Metal Gear Survive – Exp Ops

This is my 80-year-old chocolate youtube video. I know it’s going to be terrible, give me a sickness and I simply do it for the views. Metal Gear + Multiplayer zombie survival = something nobody has ever asked for (well except the Konami executive who wishes the game division would just go away). Still it could be a hidden gem. There are plenty of quality staff still desperate to release a good game and prove they can do it without Kojima lets see how it goes.

Positive thinking, no good going into this expecting a trash fire of a game. I’m typing this as I say it in the hope that it makes things true. The title screen is nice… Fancy music very much like Terminator2 and fancy graphics. Come on positive.

Let’s go!

It’s off to a good start; That’s a surprisingly detailed custom character system. I wonder if this is what the original Metal Gear Solid 5 developers used to create NPCs? It’s detailed along a Bethesda level of tinkering and easily could burn through hours in this alone.

Let’s go!

Oh the customisation was fairly pointless as the game can’t run in the same resolution. Still some of it comes through I suppose. The Matrix/Abstergo setting for the menu is cool. The menus and tinkering are not ok. Still it’s a free place to get to grips with the controls, feels like MGS5 which is fine and I can point and shoot that will do.

Let’s go!

Oh dear… ooooh dear. There’s no positive thinking around this.  The game looks worse than MGS5. Oh so much for knowing how to control this, the controls feel worse than MGS5, sort of clunky and not quite right. Ok positives…. it’s playable and hasn’t crashed out yet!

Let’s kill a zombie this might be the time for the game to shine. Nope! It nearly killed me in one hit! So I guess this is why stealth is forced but I did stealth up to him and 1 swipe seems excessive. Cool, Now I’m bleeding and even healing isn’t stopping the infected ridiculously bad bleeding effects. Oh I need to use a consumable item, at least that’s the god awful bleeding fixed.

Time to explore, Ah there’s a corpse in the road, Oh fuck that corpse was a zombie! Classic move but still works so thumbs up for still making a wuss like me jump.

Wonder what’s in this abandoned building, hopefully some ammo. No ammo but a literal ton of crafting materials.. ohhh gooooddiiieeee… Nothing more fun than spamming the collect button, smashing shelves and getting all the materials you can.

Oh I’m supposed to be protecting a drill. Ok I can do this I can… WAVE 1 starting, easy I can tell what direction their coming from. That wave is pretty larg— ok dead, Never mind then.

I need to recruit Alex (CaptainSpafff) he’s played every Metal Gear and loves his 5 he’ll know how to do this.

He confirms it, this looks like an early build of MGS5. The effects and changes to the graphics are supposed to be story driven but their clearly to keep the framerate going with a large number of units at once.

It’s full of little quirks that make no sense. For example; You don’t lose stamina jogging (you recover it) but you do crawling or sprinting. It’s still a mess, no tutorials for some things like ammo switching (even in the tutorial database) and you spend most of the time experimenting to find out how to do anything. Especially annoying given that some enemies are weak to different types of ammo/traps.

It feels like there is only crafting in this game because of the currency. Which is everywhere from levelling up, repairing equipment (because everyone loves weapon/armour degradation), to customising, to consumable items and everything that matters; Its all currency driven. You do gain currency for kills and completing missions but this is going to eventually lead to you picking easy missions to repair equipment that will let you do more.

This feels like The Division without New York, you are to explore during each mission when the drill isn’t in use and you can do this to gain bonus unlocks such as C4 and the ridiculous walking tanks but it leaves a few people to repair and set up defences. It’s an interesting idea to give people busy work to do between waves but it all ties back to scavenging for crafting again.

Oh it’s more like Left for dead without the charm or polish. Everything is clunky and the monsters are super generic despite the unique crystal style. It has that feeling of the cgi mess that WB hero movies use for their soldier, the cement monsters from Suicide Squad. Maybe it’s to appeal to that demographic of people who think that’s cool? Some of them don’t even make any sense, lunging to attack with a bite when they have no upper jaw to bite with.

The netcode was silky smooth throughout which is great and rare for a beta but was that because of clever coding? Or was this just a lack of players. The Dragonball FighterZ, Monster hunter world beta’s were still running after all and I know I’d rather be on those. Also it’s essentially a team game with you connecting with friends rather than the world. It does bode well for an always online single player to but lets not brush that off an online single player experience is always going to suffer even with perfect netcode (stuttering occasionally when there’s a network issue etc). It’s the nature of the beast.

I’ve always been of the opinion any game is fun with friends and this sort of proves it. Most of the best moments playing MGSurvive came from messing around with grenades and walls in the setup area. The game itself is bare bones and feels like it should be a free to play title. I would likely give it a massive pass on the game build on currency if it was. Granted there is a single player we’ve not seen but if it’s built on currency like this then it’s going to need a stellar story and forgive me for this cynicism but I just don’t see it.

So it’s a generic zombie survival game, forced online with the assets from MetalGearSolid5 instead of unity. Is it going to be worth jumping in and playing on launch date? Probably not.