Who here has played Metal Gear Solid The Phantom Pain and what are your impressions of the game? What do you like about it, what don't you like about it?

There are two areas in the game, three if you count motherbase and I've just reached Africa so I'm only half way into the game. As for the storyline, it's pretty awful. Metal Gear Solid 3 is the only one I've finished and I've finished it because of the storyline, but The Phantom Pain storyline is just b rate garbage. It's entertaining at some points, but there's just too much of the story that makes me cringe about how bad it is. There's literally nine times in the first mission that the enemies screw around and don't kill you only for something to happen to let you escape, another two times that they they don't kill you, one time you're actually alone and the guy lets you go saying these others are going to kill you, only for you to escape on your own. This among other stuff. Don't get me wrong, this games storyline isn't anime weeaboo bad, but it's bad in terms of how it's presented. Every mission has Hideo Kojima listed no less than 142 times. I really hate how narcisistic his attitude is within this game, considering I for one never thought he was so amazing to begin with.

If you've played the demo to this game... err.. "the prologue," then you know exactly how the game plays and the controls are identical. There's some new features added into the game that you can now do and some of the stuff actually works better(like how rolling on the ground almost never wanted to work for me in Ground Zeroes.) This game controls incredibly well, but there are some things that it doesn't do that have been on stealth games since the PS2, I think even as early as Tenchu for the PSX. There's no way you can peek inside a door before opening it or slowly opening it just incase people are in there, there's no way to take the time to open windows. So for the most part it controls very well, but these are things that are missing in the game that shouldn't be missing, especially considering that this game was in development for six years, if not more.

So I've completed all of the main missions and side ops so far and have been enjoying my time with the game, and the game is a great game, one of the best I've played this gen, but not the best, and it doesn't deserve a 10/10. There's too many problems with it. Almost every single main mission in the game feels like a side op mission. Unless you start the side op from where you're at on the field, you have two minutes or more where you're sitting in the helicopter waiting to be dropped off at your starting point. Every area that a main mission takes place you'll have more than a couple side ops in that location, repeatedly going to the same areas to do a slightly different mission, not to mention how repetitive Afghanistan feels just going through it. The enemy AI leaves something to be desired. The enemy AI is passable, but it's not what you'd expect from a 10/10 game. You can do any mission any way you please, but if you go lethal, the game goes from sort of reasonable difficult to easy. Just come loaded with C4, grenades, an RPG, and a machine gun, and you can take out an entire base like nothing. The main missions often want to remove drop off points at further areas and make you go through several bases in order to finish the mission, or collect something from this base, then something from this base. There are also a lot of other smaller issues but I won't go into them.

Now I sound like I'm crapping all over the game, but it's really because it has so many problems.

As for the good things about the game. While most regular missions play out to be like the side op missions, the side ops are side missions are much better than the average side content at most game. Think of them like a random cave in an RPG with treasure to find and an objective to get that doesn't involve the main story but it's enjoyable content that is thoroughly developed. The reason for this is that there are soldiers patrolling every base at all times of the day, so no matter when you go back to that location, it'll have the exact same feel of stealthing your way through the mission, or blowing things up if that's how you want to go about it. Additionally you can do anything any way you want, which is why you hear reviewers talk about it's not talking about the mission, it's more about talking about how you did the mission, becaus there are multiple ways to do any mission, even when you're early in the game. In reality there aren't too many different ways, but everything can go down a bit different, even more so with the amount the amount of different weapons and side weapons that you have. Going in loaded for a war is going to make a lot more noise when moving around stealthily than if you were to have less stuff on, but you can still do that(I don't leave anywhere without my trusty rpg, just in case.)

So that's my opinion of the game. Great game, one of the best I've played this gen and is a must own game for anyone that's even remotely interested in action or stealth games, but journalists are really overrating it.