Metal Gear Survive Guide

Metal Gear Survive kicks off with a weirdo alternate history of Metal Gear Solid V, starting with that game’s opening attack on Mother Base, the home of MGS V protagonist Big Boss and his group of nationless soldiers. In the early stages of the game the survival and exploration is well meted out via small and specific missions to introduce what you need to worry about - food gathering is important upfront as health and stamina is linked to hunger and thirst, the former decreasing as the latter rise. Animals like sheep and goats are marked on the map as side missions to get you started, and you can always grab the odd gerbil along the way. The shame of stabbing tiny rodents with a six foot pipe sharpened to a point lasts literally seconds, once you see your hunger decrease. These early objectives work well to reinforce priorities and rules. There are areas full of toxic dust, for example, that you can’t enter without oxygen. This introduces a strict focus on time management, prioritisation and resource awareness. You can ‘buy’ more air but the cost increases each time, so you really have to manage what you have. Spend too long getting distracted or waylaid and you’ll find yourself quickly fighting against the clock, trying not to suffocate or starve.As you progress you set out on longer and longer forays into the world to seek out animals to kill, energy to power a return home, survivors to staff your base and memory boards to find (a plot device that has you upgrading an AI to unlock stuff). The further out you get, the more important using wormhole teleporters becomes. Using these you can jump to specific points once they’ve been reactivated. This introduces a horde mechanic with the Wanderer enemies; feral zombies with crystalline neck stumps for a head. As a rule they mainly stagger around the plains to avoid or attack as you see fit. Dealing with these larger numbers is where one of the game’s biggest features comes in: building fences and managing a defence line to hold back waves of enemies. These use all the items you can craft back at your base; things like chain link fences and barricades, as well as claymore mines and molotov cocktails. In single player that means a test of resource and strategy management as you run about placing obstructions and stabbing things through chainlinks, while in multiplayer it’s much the same, except there are three other people to shout at when things go wrong.  Because you essentially teleport in the items you build, you can drop fences in an instant dealing with perimeter breaches and holding off one problem while you manage another in a very instant and reactive way.

It’s an extremely active crisis management where you’re thinking on your feet and dropping barricades as much as you are smashing in neck stumps with a crowbar. Like in most survival games the zombie managing and base building ramps up constantly and it’ll be your limit for the demands this makes of you, against the increasing work it requires, to decide when you’ve had enough. Once the game settles into its pace you’ll be growing potatoes and keeping goats, collecting rainwater and managing medical supplies for a whole team of people; all while heading out on more and more unforgiving runs into toxic, dust-infused wastelands. As the missions, demands and responsibilities get harder it all depends on how much you want to push through that barrier. The gameplay and mechanics are sound, introducing new things just as you’re starting to settle into a routine, but there's maybe not quite enough variation to the ‘day to day’ grind. It’s worth noting that the multiplayer’s ‘easy’ missions start with level 20 enemies to give you some idea of where this pitches its overall challenge. While the very existence of this will likely offend the hardcore MGS fan, it’s a decent enough take on a survival craft-em-up with enough personality and freedom in its options to please anyone who likes tackling a challenge on their own terms. The early hours of Metal Gear Survive, when food and water are scarce, and infectious diseases are potentially just a gulp away, are grueling. I was armed with little but a spear and other crude defenses, and forced to subsist on raw meat and dirty water until I could scavenge the resources needed to build a base with the basics: a campfire to cook, a pot to boil clean water, workbenches at which to build gadgets and increasingly powerful weapons.

Early missions are a mix of desperately scrounging for food and hunting down memory boards for your talking computer ally, Virgil, a wackier, split personality version of HAL-9000. Later, Survive tasks the player with rescuing other characters who have been transported to Dite through a trans-dimensional wormhole and reclaiming abandoned bases, which house wormhole transporters that enable fast travel. This is where Survive plays its best, when stealthily approaching bases and dispatching enemies with silent kills. It’s the closest the game comes to the enjoyable open-world sandbox Kojima Productions crafted for The Phantom Pain. Unfortunately, much of the remaining gameplay centers around building defenses and fending off waves of Wanderers. This is accomplished by building walls and fences that block the zombie-like creatures from forcing their way into bases and destroying the precious wormhole generators (or energy-mining drills) that you need to protect to progress. These moments, when you’re fighting for your life with limited ammunition and supplies against a flood of angry zombies, can be thrilling. But as the game progresses, and even as your abilities and arsenal evolve, the action doesn’t change much, and the fight for survival starts to feel repetitive. While your survivor eventually learns how to build new tools and develop new resources acquired by finding recipes and raw materials throughout Dite the mechanics never progress in the same interesting fashion they did in The Phantom Pain. In that game, the player has a wealth of weapons, tools and tactics at their disposal. Enemy forces learn to counter your evolving weapons and strategies in The Phantom Pain, something not replicated in Survive, which has only a handful of enemy types.

While Metal Gear Survive doesn’t offer the same allure of ever-evolving tactics that The Phantom Pain gave players, it certainly borrows plenty from Kojima Productions’ last game. Dite lifts elements of The Phantom Pain’s Afghanistan and Angola maps wholesale. The map is populated by the same flora and fauna, and Konami reused certain structures that will look very familiar. There’s an in-game justification for these repurposed assets reappearing, naturally, but too much of the game feels like a copy of another work. Survive also revisits the Mother Base-building and personnel management elements of The Phantom Pain, letting players customize their base with resource production facilities. They can assign staff, composed of other survivors the player rescues in Dite, to manage it while they’re away on missions. Base management alleviates some of the aggravation that comes from hunting for food you can build vegetable farms, rainwater tanks and medicinal herb gardens but I found the mechanic didn’t really open up until after I’d completed the main story, at which point I was happy to end my visit to Dite. Metal Gear Survive’s single-player campaign is a bewildering, cheesy trip. It’s full of twists and turns, some of them genuinely surprising. Others are earnestly bizarre. But Survive’s story is also often lazy and hamfisted, feeling like a multipart episode of a desert island sci-fi show (a la Star Trek: Voyager or Lost), as the game dangles the promise your crew will make it home only to repeatedly yank the rug out just as rescue feels imminent. The story ends in such a way that the events of Survive feel completely pointless, and though you accomplished a seemingly impossible task, nothing’s changed. Survive is somewhat of a slog, but there are flashes of brilliance along the way depending on the kind of scrapes in which you find yourself in. You can never be too sure about what you’ll stumble across, and finding a way around any obstacles in your path without dying is satisfying much credit should be thrown Konami’s way, given how different this is. The flipside to that coin, as mentioned, is the reason it’s called ‘Metal Gear’ to begin with – aside from the obvious. Everyone would have been better off following Rockstar’s example with Red Dead Redemption: Undead Nightmare, offering this up as an add-on to Metal Gear Solid 5 or a spin on what’s possible within that world. Trying to identify it as part of the series – even with a new subtitle almost seems at odds with the premise.

There was at least one major surprise in Metal Gear Survive, however, that helped me overlook the game’s narrative silliness: the game’s chief antagonist. Designed by artist Masahiro Ito, the creator of the Silent Hill’s iconic Pyramid Head and bobblehead nurses, the big bad of Metal Gear Survive is an unexpected terror that establishes the game as more of a stealth-horror hybrid. That enemy is also the justification for inserting an actual Metal Gear into a game that otherwise barely warrants the series’ namesake. Metal Gear Survive’s single-player is only part of the experience. A few hours into the game, players unlock co-op Salvage missions with teams of up to four players. The goal in Salvage missions is similar to many of the base defense missions in the campaign: protect a drill as it extracts energy from Dite, while hundreds of zombies claw their way toward it. Teaming up with other players in a frenzy of building, defending and zombie-killing feels rewarding and empowering. It’s an enjoyable diversion from the lonely monotony of Survive’s story, where you spend much of your time simply trying to stay alive against difficult odds, but doesn’t feel essential. Like most survival games, Survive wants you to get into a groove of base-building to acquire more materials, so that in turn you can continue constructing. The crafting system is a nice touch it puts more power in your hands but going through the motions can be draining if you’re not engaged by its wash, rinse and repeat approach. It isn’t as if combat changes this much up, either. While you may be expecting a good dose of stealth to be important, the reality is that you need to keep your hunts varied. A solid sneak attempt can pay dividends, but it can also trigger an entire horde, sparking attempts to frantically erect more buildings in an effort to stay alive. It raises the tension well, but whether or not that makes for a good video game will vary wildly. It never really feels overly fun. Survive does embrace what the survival genre is all about, and if that idea and the franchise’s look floats your boat then you’ll probably be pleased. Remember, though, that you always have to be online, and that microtransactions feature heavily. Even creating a new save file – if you don’t want to delete your original – will cost you, and how that’s a good idea when the rest of the game is so hard-going is anyone’s guess. Everything about Survive just feels a little too dry for its own good.