Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes Review

It's been an agonising wait, but finally Snake is back. Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes might not be quite the full Metal Gear experience we've been waiting for, but it is a fantastic appetite-whetter to keep us satisfied enough until The Phantom Pain arrives later in the year.

Call it what you will – a  grand scale demo, a prologue chapter, a training mission - Ground Zeroes provides every Metal Gear fan a sizeable chunk of an experience designed to serve many purposes. Firstly, like the tanker mission from Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, Ground Zeroes sets up the story to The Phantom Pain in a large mission / small game format. In a mission that will take even the slower players fewer than three hours to complete, Snake, or more accurately Big Boss, is sent alone to infiltrate a Cuban prison camp to rescue two allies to his cause, Chico and Paz. If those names ring a bell then you may recall them from the PSP title Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker, which takes place directly before Ground Zeroes.

Young woman Paz, who is of questionable allegiance, and child soldier Chico, a young but gifted recruit into Snake's private military, have been subjected to horrors unimaginable at the Cuban prison camp, and Snake's sole purpose throughout Ground Zeroes is to rescue the pair and extract them via helicopter. Quite how you approach the mission is up to you, as Metal Gear Solid V welcomes the series into a new open world setting, whilst firmly retaining its roots. The prison camp has many points of entry; guards can be bypassed, knocked unconscious or killed; sub-missions can be tackled in any order you like – it's typical Metal Gear stealth taken off the rails, allowing the player more freedom in their approach. And it works.

While the full open world experience isn't explored to a massive extent in Ground Zeroes, there is still a huge sense of freedom as to how this one mission is tackled, and serves as a delicious taster as to what The Phantom Pain has to offer. Ground Zeroes takes place at night during heavy rain, allowing Snake to stick to shadows and avoid spotlights, but The Phantom Pain promises the advent of quasi-real time temporal effects, meaning you have control over what time of day your missions are undertaken.

Ground Zeroes is also very much a purposeful training exercise for the player, too. While the controls remain familiar Metal Gear fare, there are a few subtle differences, and getting used to these sets you up for The Phantom Pain's frankly daunting open world. Firstly, aside from the standard pause menu, Snake makes use of his iDroid device in real time only, so setting waypoints, planning infiltrations and calling for a chopper all have to be actioned whilst the game world ticks on regardless.

A brilliant touch is the very next-gen use of smart devices to assist you throughout Ground Zeroes (and of course later on in The Phantom Pain). The aforementioned, cheekily named iDroid, which houses your objectives, maps, mission info, etc, can be downloaded onto your – you guessed it – iOS and Android devices, and even onto the PS Vita for the PlayStation 4 players. It's integrated fully in real time through these devices just as effectively as on the screen, and works really, really well. A couple of tense moments as I lay in wait, hiding from the searching guards, allowed me to keep my pistol aimed at the door while planning my escape using the tablet on my lap, and another instance had me calling for a chopper extraction in the middle of a firefight (to the tune of Ride of the Valkyries, no less!). This is smart device integration done perfectly.

A new addition to Snake's lengthy list of abilities is the Reflex Mode. Now, when Snake gets spotted, time slows down in a tense scenario to the pulse of your heartbeat, and you have a very limited time to squeeze the L2 / Left Trigger button and pick off the guard before they have a chance to call for backup. It's a mixed bag, really. It goes beyond my expectations of mere pandering to the Bullet Time-friendly age we live in, and securing a headshot a split second before a guard presses the button on his walkie-talkie is infinitely satisfying. However, this occurs every time you are spotted (when the guards aren't already alerted to your presence), even when there's no ammo left, or even more annoyingly, when you're armed with a very inappropriate weapon. It's no use affording me the opportunity of a few seconds' slo-mo when I have C4 in my hand. The 'Alert' counter is now gone, yet the radio announcements by guards remain, which allows for more intense and agonising waiting as you hide from the investigating soldiers without the aid of knowing just how long you will be lying in wait.

You can also 'mark' enemy soldiers through use of your binoculars, a feature popularised and well implemented in FarCry 3. With many, many soldiers spread out across the map, it becomes very handy marking as many as you can, as they stay marked even if you travel to the furthest reaches of the compound.

Keeping with the typical Metal Gear tradition of boundary-pushing graphics, Ground Zeroes shows off the new Fox Engine with aplomb. From the first frame of the introduction, it is abundantly clear that Ground Zeroes is a beautiful, stunning and jaw-droppingly outstanding visual experience. The heavy rain effects as individual droplets bounce off surfaces are incredible, as are the wet effects on Snake's sneaking suit. I swear, I felt cold and uncomfortable as I was playing because the effects are so immersive and realistic.

The typical cinematics we have all come to expect with a Metal Gear title integrate seamlessly in and out of the action allowing for a fully filmic experience. The opening scene, showing a standard Metal Gear foe, complete with disfigurement and gloriously silly name, zooms in and around antagonist Skull Face's encounter with imprisoned Chico, travels with him across the map, up in the air, down the cliffside until Snake shows up. Snake has his own intro scenes, then before you know it you're in control directly from a huge-scale cinematic, with not even a whiff of a loading time. For a small taster of a game, the sense of scale and accomplishment is already staggering.

Controversially, as we all know by now, Snake's iconic voice has been replaced in a move that has upset Metal Gear zealots across the globe. David Hayter is out, but of all the people in the world to be replaced by, you could do a lot worse than Kiefer Sutherland. He lends his voice well to Snake, and the role plays right into his CV as there are a lot of similarities between the lives of Snake and Jack Bauer's. Sutherland's voice acting is superb, it's just not David Hayter. I am a massive Kiefer Sutherland / 24 fan, but can't help shake the feeling that the dialogue was still written with Hayter's world-weary, sarcastic tones in mind. However, it's only fair to judge Sutherland's efforts in Ground Zeroes on their own merits, and he scores full marks.

Despite the meat of Ground Zeroes only taking a couple of hours to complete, there is actually a lot more on offer than simply completing the mission, and whilst arguably not to the value of a full-price title, there is certainly enough to justify the discounted asking price. All you are offered to begin with is the standard Ground Zeroes mission on normal difficulty, but once that is completed you are not only allowed access to the more challenging hard mode, but a few 'Side-Ops' missions become available. All set on the same map, these missions pad out the Ground Zeroes experience and through a tough ranking system train you into being a better Snake. By the time The Phantom Pain rears its head Ground Zeroes is likely to have more than prepared you for it. Despite retreading the same ground, the variety and length of the extra Side-Ops missions cater well for those after something a little different. 

Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes is a cracking experience. Despite its short lifespan there's a large field of play covering land, sea, air, cliffs and building interiors, and enough replayability to keep you busy. By the time The Phantom Pain arrives you'll likely be fully versed in Snake's new abilities enough to hit the ground running. Graphics, sound, gameplay – there's very little to fault Ground Zeroes on. The length is short but it's meant to be, and it's countered with extra features and a discounted price. Ground Zeroes is a huge accomplishment, and God only knows just how incredible The Phantom Pain is likely to be based on what we've seen here.