Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes

Overall: 9/10: If you personally can deal with the fact that the bulk of your time in Ground Zeroes will be playing the post game then I can highly recommend this game with no caveats. Alternatively if you’re not a big fan of the series but want to get into it, I would not recommend this game as a starting point. The price point is a bit steep for only mild interest if you’re on a tight budget, but if you have a couple extra bucks to throw around, this game comes highly recommended from a long-time fan of the series.

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Ground Zeroes provides the player with a decent amount of content and a great stealth playground.

“Metal Gear Solid: Ground Zeroes offers a promising taste of freedom, but there’s not much meat to feast on here.”

Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes is not for everyone. I can’t stress how underwhelming the game will be if you aren’t a huge fan of the series, or you can’t see yourself playing in the same sandbox enough to really get your money’s worth. But for everyone else that can’t wait to get even a taste of Phantom Pain, it’s worth the budget price of entry — especially on a current-gen console.

Metal Gear Solid 5: Ground Zeroes is a short but challenging game, and those willing to cast aside conventional expectations will find a lot more here than first glance might suggest. While I’m unconvinced that Kojima is quite ready to tackle more controversial narrative material, for the most part Ground Zeroes represents a new, more sophisticated era for Metal Gear. A Big Boss/Snake adventure has never looked or played better, and in it lies incredible promise for its enormous big brother.

Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes is developed purely for the fans. It won’t bring in any new audiences but it wasn’t meant to in the first place. It features a decent amount of content which will make the wait less taxing for The Phantom Pain.

On paper, Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes sounds like an elaborate demo. In reality, it's a bigger game than it initially seems. Spend five hours with the game, and you'll be lucky if your completion is even nearing 25%. Play for eight or more, and you'll still be wringing juice out of Camp Omega. Be warned, at face value, this game is small, but there's much more to Ground Zeroes than meets Big Boss' one eye.

This short length of Ground Zeroes is definitely a downside, but consider this: would this style of gameplay hold up after 20 hours? It might be too soon to tell, but the structure seems like a radical departure from what made Metal Gear Metal Gear. Action purists will no doubt love its combat-centric gameplay, but those looking to wax nostalgic with a MGS title from 2014 best tread with caution.

Hideo Kojima is one of the most talented and respected developers of all time. The patriarch of the Metal Gear franchise has led us on one Hell of a crazy ride over the course of the last year or so, that saw just as many twists, turns, and red herrings as the plots of the very games that he’s famous for. The end result of this masterclass in deception was the announcement of Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain and its prologue Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes. However, now that the agonising wait for more tactical espionage action is over, is there enough in the developer’s pricey preamble ...

Splitting Ground Zeroes back into a separate release was always going to be contentious. Thankfully, there is a lot more gameplay and depth than the early reports of the main mission’s length suggested and it’s full of potential for exploration, fan service and Kojima’s particular brand of hackneyed allegories.

Can the stealth series that sold the PlayStation 1 still hold up today?