Now Playing: Ground Zeroes

Metal Gear Solid: Ground Zeroes serves as something of a prologue chapter to the upcoming MGSV. As I’ve mentioned recently, I don’t really know anything about the world, story or characters of Metal Gear so I’ll be focusing this review primarily around content and gameplay. That said, Ground Zeroes does come with a lot of text detailing various events throughout the Metal Gear time-line, and it’s something I’ll certainly look into if/when I play MGSV.

So I won’t really talk about the story of GZ, although there’s honestly not much to really talk about anyway. The primary mission of GZ has you rescuing two people being held captive on a military base. You do so, stuff explodes, then you get to watch a trailer for MGSV. In all, it took me about 40 minutes to ‘complete’ GZ, although once you know where to go, you can probably clear it in half that time with ease. And this is why GZ has been criticised as being little more than an expensive demo for MGSV. And I can’t honestly say I disagree with that assessment, although I don’t think it’s entirely fair either.

Ground Zeroes is really a sandbox, a little playground for the player to experiment and enjoy ahead of MGSV. There’s a single map – a military base – with several distinct areas. In addition to the main story mission there are six ‘Side-Ops’ with varying objectives. They all use the same map, but can feel quite different to play due to the time of day, weather, enemy placement and player goals. Each mission has a Normal and Hard mode plus a series of challenges (trials) to complete. There’s also some collectible stuff hidden in the game spread throughout the various missions.

If you clear absolutely everything, including all of the trials and optional/hidden objectives, as well as attaining the highest rank on each mission/difficulty, you might get 15-20 hours out of Ground Zeroes. In that respect, calling it a demo seems a tad unfair. But unless you’re a hardcore Metal Gear fan, it’s unlikely you’ll have the patience to bother. It’s not that the missions aren’t fun to play or explore, but with a single map it does grow quite repetitive very quickly.

I played every mission in GZ 3-4 times clocking in about 10 hours of play. I can’t say I didn’t enjoy my time with the game, but the content on offer is certainly limited. Story wise, it does little more than set up the upcoming MGSV and in terms of content, GZ offers only a single map with seven missions and only a couple of hours of play (if you only play each mission once). In that respect, calling GZ an expensive demo isn’t too far from the truth. But how does it actually play?

As I said, GZ is really a sandbox that the player can mess about in. Although advisable (and you’re certainly ranked accordingly) to focus more on stealth, it’s really up to the player how they want to approach each mission. Full on combat is surprisingly viable, as I discovered on my first time through. I intended to be sneaky, only to be spotted by the first enemy. I ended up going on a rampage through the base, shooting everything that moved, tossing grenades left and right before hijacking an armoured vehicle and blowing everything up. STEALTH!

I actually think this was way too easy to do though, and unless you really care about your ranking, there’s no real reason not to just shoot your way through most of the missions. But it wasn’t all guns blazing, and I did get used to the stealth mechanics of GZ. It’s a pretty good system of various stances and speeds of movement with the ability to hide and distract combined with a surprisingly good AI.

I have to say, the AI of the guards in GZ is a real highlight. Over time, you do see through the cracks and figure out ways to exploit them, but there’s a lot of neat little touches I appreciate. You can grab an enemy and make him call for back-up, leading others into a trap. If they think they’ve seen something unusual they may radio through and let the others know they are investigating something. And if you then kill/incapacitate them and they don’t radio through an update, you’ll soon have company as more guards are sent to investigate why that guard hasn’t reported back. It’s neat.

So combat and stealth are both quite solid and fun, although I did think the enemies could be a bit bullet-spongy at times. The game looks pretty good, but the view distance isn’t as good as I would hope, and this is particularly important when scoping out an area from afar, as enemies won’t pop up until you get closer. This kind of kills any long range planning and given the relatively moderate size of the map, is disappointing. One other thing that bothered me was the checkpoint system, which seemed to have this strange tendency to ‘reset’ certain things if you reload – such as guards you’ve tranquillised suddenly awake and back at their posts.

There’s also a dumb thing I noticed in the main mission (I’m not sure about the rest) where new guards spawn out of thin air at certain points, even if you’ve neutralised every guard on the map without raising a single alarm. They just pop up guarding a door or patrolling somewhere you need to go. It makes sneakily clearing/scouting the path in advance of your objectives seem kind of pointless when new guards can just pop out of nowhere because you hit a checkpoint.

I don’t think there’s much more to say about Ground Zeroes. It’s a solid, enjoyable, if limited taste of an upcoming game. Call it a demo or not, but I think GZ has just enough content and replayablilty to justify a price tag, albeit not a very high one. If anything, it’s made me interested in MGSV, so I suppose it did its job in that regard.

6/10