Unpopular Take: Metal Gear Survive (2018) is Actually Fun
A Recipe for Disaster
I’ll be frank; most people have either never heard of this Metal Gear spinoff, or heard enough bad press to make avoiding it with a ten foot pole a number one priority. Some of those people even took it upon themselves to slam it into the grave without even having watched a gameplay trailer.
Hideo Kojima, Metal Gear’s mastermind, had no hand in the creation of Metal Gear: Survive
And who can blame them? Metal Gear Survive is the first title under the Metal Gear brand that, as the stories go, was made without Hideo Kojima at the helm. In other words, it’s not really a Metal Gear game at all. Pair a story not up to the Metal Gear standard, the presence of microtransactions, the mere mention of “survival” (as if there are not enough games in that genre, already), plus a brutally-loyal fan base, and you’ve a recipe for a game destined to be dead-on-arrival. Sub-par review scores across the majority of gaming news sites and the $40 price tag didn’t help its case in the slightest.
Talk about being dead on arrival; just look at the numbers!
Even the nearly five year old Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, a (mostly) single-player masterpiece from 2015, has well over 30 times as many currently active players at the time of writing. There’s literally and average of about 40-50 people playing Survive right now; that’s close to a tenth of the current player-base of The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, a title from 2002. On release, the all time peak concurrent players was at about 5,500, averaging 1,500 in that month; it only took one month for that average to drop to about 300, and two more for it to drop below 100, down to about where it sits now. Talk about having no chance.
Strangely, despite all the politics and drama going on at Konami, I was still intrigued when the gameplay trailers and beta footage starting popping up pre-release. To me, it looked like a polished survival experience that was co-op ready, built on an engine I already liked the feeling of quite a bit. In theory, if the gun-play and stealth were on-par with The Phantom Pain, and the crafting had enough depth to provide meaningful progression systems, I felt it could be a fun experience that I would personally value at around $20-30. So, I waited for sales to come along to allow me to snag it near that range.
The thing is, by that point, I had seen just about every reviewer I read or listen to slam it in every aspect, claiming it was a tedious, boring experience that was “clearly a cash-grab by Konami.” The press was so bad that it purged Metal Gear Survive from my memory. Literally; I forgot it existed. Some may say that was for the better, but I’ve got a unique taste in games, so who’s to say it’s not for me? It’s almost like when the commentators of an NFL game all get together to lay out their predictions on the coming matchup, only to find they’re all rooting for the same team; even if nobody voted for the underdog, it doesn’t mean the underdog has no chance in hell of playing their hearts out to outperform expectations.
You can buy a brand new boxed copy of this game for less than $10 now because it flopped so horribly, so with cost and expectations at an all time low, I decided to give it a look for myself.
First Impressions
There’s a Big-Boss cameo in the intro scene, taken from the end of Ground Zeroes
The intro scene for the game drags on for a while, more than most people would care for. I sat through the whole thing and watched it as the developers intended. The opener ties the early moments into the events between Ground Zeroes and The Phantom Pain, but if I’m being honest, there wasn’t anything ground-breaking you’d be missing if you just skipped it. Not that it was bad; it just wasn’t as concise as it could have been.
The story basically starts with you, the “Captain,” getting nearly sucked into a giant wormhole with a few of your buddies after Mother-Base crumbles under the XOF’s large-scale assault. Big-Boss and Kazuhira Miller cameo as they’re seen departing in a chopper while you and your fellow comrades are left behind to face the end, alone. The Diamond Dogs lose, and the Captain ends up comatose for a while.
A man named “Goodluck” prevents you from being casket-dropped into sea like those beside you who have passed on. He’s got a mission for you; one you cannot refuse. He claims you are “infected” with a disease from another dimension, and that remaining on Earth is not an option if you want to stay alive. With this, he sends you off to a realm named “Dite” to rescue the lost members of Mother-Base and a group called the Charon-Core, who were sent there and never returned.
It’s a simple premise, but the limited backstory, at least in the beginning, probably threw many people off and caused many “this story’s WEAK” reactions right off the bat. Again, my expectations were very low, so unlike most, I actually found the higher-budget cut scenes and decent voice-acting cool to watch.
The opening gameplay sequence is pretty darn good
Once you’re allowed to truly start playing, you’re thrown into a pretty messed up scenario; dark, close quarter hallways, dozens of zombies, and only a couple mags of ammo. The tension produced this early surprised me, and I felt that if the pacing and story kept on like this, I was in for a treat. How could people talk this down? Well, it all changed once I was allowed into the open world, and what everyone was claiming was the “grindy, boring early game.”
Leaving the Nest
It’s off-putting to regress from fighting zombies with a handgun to poking them through fences with a shitty spear, but that’s exactly what happens right away. The drastic pacing change from the dramatic early cut scenes and opening gameplay sequence probably had many people going, “so this is what garbage feels like.” Me? I’m stubborn. I said to myself, “maybe it gets better after this,” and trudged on; I’m not one to judge a book by its cover.
You’ll be doing a lot of this when you’re starting out
The early game contains a lot of grind-work. You’ve got jack for provisions, so you’re mostly avoiding fights through stealth, a strategy I found myself at home with, since it plays essentially the same as The Phantom Pain’s implementation. Food and water are annoyances in the early game, as they are not as plentiful as they eventually become; you don’t need all your meters topped off to perform well, but your max health and stamina will suffer with time.
The first hour has you building up base camp to minimum standards before you find a corpse with a gas mask and oxygen tank, which you need if you’re to enter and explore a giant mist, known as “The Dust,” which engulfs the majority of the game world with a “Stranger Things” type of ambience.
Stealth is key when you’re outnumbered by a large margin
This was when things started to get interesting for me. Within that haze lies the bulk of the game’s weapons, gear, story elements, and of course, zombies. When you’re inside, your map won’t show where your are until territory is explored and you add your traveled paths to your base camp’s AI assistant (this is done automatically when you return to base). Couple not knowing where you are with a limited supply of oxygen (essentially an exploration timer), and you’re in for some higher-stakes tension. I feel the difficulty spike here probably led many more players to give up on the game from this point on, but I wasn’t going to let a few deaths deter me from finding some progress.
After going in circles for a while, I eventually realized that by standing still, a compass ring will appear around you, and that helped me find my way to the first “wormhole transporter,” which is basically a permanent fast-travel point. The thing is, in order to activate these transporters, you need to defend them while they get online. This means you need to hold out against a horde or two by putting up fences and traps to delay their arrival. This moment was a brilliant change of pace that turned the experience from “survival game” to “tower-defense game,” which made me glad I trudged through the early slog. I barely made it out alive, as I soon realized that the zombies could World War Z over the fences when there were enough of them in proximity! That wouldn’t be the first time they’d best me.
A Tower Defense Game in Disguise
This looks like a zombie defense game I can get used to
The highlights of Survive definitely stem from its horde defense moments. With plenty of traps, barricades, and ballistic weaponry to choose from, the game gets more difficult and introduces more ways to challenge you as you become stronger.
While the early game basically consists of fighting “wanderers,” the simplest and most common enemy type, later sections introduce bombers, giant mushroom-topped beasts that absolutely smash walls and fences, exploding if not stealth-killed, along with “trackers,” super-speed ninjas that will annihilate you and jump over your defenses if you don’t make killing them a top priority. There’s also the “mortars,” which, as you can probably guess, shoot explosives and bullets from afar in the vein of Resident Evil, and fully armored zombies mixed in the ranks of the undead like the Uruk-Hai.
A healthy mix of these main four enemy types helps keep base-defense interesting, and encourages high levels of caution when venturing unknown territory in the dark. And no, guns and ammo are not plentiful enough for you to rely on them as your savior; at most, you’ll have only about 3-5 magazines of any given ammo type at a time. Guns and ammo are also pretty heavy, so you’ll have to thing twice about what you’ll be doing before you leave home, as being armed to the teeth will mean lots of firepower, but not much inventory space for looting, not to mention higher stamina consumption and slower movement speed.
You can use balloon traps to keep the hordes at bay; in the center, a bomber floats ready to “BOOM”
The co-op mode let’s you run “salvage-missions” either alone or with a couple buddies. These are basically pure-tower defense missions that let you prepare defenses for the first couple minutes before each wave before the zombies start running to you by the dozen. If you don’t bring enough equipment for the long-run, you might find yourself out of ammo by the final wave. Not to fret, though, as by killing zombies, you’ll rack up currency that can be used to speed up the digger (the thing you’re protecting from zombies), buy walker-gears (bipedal mini-tanks from The Phantom Pain), lay out traps, or simply restock on arrows and bullets. The latter three options, however, may only be done once per mission, so deciding when you really want to use them is half the battle.
Your team will receive a letter grade of E, D, C, B, A, or S depending on how much Iris Energy was mined by the digger. Every grade after D will earn you one crate of loot at the end of a match, for a maximum of 5 crates (to the best of my knowledge, that is). The higher your grade, the better your loot earned at the end will be. These missions are part of daily and weekly challenges that have potential to earn you even more loot depending on your volume and performance per game, creating a fun game loop that I didn’t think was even there.
A Polished survival Experience
So the base defense stuff is cool, but is there anything else here that’s fun? Well, it depends on what you’re into, I suppose. There’s lots of walking involved when you’re traveling about the map, and until you unlock more fast-travel points, it’s hard to stock up on the materials you require most. This is a fact that, again, probably caused many people to abandon ship and call it a day.
The base building options are pretty cool; you can really set things up as you like them
The reality is, though, that the more items you get, and the farther you make it into the story, the easier it becomes to procure more advanced materials and, in turn, better weapons and gear. Food and water also start to become more of an afterthought once you start getting a home base crew established, and you start to have dedicated plant and animal farms, medical specialists, and stationary collectors with means of purifying rain while you are away. It’s satisfying to log in and get all those notifying bells and whistles to go off, at least, it is to me.
The items you can find, unlock and use are color-coded based on tier, in the same fashion as games like The Division, Borderlands, and World of Warcraft; higher tiers of loot are always going to perform better than their lower tier counterparts, but the cost and quality of materials needed to both craft and repair them will in turn be much higher. There was a point where I wasn’t paying attention to the wear-and-tear of my high-level supplies, only to find I had to use some cheaper stuff because I could not afford to fix my favorite items at the time. It was an interesting dilemma, as it had the effect of making (some) lower tier items more desirable and semi-viable options late-game. I was pleasantly surprised to find that there were more types of gear, and gear within those types, than I expected coming in.
Salvage missions can net you lots of gear; harder missions and better scores get you even more!
Other aspects of progression include a level-up system and skill tree, with sub-classes becoming available once you get further into the story. This allows you to improve your damage, health, stamina, and movement speed, along with giving you new combos and ways to fight up-close. Some skills, like being able to grab and throw zombies into walls, or being able to stomp crawlers to death, make gear conservation more feasible than it might seem at face value.
I only crashed once in my 30 hours with Metal Gear Survive, and never once dipped below the 60fps threshold, even with tons of enemies and particle effects going off at once. This tells me the developers at Konami actually put quite a bit of effort into improving the FOX Engine than I thought they would. The controls were modified slightly from The Phantom Pain to accommodate new gameplay mechanics. Mouse and keyboard play, along with the obviously specialized game-pad controls, were flawless in my experience. Most keyboard mappings can be changed, but the controller scheme was locked as far as I can tell. Not that the defaults were ever a problem for me.
Sneaking behind an enemy and attacking nets an instant stealth kill and 50% more loot
Stealth works as intended, with most enemies being blind and reliant on noise to find you. Sprinting into tall grass yields itself to confrontation with “grabbers,” which tangle you in place for other enemies to wail on you, and venturing into dark areas might leave you in conflict with creepy “crawlers,” oversized spiders ready to jump from walls and pounce on you. Animals of various kinds litter the landscape, from teeny little gerbils to donkeys and wild dogs. I never felt the world was empty, though there were a few areas that could’ve done with more enemies.
Many people complained that the map for Survive is “literally the same” at the Phantom Pain’s map. I would argue that enough has changed within it that it’s hard to argue nothing’s different; yes, the layout is the same, but the enemies, landmarks, places of interest, and way in which you move around change enough about the exploration that I didn’t realize the map was the same until I started discovering more of it.
The people who complain that “it’s just lazy, recycled content” are entitled to their own opinion, but the complaints here sure remind me a lot of the outrage that commenced when people started to realize Far Cry Primal’s map had the same layout as Far Cry 4. Who cares? It’s not the same game.
Verdict
Story: [69 / 100] - It’s not even close to being on the level of quality Metal Gear is known for, but it’s entertaining enough for a first viewing in the vein of a Godzilla or Pacific Rim movie. There are a few good twists to be had here, and the voice acting isn’t too ridiculous, as forced as it sometimes feels.
Gameplay: [83 / 100] - Gunplay is solid, base defenses keep you on your toes, and elements of progression are present for good replay value if you like what’s there. If you liked sneaking around in Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, you’ll feel at home avoiding zombies’ line of sight in Survive.
Presentation: [85 / 100] - Survive runs on the same technology that made The Phantom Pain the game it is. UI isn’t too cluttered, performance is outstanding, and the graphics are what’s to be expected from AAA quality titles. Many classic sound effects from the other Metal Gear games are present, fitting right in. Nothing feels out of place or low-budget as a whole.
Score: 79 / 100
In many ways, I feel Metal Gear Survive is to The Phantom Pain as Undead Nightmare was to Red Dead Redemption; it’s a fun spinoff that makes use of old assets to create a new experience that stands well in its own right. It’s also one of, if not the most polished single-player survival game I’ve tried to date, with fun tower-defense moments and satisfying progression systems.
Sure, it’s not the best game; there are many flaws with its pacing and early story moments, but the twists present in the middle and later sections kept me on my toes enough to enjoy the good content and story beats that were there, without fussing about the drama that occurred behind the scenes at Konami.
I get why people were (are?) upset, but this game was buried so hard under bad press that I forgot it existed, and in my eyes, that’s unfair when you consider how many talented developers are still laboring under Konami.
Kojima was the heart and soul of Metal Gear. Metal Gear Survive is not a true Metal Gear game at all: far from it, actually. But it’s by no means a bad game, no matter how hard it flopped at the end of the day. It’s probably the highest budget flop in recent gaming history that I’ve had the pleasure of playing, and I have no regrets checking it out nearly two years after its inception.