What's great about Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain is the balance. Others have really good stealth, but if you're caught you're dead meat. Some games have decent stealth, but you're always tempted to just break out and give in to the quicker, easier combat. I likened the game to Far Cry yesterday, but this is far more involved than that series, even if some of the concepts are similar.ģ. The depth in missions and in how you approach any given situation is truly some of the best I've seen anywhere. (Even in the tutorial, the mysterious Ishmael instructs you which buttons to press rather than telling you one thing with an onscreen prompt telling you another.) Everything is a puzzle to be solved, but as with the best games, there is never just one solution. As much as Kojima may be smitten with Hollywood, his games are some of the best examples of pure gaming I can think of, and this is no exception. And sometimes you stumble on solutions to problems you'd simply never expect. Often it means using your brain and lots of patience. Sometimes this means stumbling upon valuable intel on your way to the objective. The game gives you tools to achieve your mission and then let's you decide how you'll do it.
While not every mission is wildly different from the next-there's a lot of similar tasks confronting Big Boss and the Diamond Dogs-how you carry them out, even down to the tiniest detail, is pretty mind-blowing. Staggering depth in the way missions are carried out.