We’ve found little to get excited about in the first few hours.
Metal Gear Survive launched today, and because Konami didn’t provide early access to critics, so has our review. We’re working to get the full review published as soon as possible (exactly when will depend on how much there is to do), but until then, here are some launch-day impressions.
One of the first things you see when you reach the bland, zombie-infested alternate Earth where Metal Gear Survive takes place is the huge, twisted chunk of The Phantom Pain’s Seychelles Mother Base. But if Survive is set after Ground Zeroes and before The Phantom Pain, as its opening cutscene suggests, this makes no sense. Diamond Dogs wasn’t formed until nearly a decade after the destruction of Militaires Sans Frontières’ Caribbean Mother Base, so how can this be here? Is this an intentional mystery meant to fuel Survive’s oddly misplaced fantasy storyline, or a mistake borne of recycling pieces of a better game? These are the questions evoked by the opening of Survive’s thus far tedious single-player campaign. But even when you strip out the nagging continuity questions and just take it for what it is, you’re still just left with a mediocre base-building action-survival game without much else going for it.
You only get one first impression, and after the first three hours, Survive hasn’t made the most of its opportunity. There are a ton of simple but important systems to learn and unlock in its opening hour, via a series of relatively boring expositional quests, and there are presumably a handful more to go through. It’s hard to say at this point what new ideas Survive really has to offer, because so far, it isn’t much. Over the course of a few in-game days, my main activities have been hunting various small animals and foraging for fresh water to keep the hunger and thirst meters in check; crafting a spear for tiredly poking its main zombie type, Wanderers, to death; running fetch quests for two dull AI quest-givers; and of course picking up a lot of garbage.
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Survive’s opening hours are sorely lacking in compelling encounters and challenges.
Combat in Survive feels fine on a mechanical level. The opening hours focus mostly on melee before you get what you need to craft firearms, but luckily its crystal-headed Wanderers go down in a few hits with even the weakest weapon. The control scheme does a pretty good job mapping diverse sets of equipment and commands to a limited number of buttons. That makes cycling through two sets of primary and secondary weapons, a handful of explosives, and craftable barriers that can be deployed even in single-player easy to do, even in the heat of battle. That seems like it’ll be especially handy in the co-op tower defense mode, which is still on the agenda to dive into.
But despite everything working smoothly, Survive’s opening hours are sorely lacking in compelling encounters and challenges. Metal Gear is a series built on stealth, but Survive seems to fundamentally misunderstand the circumstances that make fun, stealthy escapades possible. Its terrain is flat and unexciting. Its Wanderers are mindless and uninteresting – they don’t interact with each other in any dynamic way and they don’t exhibit any challenging behaviors to overcome. As was proven in Snake Eater and The Phantom Pain, it’s possible to adapt Metal Gear’s stealth formula for new and difficult environments. But based on what we’ve seen today, Survive doesn’t even try.
The most exciting thing so far was getting lost in a dangerous, unmapped zone called The Dust, which requires an oxygen tank to enter. Losing sight of the objective, eating jackal meat to avoid starvation, dying twice, but still finding rare materials and crafting recipes tucked away inside narrow canyons and abandoned outposts before stumbling back to safety, a horde of Wanderers in tow, were some highlights. It was a scary and dangerous digression, but it’s way more fun being lost and struggling to… well, survive… than sticking to Survive’s dry fetch quests and early-stage base building.
Stay tuned to IGN for more impressions as we continue to explore Metal Gear Survive. And if you’re playing, let us know what you think so far!
Chloi Rad is an Associate Editor for IGN. Follow her on Twitter at @_chloi.
Source: IGN PC Articles
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