About six hours into Metal Gear Survive, one query works its manner by means of the final confusion engendered by a setting stuffed with crystalline zombies, matter-transporting wormholes, and different realities: is that this even a Metal Gear sport?
You will need to play Metal Gear Survive with friends. Trust us.
The zombies and different reality-bending gibberish would counsel that, no, Survive is one thing totally different. As unusual because the Metal Gear collection is (bear in mind the nanomachine-powered vampires, fourth-wall-breaking S&M psychics, and surfeit of superpowered clone troopers?) it has at all times been grounded, too, in one thing that resembles actuality. Every backflipping cyborg ninja is paired with a refreshingly mundane dialog between two characters about, say, nuclear non-proliferation treaties or the horrors of recent warfare. Boss fights towards geriatric, half-chameleon snipers or precise ghosts are damaged up with discussions of Cold War politics. The implausible and the true have at all times been given equal weight.
Survive makes a minimum of a passing try to preserve a few of these components in play. In the sport’s introductory sections, you be taught that the primary documented sighting of the zombies you’re despatched to struggle occurred throughout the Vietnam War, and that the American navy contained and lined up their existence as a part of the battle. The mystical ‘Kuban’ vitality that grows in glassy clusters round Survive’s panorama and animates its undead creatures is rapidly included right into a conspiracy that includes authorities black ops and clandestine political agendas. Everything is wrapped up in decidedly on-the-nose Dante references, with an AI referred to as Virgil and heavy-handed references to your journey by means of the wormhole as a visit into the Inferno’s City of Dis.
All of the items, from the ludicrous to the odd, are in place to match – in concept a minimum of – Metal Gear’s trademark tone.
And but there’s nonetheless one thing slightly bit off concerning the outcome – one way or the other, it’s a few shades away from becoming right into a decades-old collection that was unafraid to vary up its themes and mechanics with every new entry. Playing Survive, jogging throughout a desert world dotted with decaying steel constructions and piles of commercial refuse, intently resembles the moment-to-moment expertise of 2015’s Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain. The instantly recognisable sound results – metallic clicks when scrolling by means of menus and the spine-jolting synthesizer yelp of alerting a close-by enemy – are all right here. The motion, although it options extra monsters than human troopers, ought to be acquainted to anybody who performed Survive’s predecessor.
What shouldn’t be the identical, nevertheless, is the rhythm of the sport – Survive centres on repetitive useful resource gathering – or the worn-in quirks of absent Metal Gear creator Hideo Kojima’s divisive directorial contact. There could also be a mission handler with the colorful identify ‘Goodluck’, however he’s too flat to convey the sort of character wanted to face alongside the outsized characters who populate each different Metal Gear sport. The story up to now could also be extra elaborate than it must be for a sport about killing zombies in a purgatorial wasteland, however its complexity appears to exist just for the sake of being complicated.
It feels just like the essence of Metal Gear has been recognized by the inheritors of its legacy – however solely the aesthetics surrounding that essence have carried over. Despite the general hollowness that accompanies this, Survive’s oddities are, partway by means of the sport a minimum of, compelling in their very own proper. Its deal with oddball story particulars and a handy guide a rough fight system – all enlivened by the animation, visible, and audio framework it inherits from The Phantom Pain – make it a definite change of tempo from different motion video games. Even so, whereas it finds success in emulating these floor trappings, merely shuffling round in the identical garments because the collection it’s named after doesn’t earn it a spot in Metal Gear’s canon.
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