METAL GEAR SOLID V: GROUND ZEROES

Metal Gear Solid V is a strange mixed bag of an experience (that goes for both games!) Ground Zeroes is basically a prologue for The Phantom Pain, coming in at ~6 hours of gameplay. It's not worth the 20 USD they're selling it for (the 30 USD bundle for both games is a much better deal). It also lacks a lot of polish both as a PC port and as the first chunk of a then-unfinished (and still-unfinished) game--controller support just breaks sometimes, the game likes to make your mouse cursor visible right in the middle of the screen, and certain mechanics are pretty jank (see: the dive). That being said, it's actually the best part of the whole MGSV package. The level design is great, environments look good, music is memorable and appropriately compelling, cutscene and voice direction are pretty good, and the mechanical design of the game is extremely refined (coming off of MGS4 and Peace Walker). There's two notable complaints I have: 1. There's not much to do and it all takes place on one relatively small map. There's only a handful of missions, most of which are like 30 minutes long. Sure, you can complete them in a bunch of different ways and you unlock more choices of starting equipment by beating them so there's some replayability (kind of like a Hitman game, to be honest), but the game just doesn't have the variability to make even its meager runtime work. 2. About that starting equipment, and items in general, there's just not very much. There's no cardboard box or other fun items like that, and there's not many weapons to pick from. On paper every mission has a thousand routes, but in practice only a handful of strategies are truly available for the player. Last thing: The movement in MGS Delta feels very similar to the movement in MGSV. It's not really related to the review I suppose, but I found that interesting and I think it *should* make GZ and TPP more comfortable to players coming off of Delta, but for some reason Delta's control layout doesn't match MGSV's (why is A the crouch button in every other MGS game except for Delta???? why did Delta have to be different??). If you played Delta before hopping into MGSV, you might be in for a rough time relearning some controls and muscle memory. (Also at least play Peace Walker before MGSV!! You're losing a lot of important story context if you don't!!)