3/5 ★ – jdraco's review of Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes.

The cover for this game sucks ass And I’m so sick of damn-near every video game cover nowadays being either a character’s face over a boring background, the character standing or doing some pose over a boring background, or a character just pointing a fucking gun at me Seriously, though, you’d be surprised how many video game covers are just a character in the game pointing a gun at you But despite its shitty cover, this game is pretty solid And as far as demos go, this is about as good as it gets You get 7 missions in total, and in them you get a nice little playground to just kind of fuck around and learn the controls and mechanics of the game Although I will say you really only get 5 missions to fuck around and learn the mechanics for, because the last 2 are these weird “extra ops,” where in one of them you recreate certain moments from MGS1, And then in the other one you play as Raiden and kill about 1000 of these blue demons that possess people’s bodies called “snatchers” And what’s really crazy about that mission with Raiden is that it’s actually one of the more normal things that happens in the entire series I digress, though So while I’ve already said that the missions in this game are these nice little playgrounds you can use to mess around with the gameplay and mechanics, that doesn’t mean that I necessarily like them all that much Pretty much every mission just consists of doing some generic shit Like “destroy these weapons,” or “eliminate these people,” or “play as a cyborg ninja from the future and gun down 8 million soul-snatching demons in order to liberate the American black site known as Camp Omega” You get the gist, though, again, a lot of the missions just feel the same and aren’t that fun to revisit aside from trying to find different ways to complete them But then once you pretty much find every possible way there is to complete the missions, then they start to feel very stale Also, I’m just going to address the fucking 12-ton, 13-foot elephant in the room, and it’s that Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain is a game that exists A game that takes everything that this game is, everything that it introduced And it just makes it 1000 times better and makes it into an actual full-fledged video game So because of that, there is really no reason at all to go back and play this game Unless you really want to just play through every single game in the Metal Gear series, or you really want to know what happens between Peace Walker and the Phantom Pain without just watching a YouTube video breaking it down Then I could see people wanting to come back to this game And, I will say, even though there really isn’t a strong reason to play this game now, in 2014 when it came out, I can imagine people probably replayed this game so many times just to experience that gameplay and to maintain their hype for the Phantom Pain Even if that meant playing the same boring-ass missions over and over again Also, one thing I will say as well is that the controls in this game are worse than the controls in The Phantom Pain Like in this one, when you dive, Snake doesn’t automatically start to crawl unless you stop moving entirely when you dive And then also, for some reason, swapping between guns feels very clunky to me as well Although that could literally just be something that only I experienced But yeah, I really don’t know Maybe the controls aren't necessarily bad, but in my personal experience, I played this after completing The Phantom Pain, so going back and controlling this game just felt weird And I’d be curious to know if anyone else feels that way too One more thing that I want to highlight about this game, though, is that the silenced pistol that you get, which puts people to sleep, sucks ass It has no range, it rarely ever does shit, you can barely get a headshot with it, it’s pathetic, fuck that gun And fuck this game too But fuck this game in the sense that it’s pretty good, and I’d consider fucking it if it was a real person Yeah, again, this game is overall pretty solid And while I didn’t have the greatest time with it (mainly because I had to do a lot of those trials in order to get every single trophy), it still is a very impressive game And, again, as far as demos go, this is about as good as it gets, and it honestly is a perfect way to prepare yourself for the Phantom Pain… You know what, fuck what I said earlier; I’m legitimately realizing that what I said earlier was fucking stupid Literally what I just said about preparing yourself to play The Phantom Pain is a perfect reason to play this game Especially if you haven’t played The Phantom Pain already, then you should definitely jump into this game first Although I’d personally recommend only playing the first mission, because, again, the rest are pretty ass, and you can just experience better missions and overall gameplay in The Phantom Pain Also, I’d recommend buying “Metal Gear Solid V: The Definitive Experience” because paying $15 for just this game is absolutely fucking egregious And I should know because I did it once That's not even a joke either. I mean, it wasn't $15 exactly, I don't think, but I remember specifically going into GameStop just to buy a physical copy of this game, and then I remember also that the guy behind the counter was shitting on Metal Gear Solid 1 while I was buying the game So yeah, Overall, I’m giving that GameStop experience, a 2.5/5 And then I’m giving Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes, a 3/5n