to take a mission or a side mission. You can't just jump in the chopper and go where ever. Well you can but only if you pretend your going to do a mission there LOL
It's not however a massive seamless open world you can travel across like in Far Cry.
Don't let that dissuade you too much as the combat zones are pretty damn big and you often find it easier to use your horse or a vehicle to get around. You can call in the chopper, but it can only land in specific designated spots.
EDIT - on playing further into the game I realize now that you can "extract" from later missions simply by using a land vehicle instead of the helicopter. Doing this ends the mission, but sets you into an open world mode where you can travel throughout the entire open world rather than just the specific area normally defined by the mission. So basically you CAN play the open world aspect after you finish the first 4 or 5 main campaign missions.
There's no "fast travel" per se, but you can collect manifests from cargo pads and supposedly if you crouch in your cardboard box on one of these AND the enemy is not in an alert state (rare for me) you can get picked up by their delivery system and dropped off anywhere you have collected a manifest clipboard from. I haven't tried this yet. Nothing so far in Metal Gear has been truly instantaneous and I like the views you get as the chopper picks you up and drops you off as the sequences are fairly long.
The animal life is really well done too with lots of predators and prey running around. You can bag them and send them back to your base. Naturally the first thing I did was tranq a Crow and send it back to base so I could use the Raven symbol on my base (true story)
Horseback riding is fantastically done and feels good to me. In fact the horse and wildlife feel VERY Red Dead Redemption to me. Which is a good thing!
You can also collect plants and minerals to send back to the base. Probably the most fun thing in the entire game to me is running around and balloon lifting everyone and everything that isn't nailed down in the game world.
Seriously the Fulton Device is way too much fun to play with.
SOUND - The sound is of course very good. As I said phenomenal voices acting. Even the enemy chatter is good and interesting. The ambiance in the wilderlands is very good. Sound is directional so for example you can turn your mouse and try and determine where you hear a truck coming from. The game has a folder you can dump custom music into and Snakes cassette player will play music and briefings through it if you want. In fact another thing I find funny is you can collect 80s music tracks scattered around the missions in enemy boom boxes. So if you want to listen to She Blinded Me With Science while skulking around or have your chopper blare some ASIA while picking you up and dropping you off you an do that.
FINAL THOUGHTS - I'll wrap this wall of text up and say it's a very, very good third person stealth action game. AAA title that just needs a little polish. I can't comment if the story will ultimately be good or a convoluted mess, because I just don't know. I can say the few days I've been able to I have snuck in many hours as I could be it draws me back (stayed up until 3:00 AM the first night... yikes)
It's not an extremely realistic game (obviously) so this isn't ARMA, but it is a FUN game while still maintaining CHALLENGE which is unusual in this day of extremely easy "big explosions" pew pew pew fests. Recommended.
(you'll see why if you watch the first part of the video)
