Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes (PS4)
Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes is a hard game to classify. Its short length and minimal content would make it seem like a demo for the more substantial Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, but yet it was released on a disc and costed a fairly steep price for something of that nature. Despite how Konami and director Hideo Kojima tried to frame it, it is not really a game that stands up well as a self-contained product, the game hoping that players will be happy with a taste of the MGSV game engine and a story that mostly serves as a means of sweeping away elements from Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker to make way for the Phantom Pain. It’s a prologue split off into its own title, but ultimately, the biggest surprise about this attempt to give fans a small taste of a bigger game early is… it didn’t turn out all that bad.
For a player new to the series, Ground Zeroes’s story elements will likely not compel them much. The game is very focused on tying together two games, so getting plopped in with no context in what is essentially a random episode of a grander story might not go too well. They do give you a few tapes to listen to for context as well as talk during the game and loading screen text, so you aren’t left totally adrift and you at least can see the game’s story as the start of a bigger tale. Set after the events of Peace Walker in the year 1975 (despite some anachronistic technology), Big Boss, also known by the codename Snake, has managed to establish a military force independent of any national allegiances, but Ground Zeroes sees him facing the consequences of attention falling on it. A potential spy in his ranks has been captured along with an ex-child soldier from his group and are both being held in a American-owned black site on Cuban land. The mission is to extract them both safely, and… that is pretty much the extent of the story. It only really takes an hour or two to complete this sole story level, after which you’ll get a sequence of cutscenes. One of them is pretty much a pointless scene of gratuitous gore before you get a few more substantial scenes that almost amount to trailers for Phantom Pain, and then the game’s story relevancy has concluded. A simple rescue mission that requires prior knowledge and doesn’t really wrap up its characters or loose ends would be a terrible story framework if you didn’t have the outside knowledge that you’ve played a small piece of a future game, but surprisingly, despite the story’s importance being the main draw, it’s not really what saves Ground Zeroes from being a waste of time.
After beating the single story mission, you unlock a few side ops, and while they positions themselves as “pseudo-historical recreations” to try and trick players into believing they’re important, what they really are is a way to further engage the game’s new stealth action mechanics. Like other Metal Gear Solid games, Ground Zeroes is a mix of trying to sneak around enemy territory and engaging in battle if you fail at being stealthy. Sneaking effectively is valuable, as being detected by an enemy guard will put the whole area on high alert for a significant period of time, and of course the opposition is well-armed. Snake himself will typically have to rely on sleep darts, a machine gun, and his own fists to take down soldiers if he gets caught, although he can find new items in the environment like grenades, different rifles, and even a rocket launcher that can make him more reliable in battle. Ground Zeroes has the classic balance of sneaking and action a permissive stealth game allows, with the player in danger if detected but able to potentially escape it if they’re smart and swift.
Ground Zeroes’s stealth isn’t quite like the other Metal Gear Solid games before it though. First of all, you’re completely without a radar. It’s a lot more immersive to not be able to see a small map with blips for enemy soldiers walking around, but the game doesn’t completely throw you in without any way to track guards beyond what you can see. If you mark a foe, you’ll always have a fairly decent idea of where they are unless you choose to kill them. This does mean the screen can get a bit full of markers for enemies you no longer care about, but it also makes sneaking a more interesting prospect as you must identify threats and base your movements on their patrols. Another interesting feature comes in the brief slowdown when an enemy spots you, and while you can turn it off for a more authentic experience, it also lets you quickly shut down a disaster if you’re quick on the draw. You even get a small indicator on screen to tell you if an enemy suspects you’re around and the general direction they’re in. Sneaking past guards and gunning for the goal is one way to play, but Ground Zeroes encourages the player to find many ways to infiltrate the enemy base. Cutting the power, interrogating guards at gunpoint, luring enemies to bogus threats, and many other small tricks can be used to make your sneaking mission a bit more varied and complex.
Unfortunately, what doesn’t help that is the fact that, even in the extra missions you unlock after the story mission, all action in Ground Zeroes will take place on the same technically large but fairly limited map. The black site you’re infiltrating can be approached from many directions, with plenty of paths through that clearly value experimentation and clever thinking… but the mission objectives don’t quite match that approach. There are about five areas on this map that you could compartmentalize: prison, buildings, refugee camps, warehouses, and another set of camps. The game almost never wants you to go to the refugee camps, the prison area visits are insubstantial, and the warehouse area is underutilized as well. Most of your time seems centered around the buildings/helipad and can bleed into the other zones as you work your way towards it or away from it. It will put small objectives in the other zones, but the action still feels heavily focused on a small segment of the map and it does make it harder to enjoy the excellent stealth mechanics. The story mission and side ops are mostly about finding certain targets to dispatch or extract, although there is one that completely changes the style of play and is a highlight for it. Rather than sneaking on the ground, Snake’s goal is to protect a character who is a rather cute cameo from game director Hideo Kojima, the game taking on a heavy action focus as you fire from the side of a helicopter with infinite ammo weaponry. The new objective and mode of play is a refreshing break amidst going to familiar areas and doing very simple tasks, although the extra missions you get for finding all of the collectible X.O.F. patches manages to add missions that are both fairly unique and heavy on the fanservice for series veterans.
Ground Zeroes tries to squeeze a lot out of a minimal amount of content, and that’s not only in regards to the greater mission construction. A ranking system, collectibles, challenges, easter eggs, and more are packed into this tiny map but would require many hours of retreading the same ground for mostly bragging rights as your reward and a few goodies if you transfer your save data into The Phantom Pain. Despite all these issues with content and length though, it speaks well for the gameplay mechanics that it manages to stay enjoyable enough. Not really strong enough to support trying to go for 100%, but if you’re interested in the missions and their hard mode variants, you can quite quickly adapt to the controls and gameplay design save for some intuitive touch pad controls that aren’t terrible but do feel tacked on. Learning the environment and discovering new tricks to navigate it better does more for keeping the game fresh than the goals it sets for you, but it never truly can shake that you’re playing a teaser that was fattened up a bit to better sneak its way into your game library.
THE VERDICT: Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes is an impressive demonstration of a wonderful game engine. The stealth mechanics are a good mix of giving the player the means to sneak around and react to surprise situations without giving them too much information, and the combat situations from being discovered can be enjoyable to deal with as well. For the Metal Gear series it feels like it could be top of the class… if it wasn’t just a taste of the meatier meal waiting in Metal Gear Solid V. Since it was developed as a taste of things to come, Ground Zeroes has some excellent gameplay mechanics in a game that has very little to do with them as you are sent on similar missions across the same environment, the game failing to even utilize that space to its fullest. There are a few side ops that give you interesting tasks still, but since the story is just a bridge between two larger games when it’s not entirely inconsequential, it’s hard to see Ground Zeroes as a full experience even when its mechanics are shining brightly.
And so, I give Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes for the PS4…
An OKAY rating. As a standalone game, Ground Zeroes fails pretty badly. Its plot exists mostly in extra material and the cutscenes that bookend a short story chapter, and even that plot mostly exists to work on elements that are found in more substantial experiences. The draw of this game is basically that it’s holding some plot points from an anticipated title ransom, but if you choose to engage Ground Zeroes as a collection of stealth missions instead, it’s a bit easier to swallow. More work could have been done to diversify the structure of them and of course the single map wears out its welcome even when the game whips out more interesting objectives. However, the layout of the American black site, the shifting guard positions, security cameras locations, and vehicle placements make it so you’re still always working with the top-notch stealth side of the gameplay. If the game had been better at challenging that aspect, then Ground Zeroes might have not have been such a bare-faced upgraded game demo.
The biggest potential improvement to Ground Zeroes though is fairly obvious: just put it at the start of Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain and offer the side ops as bonus content there. Quite tellingly, Metal Gear Solid V: Definitive Edition bundles the two games together, cementing that it was essentially a stopgap until the bigger game was complete. However, it won’t hurt to play Ground Zeroes if you can find it for cheap, and there’s just enough there to ensure it’s a decent time.