This feels more like a Ubisoft game than a Metal Gear Solid game: open world, tons of side missions, and a lot of farming for resources. It was honestly a pain getting through this MGS. I love MGS3 and MGS4, but this one just felt tedious.
There are way too many unnecessary transitions and cutscenes. You have to watch yourself getting into the helicopter to start a mission, then go through the same thing again when leaving a mission. The credits roll after every mission, which gets old really fast. About 90% of the missions feel like side missions, while only 10% actually feel connected to the main story.
The Forward Operating Base (FOB) system is another part that felt completely unnecessary to me. Managing bases, staff, resources, and the online invasion system just adds another layer of clutter to a game that already has too many systems competing for your attention. I never felt like any of it made the core MGS experience better.
I also really disliked the weapon development system. Instead of gradually giving you a carefully selected set of weapons and tools that fit the missions you're being sent on, the game makes you farm resources and wait for weapons and upgrades to be developed. It turns progression into resource management rather than something that feels connected to the actual missions.
The huge amount of freedom also works against the game sometimes. Because you can develop so many weapons, gadgets, and upgrades, you can eventually find extremely powerful strategies that make a lot of missions much easier than they probably should be. The game does try to adapt to your playstyle, but I still would have preferred more limitations. Give me the right tools for a particular mission and force me to figure out how to use them effectively. That would have made individual missions feel more deliberately designed instead of giving me a massive toolbox and letting me repeatedly use whatever strategy works best.
The beginning of the game, especially the intro, feels very much like a Kojima production. But once you enter the open world, it starts to lose that "Kojima magic" for me. Compared to the previous games, this one was a total miss.
I also don't think it has aged as well as the earlier installments. Maybe this style of open-world gameplay felt better when the game originally came out, when this type of design was much more of a trend. I don't know.
Either way, it wasn't worth it for me. I wouldn't recommend it.
