Computer Game Summary XXII (Metal Gear Solid 5)

40% fun, 20% tedious and another 20% of God awful. These are the scores I give to Metal Gear Solid 5.
The games opening might be the worst thing about it. As you have to sit there for about 10 minutes doing absolutely nothing just to get to the main menu where you then spend another 20 minutes doing absolutely nothing. So then only to end up walking around a hospital for 30 minutes before eventually given the right to shoot a gun, which you can't really use for another 20. And this is supposed to be an open world game where you can tackle missions any way you see fit.
And finally the little cherry on top of the cake is the sub-par confusing story. Involving space whales, fiery unicorns and a girl in a sweater that really clashes with the real world Warfare.

On the bright side the game does open up after this point and you are given free reign to do with what you wish. And it's fun for quite a while, sneaking in on an enemy base, taking their resources, kidnapping people, knocking them out or straight up killing them. Switching your tactics from time to time just to see what it will do. Rather that be shooting them with a sniper rifle from 50 yards away or running in guns blazing like a crazed John Rambo.
And it became more amusing when you discovered that you could play as one of your combat team Associates. Which became essential after a point because my character became covered in blood and unable to wash it off. Apparently I was a little too gung ho with the shooting and The Killing, Now my character is permanently stained with blood. But you can just play as somebody else and overlooked that whole issue. Except you can't use your prosthetic arm.

There's only two flaws and one of them is livable. The first is distance and destination. Sometimes when you need to go to a certain place you'll have to traverse the entire map, you'll either have to steal a car, ride a horse or take a helicopter. But cars are hard to find, your horse can only be brought with you if you don't want to bring the attack Dog DeDe (which of course you do).
And helicopters cost you resources and if you're anything like me the idea of paying $0.01 more for anything in game is frightening to you.
So it can take a while to get from one place to the other especially in Afghanistan where there's hills and mountains all over the place.
But that's just a Nick pic, the real problem I have is when you travel around in your ''Mother Base''. You either have to drive on these boring straight Platforms in a slow military Jeep or God forbid you call for your helicopter to take you to a different location. But for some reason they decided you have to sit there and wait for the helicopter to take you to the other location every single time. And it gets real boring real quick. Especially considering the helicopter will sometimes spin around in a circle around the platform you want it to land on.

My second problem has to be Kojima story. Both in cutscene and an actual game mechanic*.

You're sitting there in the bushes of central Africa shooting down enemy combatants and getting really immersed into the Warfare of the game. You even start to get a little hesitant shooting these poor bastards as you listen to their conversations and realise they're just average human beings trying to live their life. Maybe you start taking non-lethal approaches and see if you can leave certain ones alive and only take what you must. Maybe you decide to become a monster and kill everyone in sight without a single thoughts hesitation for the consequences.
Or maybe you start avoiding the war altogether only sneaking to your Prime destination taking your Target and leaving everyone else in peace.
But none of this matters because every here and there during the mission something stupid will happen. These weird little skeleton monster men will start popping up where you have to do battle with a giant robot as if you're in some Power Rangers movie. All that atmosphere, buildup and anticipation for the greater world that you're playing is eroded away as your eyes roll into the back of your head and you sigh as you say to yourself: ''Oh God here we go again. I have to stop enjoining the game and put up with this crap for another 20 minutes.''

And the part that bothers me most about this is the over-the-top campy villain. You have to fight this Skeletor guy at some point who has this other organisation of mercenaries were apparently bad**.
You're dealing with real world conflicts and real world events. You know what's more interesting to me than a Skeletor villain. Bad Soviet operatives taking advantage of the Mujahideen fighters or even their own Soviet Army and causing human rights violations. All of this makes for a far more intriguing and disturbing villain than any sort of masquerade Skeleton Man. Or hell they have child soldiers in Zaire, Dealing with the horrible people that bring up these children would be a far more interesting story then a giant Metal Gear robot that's supposed to be the greatest weapon ever created, even though an  semi-elderly man with no depth perception can still destroy it.
That's another thing that bugs me about these Metal Gear games. They always claim how powerful and destructive the metal gear machines are but even from the games perspective they're not that bad. You can take them down with relative ease if you know what you're doing and I found engaging them easier than fighting a Soviet attack helicopter. In real life simple bombardment would destroy these machines they would be blowing out of the sky by fighter jets and if they got anywhere near the water an aircraft carrier (more correctly a Dreadnought) would turn them into dust.

There are very real reasons why we don't have giant robot machines running around. They're not very good. A small predator drone a device smaller than the human body loaded with a small missile would destroy a giant robot. And I wouldn't have a problem with this if it was in a more zany game. But Kojima likes his military equipment, he likes to talk about military procedure and he likes to use real life weapons.

There's a mission that sums up this entire problem quite well. It's operation Honey Bee in which you have to steal this rocket launcher from a Soviet base camp all while avoiding a Soviet attack helicopter. The first half of the mission is fantastic, you're sneaking into unknown territory you see this ridiculous flying tank in the sky. You get this real emotion of dread as you realise you're powerless against this machine. That helicopter will destroy you if it discovers your location and the only way you can stop it is by acquiring this rocket launcher from inside the base. It's a great setup for what I thought would be a fantastic encounter with one of the Soviet Union scariest weapons in the real world. A machine that was actually used in the Afghan war and was considered the biggest threat to the local Fighters. But instead the entire thing gets derailed if you have to fight a bunch of silly looking monsters. And the worst part is, you don't even have to fight them. You can just call your horse, Mount him and ride off into the sunset avoiding the entire confrontation. And that wonderful Soviet attack helicopter? It's gone. Who knows what happened to it. Doesn't matter we have to pay attention to made up jiggle monsters.

Now here's the thing, I don't hate  Kojima stories. They're silly, over the top and a lot of the time they're very badly written. But I enjoy them for what they are. I like Metal Gear Solid 4 and I like bits of the other Metal Gear games that I played as well. Everything was so silly, so odd and the voice acting just being bad enough that it all kind of worked out.
But Metal Gear Solid 5 has slightly better voice acting and it tries to pretend as if it's a realistic World filled with real problems. So when you introduce the ludicrousness of  Kojima's stories you end up with this strange tone-deaf Fable that really doesn't work. Your left just feeling kind of confused. Then you add on top the nonlinear progression and the giant world. The whole thing becomes a little exhausting.
It has the same problem as most open-world games. The game playing progression is huge and slow but there's not enough small things to keep you invested. At some point you're just going to get bored and if you're like me you'll just stop playing. I can't remember the last time I beat a large open world game.

I feel as if I've done nothing but complain about this game so let me give a big positive to something that many other people seem to hate. The mortars.

I had absolutely no issue with these in the game. I didn't think they were used cheaply and I didn't think the enemies shot at you immediately when they thought they knew your location. It seems sensible. And they were fun to use. Their description is the opposite of how they're actually used in the game though which is kind of funny.

''A simple projectile weapon that requires two people to use and is fairly un-accurate. As opposed to the video game where it's incredibly accurate and can only be used by one person.

Now to the best of my knowledge this is a fictional mortar that wasn't owned by any country.
Now from the gameplay perspective it's definitely based on an American modal as its accuracy is far better than any typical Soviet mortar. And that's not me trying to bad-mouth the Soviets by calling their equipment cheap by comparison. That's very practically how they did it.
Most American-made mortars were rifled; This gave them much more accurate projectiles. But it cost about 10 times the amount of a nun rifled mortar. The Soviets realise this years ago and decided to produce 5 mortars for every one American. Because rifling them only made them about two or three times more accurate than an average mortar. This means that if you created Five unrifled mortars you'd still be better off than your contemporary with their one rifled. Quantity over quality.

*When I say the story affects the mechanics of the game I mean Kojima weird characters who don't conform to the conventional fighting styles of the soldiers. You have characters like the skulls or the stupid girl with the sweater and the men who are on fire all these characters conflict with the actual mechanics of the game and they become frustrating to fight not fun just frustrating.
Now compare this with the conventional soldiers. Some of which are more powerful or have unique abilities of their own. The heavy soldiers can take a crap ton of Firepower and can't be brought down with conventional arms. The snipers can see you from a mile away and can hit you with almost pinpoint accuracy. They're annoying to fight too but they work within the mechanics of the game and become a fun challenge.


**I have to laugh at the game's morality. It paints your organisation as the good guys. You're a mercenary group with no allegiance to anybody and you're all predicated on the survival of one-man (snake). If he dies the entire organisation goes under or it gets taken over by some dictatorial power that can use it to do god-knows-what. You're just as bad as the mercenary group that you're fighting. The only difference is you don't have a skeleton for a face. But if you play the game a certain way you'll end up covered in blood with a horn coming out of your head which makes you resemble some offshoot of Satan. At the end of the day at least you're competing military organisation has an allegiance with the Soviets to some degree.