As a huge fan of the Metal Gear franchise, I wanted to review Metal Gear Survive. Sadly, it isn’t worth wasting my time on a full review.
Kojima, I miss you.
I first fell in love with Metal Gear Solid on the original PlayStation and have since played every game in the franchise, including those on the PSP and the NES. There is something special about the ridiculously long cutscenes, over the top villains and insanely cool protagonists.
Enter Metal Gear Survive to ruin the party.
Gone is just about everything I love about this franchise and in its place, we have a painfully slow and gruelling survival game. In place of soldiers to take down, there are wanderers, lurching zombies with glowing red crystals where their heads used to be.
The meat of the game seems to be to journey into poisonous dust to find rare materials and blueprints for better weapons and gadgets while trying to avoid being swarmed by enemies. It’s basically like The Division only without the awesome snow-swept streets of Manhattan and the remote plausibility offered within Tom Clancy’s online title. It’s like when The Division was really bad, only worse.
Oh, did I mention that your character has to eat and drink almost constantly, otherwise the screen gets foggy and they start lurching around like the wanderers they’re supposed to be killing? It’s as fun as it sounds.
Metal Gear Survive’s world is uninspiring and, quite frankly, drab. Sand and rocks with no incentive to truly explore, other than to maybe find some old shipping crates or a military outpost guarded by the same group of enemies. If you’re imagining Mad Max’s Plains of Silence then you’re going to be sorely disappointed.
Survive is in the name so survival is also on the menu here. Metal Gear Survive copies the stale formula seen in countless other survival games, which means you’ll be gathering materials, killing animals, crafting gear and constructing a base to live in. The whole survival element feels like a way to distract players for just long enough to feel like they’ve got a bit of value from the overall experience, rather than having wasted hours of their life that they’ll never get back. Ultimately, there are too many survival games on PC that exceed that Survive has to offer to count.
And, don’t get me started on the microtransactions. $10 for a second save slot? No thank you.
Metal Gear Survive is little more than a quick cash in on the franchise, attempting to use the Metal Gear name in combination with the popularity of survival and zombie games. What we’re left with is a stale, boring, slow experience that tarnishes the franchise.
I’m worried about Metal Gear Solid 6.
