Game - Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes (PS4)

Snake? Snake?! SNNAAAAAAAKE!!

Never having played a game in the Metal Gear series before this – I know, I’m a heretic – except for an extremely brief flirtation with, I think, Metal Gear Solid on a PlayStation emulator and a go at the demo for Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance, where I took issue with the silly made-up word adorning the title and a control scheme I found somewhat unintuitive to say the least, I was only vaguely sure of what to expect from Ground Zeroes. I knew enough to be aware that the general plot of the series is about as easy to get a grip on as a greased ferret at a foam party for the National Prosthetic Hands Society, and a few visits to each game's relevant Wikipedia pages and some aspirin later I was forced to concede defeat to the impenetrably tangled Japanese Knotweed infestation that is Hideo Kojima's writing. 

The plot concerns two of Snake's allies from Peace Walker, Chico and Paz, who have been kidnapped by a mysterious Black Ops group and are being held at a black site prison camp in Cuba. Head of the MSF, Big Boss, formerly known as the original Snake, (Kiefer Sutherland replacing series stalwart David Hayter as VA) goes in under cover of night and rain to get them out. Having done so, by way of more or less faffing about depending on the player, Snake evacs the pair by helicopter, whereupon he has to rummage around in Paz' guts to extract a bomb placed there by villain Skullface. Almost immediately afterwards, she reveals that she has a second bomb inside her (Where, you ask? The game doesn't want you to know, and I don't think I want to know either) and leaps out of the helicopter and explodes. It's a fairly short single mission making up the game's story campaign, although individual playstyle will make some difference. There are several bonus Side Ops after the main mission, although all of them take place in the same location at differing times of day.

"No, I won't kill you. Not before I've shown you my Kurt Russell
impression."

I can’t really comment on the replacement of David Hayter with Kiefer Sutherland, but Hayter’s reported Twitter antics would hint that either he does have a secret role in The Phantom Pain, or he’s taking his replacement in good spirits, or he’s just gone looney. Sutherland says very little, all told, in the Ground Zeroes campaign and even less, verging on nothing, for most of the Side Ops. Primary voice acting honours therefore fall to Robin Atkin Downes (Halo 2's Prophet of Regret and Saints Row the Third and IV's British Player Voice) as Kazuhira 'Kaz' Miller, one of Big Boss/Snake's closest allies at the MSF. Also making up the colourful cast is Skullface, a mysterious agent who seems to literally have a skull for a face (subtle), and probably couldn't be more obviously evil if he were voiced by Tim Curry and walked onto the scene with ten puppies skewered on a broadsword.

Even with special goggles and years of training, Snake still
can't see what the hell is going on with this series' plot.

Honestly, I have a hard enough time trying to understand the Snake Family Tree of clones, alternate names, codenames and titles, and that's before I try and understand how they all fit into the plot. I think I understand that Big Boss used to go by 'Snake' when he worked for The Boss who became a traitor and died except she was actually a double agent who didn't really defect who was kept alive as the AI for a Metal Gear and Snake was the one who killed her while he was calling himself Naked Snake, and Solid Snake, Liquid Snake and Solidus Snake are all in some way clones of the original Snake who is now called Big Boss except for when he's sometimes called Snake or Punished Snake or Venom Snake and was the bad guy of the very first game which was just called Metal Gear and he's also the rival of Major Zero who is also called Cipher which is also the name of the organisation that he formed in opposition to the MSF and oh no I've gone cross-eyed. Enjoy the gameplay by all means, but if you're going to try and actually understand the plot to this series you should come prepared with several flowcharts and timelines worked out, and probably a few grams of whatever Kojima was smoking as well.

Gameplay-wise, MGS V: GZ feels like a newer and fresher take on the series. Granted, the last MGS I played was the first one, but it certainly felt to me that the control of SnakeBoss was much tighter and more responsive than I might have expected. Many stealth games that are all about stealth and evasion, like most of the Splinter Cell series before Conviction (which probably went too far the other way, to be honest) or the Hitman games before Absolution, tend to deliberately punish the player for arsing up the stealth by having unresponsive or awkward combat, where the best thing to do is perch yourself on one side of a doorway with your gun arm protruding through and shooting the enemy as they line up at the door one-by-one until you've emptied the map of them and can go about your sneaky business with impunity (anyone who's ever started a firefight on Blood Money's 'Curtains Down' level will be intimately familiar with this technique). Ground Zeroes' shooting isn't Gears of War, or even Hitman: Absolution, but the shooting is responsive enough; the limited roster of weapons have some real heft to them; and there's always the option to shoot a dead guard until you've turned him red all over, which should please fans of GoldenEye or Perfect Dark who have all tried this many times without exception.

You can't see these guys' faces, so they must be the villains.

However, Ground Zeroes is short, and I do mean short. I have probably spent more time in a single level of Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory than I have in this game's entire story mode. It would probably take more time to read the Wikipedia summary of the rest of the series' plots than to complete Ground Zeroes' story mission. I have generally worked on a per hour scheme for working out if a game is worth my money. If I spend more hours playing it then I spent pounds to get it, it must have been worth the price – you will notice that films, whether on DVD or at the movies, do not even approach this level of fiscal efficiency (books, on the other hand, must therefore be some of the most cost-efficient things you can buy). Well, the entire solitary mission that composes this game’s story mode could probably take you as little as ten minutes or as much as ten hours depending on how stealthy, methodical or downright silly you feel like being. If you're feeling particularly emergent, you could probably knock out all fifty or so guards, drag them onto a helipad, pile them around a mountain of fuel barrels and blast them all hundreds of feet into the air like corpse confetti. I went into Ground Zeroes knowing it was short, and come the end of the story mode, even with all the side missions still to do and multiple achievements still to get, I still felt a little as though I'd just played a rather expansive demo and I would rather like the full game now, please, if you don't mind. It takes a bit of an adjustment, and I certainly wouldn't like to see every fairly large game that gets released from now on try the same tactic, but I can certainly recommend Ground Zeroes as an investment, provided you don't pay too much for it. Get it pre-owned or just wait a little for it to come down would be my advice, but it's certainly a fun stealth-'em up while it lasts.

Insert your own exclamation mark and BWING sound here.

Perhaps with this shortness of story in mind, the game’s achievements have been designed to extract as much value as possible from the game itself. Achieving an S-rank on the main mission and all the Side Ops – likely to be the most difficult achievement Ground Zeroes offers – will probably take more than whatever amount you paid for this game in hours to complete on its own, requiring obsessive plays and replays at varying speeds with varying levels of stealth to work out where the main objectives are; where any side targets or missions can be found; where guards will be and when; which guards need to be knocked out, which need to be avoided, and which won’t get near enough to bother you at all; and what combination and order of managing all these elements will nab you the highest point score while minimising penalties. You could hoof those optional prisoners over to the LZ on your back for a tasty 4000 points each, but it could add an extra ten minutes onto your time, and each to-and-fro trip increases the chance of those guards you avoided spotting you or the ones you knocked out returning to groggy consciousness and sticking an M16 barrel up your jaxie and blowing your colon out through your stupid eye-patch while you practice your fireman’s lift. And even if they don’t notice you specifically, your attempt at stealth could still be shot to buggery by the slightly daffy allied helicopter AI, which likes to indulge in a cover-blowing scenic flyby of the entire prison camp almost every time it dusts off.

Like any 'B-List' or 'C-List' type game that is competent and even fun, but never original - the sort of thing you'd never heard of before you see it on the shelf temptingly priced at £4.99 - your opinion of Ground Zeroes is likely to be influenced mainly by how much you pay for it, and the kind of expectations you have going in. If you want an epic, sprawling sandbox, or a devilishly intricate and punishing stealth experience, you probably won't find it here in exactly the form you want. But get Ground Zeroes cheap, and play it a lot, and you will probably discover a satisfying, unpolished gem of a game. It's obviously intended to be a small but tantalising appetiser to The Phantom Pain, and if it's going to be like this, all I can say is: bring on the main course.

7/10 - A Solid entry in the series, but certainly not the Big Boss.