4/5 ★ – Uncle_Phuncle's review of Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain.

After finishing Metal Gear Solid 5 I feel like I played this game in the best way possible. Not that I am the best player in the world or anything (which I am but don't tell anyone) but rather that I experienced this game in the best way possible. This was my first Metal Gear game so the story absolutely meant nothing to me. I appreciated its function as a means to tie the story missions together, but beyond that I did not care about the story whatsoever. So in that regard, I have no complaints with it. I also don't like it. Completely neutral on that topic. But the gameplay tho. Ooooooh boy the gameplay. The wealth of options is the best part here. It feels like there are infinite different ways to solve each mission. The amount of tool you have at your disposal is crazy and you just wanna use all of them. The Fulton is the best thing about this game, as choosing whether to Fulton someone or take the easy way out and kill them gives each encounter a lot more depth. And the ranking system after each mission gives you an incentive to play optimally. Or you could play like you've never seen a game controller in your life and you can still pass the mission. That's the beauty of this game. My biggest issues come with the pacing. The first 15-20 missions are great. You're always getting new toys and the mission objectives are pretty varied. But after that, most development options are upgrades to your existing stuff and mission objectives start to repeat themselves multiple times. More high development level late game items would go a long way, as would spicing up some of the lamer missions. Oh and I also forgot to say that I didn't beat chapter 2. Hell I didn't even touch it. Doing repeat missions just to see story cutscenes that I don't care about sounds like anti-fun so I didn't do it. And I think that's part of why I had so much fun with this game. Even if the missions got a bit samey by the end of it, I never really felt like the game was wasting my time. From after the painfully long first cutscene to the end of the game, Metal Gear Solid 5 was fun. If you're gonna play it, that's how I recommend doing it.