Metal Gear Solid V: The Definitive Experience - PlayStation 4

It's good to be back. Though, I resented Konami for having the audacity of releasing what amounts to a VERY short, redundant, DLC in Ground Zeroes, as it's own game, and was tempted to swear off the MGS franchise altogether, the great reviews of The Phantom Pain convinced me to give them another chance. And I ended up playing through that very large campaign at least a couple times. The first for the story and all the side challenges, and again, virtually for the great 80's soundtrack, which I didn't really play with the Walkman feature until the end of the campaign, since it overlapped too much with the more important game communications, which get muddied enough, if you don't use your controllers speaker to handle the less important stuff, as that's so low and distorted it's easy to tune out. Realizing that I owned most of the games great tunes on cassette from the 80's myself, but with nothing to play them on anymore, I eagerly bought a number of concert Blu-rays (and DVDs when Blu-ray wasn't available) by the time I finished. And figuring 6 months of near nightly excursions into Afghanistan and Africa was enough, I reluctantly put my Day One Edition up for sale. Hard to believe that less than a year later I was already finding myself missing it. So, when I saw a real physical copy I could legally own, of this all inclusive edition on sale at BB, I jumped at the chance to play again. It seems they added a bug or two since my last visit. Often when selecting a different item, like a grenade, or animal trap, it'll give me the item next to it instead, even though the screen icon confirms that I selected the item I intended. And the graphics don't hold up as well paired against to the last couple Assassin Creeds. It's more on the level of the last Batman - a little blocky, and a little noisy, as if the game was still rendered at 720 and rather poorly scaled to 1080, like with the PS3 gen. Still, it looks pretty great, easily on par if not surpassing the best of last gen, despite the huge maps. Gameplay feels a little more limited than I remember too, after AC and Farcry 5. But those are about the best this generation has to offer, and unlike those, this game actually loads fast, like we were used to in the early PS4 years. So you won't have time for a 30-60 second snack/bathroom break every time you die or finish something. There's some redundancy in doing multiple missions at the same outposts, but there are LOTS of outposts and LOTS of missions, and The Phantom Pain does a much better job than Ground Zeroes did at making each mission more challenging than the last. Though it's a 3rd person shooter with 1st person elements, it's a game that rewards you for not killing unnecessarily. This is where my biggest pet peeve with the game arises. Not because it discourages killing, but because of the inept sleeping darts they give you. Somebody needs to clue in the developers that you can't simply wake someone up out of a chemically induced coma, as if they had just closed their eyes for a second, nor should they wake up on their own just a few minutes later. At the very least they could have added the option to tie and gag the person you just took out. That could have made things more realistic and interesting. On a similar note, suppressors are effective for many thousands of rounds, not just 10-20. But, hey, if reality was that important to us, we wouldn't be playing video games, right? In terms of graphics and all you can do, The Phantom Pain is easily the best Metal Gear Solid has produced, by leaps and bounds. It was one of the most ambitious games on the platform at release and still one of the most fun. Maybe I'll finally get tired of it this time, who knows. My only real disappointment is that my trophy set from the previous editions carried over. Had they clarified that up front, I might opted to continue with all the achievements I'd acquired from the previous instead of starting over from scratch. But, it's kind of fun to experience the game as if new again too. Still, it would have been GREAT had they made a new set of trophy challenges for this release to make it even more interesting.

This game is amazing! MGS has always been a great franchise, but this game takes it to another level. The controls are a little confusing at first (especially in Ground Zeroes), but soon enough you'll lose yourself in the open world. Highly recommend this game.

Good price, love it! Package came in great condition, game case was red from the best ps4 games btw, looking forward to playing this!!

Fun to play and great story line. I can't wait for the next.

As Always: The Phantom Pain is the kind of game I thought would never exist - one where every minute gameplay detail has true purpose. Its lack of story focus is sure to be divisive for the Metal Gear faithful, but the resulting emphasis on my story, my tales of Espionage Action, easily make it my favorite in the series. There have certainly been sandbox action games that have given me a bigger world to roam, or more little icons to chase on my minimap, but none have pushed me to plan, adapt, and improvise the way this one does. Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain doesn’t just respect my intelligence as a player, it expects it of me, putting it in a league that few others occupy