Recent reviews by Happydays

Unfortunately the 1.0 release of this game seems to have been pushed out before it was ready. The playable version before this update was extremely stable, extremely consistent and extremely fun and I was looking forward to this release. Unfortunately it has been a huge let down. In saying that though I am sure VOID Interactive are hard at work to get things sorted out and finally bring us the successor to the SWAT series.

I have experienced massive stuttering on all maps, especially in the station, and occasionally when breaching into rooms and when enemies pop into sight (which makes encounters really fun!). This wasn't an issue before the 1.0 release so I assume there are some bugs that need to be ironed out.

When I am able to play, I have noticed the AI have some kind of X-Ray vision and can slam 30 rounds into you through a wall the moment you decide to haul ass. Quite a few maps have this issue where we've had an entire squad wipe to an enemy slamming us through a wall (you can see multiple bullet holes in the wall and the team dropping).

The current state of the game is borderline unplayable and VOID Interactive have lost some some of my goodwill releasing the 1.0 version in this current state, it simply seems that it was Not Ready (hehe get it?) for the initial deadline but was pushed anyway, a shame because this will be remembered by the community, even though I am sure this will eventually get much better.

My review will remain negative until this game has seen some technical improvements. After that I will gladly change this to a positive review as I cannot recommend the concept and some of the encounters you will have enough.

Get it.

This game was awesome... Aside from a photo puzzle from the fifth chapter that made me scratch my head and throw in the towel to find out that I wasn't the only one - you'll know when you see it. Would recommend.

Waste of money - game's too short (completed in under 7 hours, including roughly an hour of my "playtime" being sorting out technical issues with frequent crashing).
Waste of time - story's a mess and gets super corny towards the end.
Cool concept, not enough of it - The thing that piqued my interest the most about this game was the real/spirit world split and allowing yourself to see both worlds at the same time and having puzzles separating your spirit from yourself, unfortunately this is barely done throughout the game, every time it is done it is extremely satisfying. The puzzles are also relatively straightforward.

In short, cool concept, meh story, wait for a sale; whatever you can justify spending cash on for a game that's roughly 6-8 hours (I finished the game in roughly 6, and most of the reviews posted here have play time generally between 6-8 hours, I can't imagine the game taking more than 8 hours for any reason, I collected everything and got 37/39 of the achievements in my 6 hours).

Come for the story, stay for the griefers.

I still don't have the Kjarr Strongarm Ice.

good

DEUS VULT

I absolutely love this game. I never played this until this very Steam version, I had only played the classic PS1 Resident Evil and holy hell; THIS is how you make a Remake. REmake, hehehe.

I got tricked by the few twists and changes from the original and this game still even today holds up well, especially this PC version which is probably one of the better ports of a classic game I've ever played. To be completely honest I didn't play with keyboard and mouse so I can't say much about that, but with a controller this is truly an experience and a hella replayable game that ages very well.

10/10 Not IGN. Or is that meme dead now?

There are MAJOR PLOT SPOILERS in this "Review". This "Review" is me voicing my opinions on Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain and I must talk about certain plot events and twists to elaborate on my point of view. I do not consider this to be a definitive absolution on the game, some people really enjoy this game, and I find it unfortunate that I can't enjoy this game as much as they do. My opinions on this game really hurt me as the Metal Gear series is my favourite and this game was a major disappointment to me. Metal Gear Solid is a series I've gown up playing, I've loved every single one of the Metal Gear games and I was really hype for Phantom Pain. However upon playing The Phantom Pain I was only getting more and more disappointed, don't get me wrong, I enjoyed the majority of the game for quite a while, however looking back I have noticed some things that I did not like.

Firstly, the "Open World" is something that I find more dead and barren than the Open World in Fallout games. There is so little to actually do in the world. Your entire purpose of roaming the open world is to move between outposts, grab resources and occasionally cassette tapes. I also find it extremely odd that every single outpost, base and village only has hostile combatants. It makes no sense to me that there are no civilian zones or rebel camps or friendly combatants. There's even a mission where you have to assist local rebels by destroying a battalion of tanks, however you can never see these rebels, not even in that mission. Also "Capturing" outposts yields a very small reward, you gain some heroism and even a title if it's the first time you've "Captured" an outpost, but that's about it, you can't do anything more with it. I find this extremely odd considering Diamond Dogs has a base in the middle of the ocean, at least 700 troops strong but we can't call a squad in to guard an outpost we've captured.

It seems that the staff's only uses are having numbers that all get added together that give you numbers to make equipment or to battle numbers using a timed facebook-like event, and when they're not doing that they're just saluting you and getting beaten by you for being completely useless. There were Rebels and enemy combatants fighting constantly in Metal Gear Solid 4, I assumed that this feature would be brought back into The Phantom Pain, since it made a lot more sense, however this wasn't implemented, which I find very strange considering the previous Metal Gear title DID have this feature.

My next problem is the copy-paste style mission types. I feel as though there isn't enough variety in the gameplay. Sure you can adjust your playstyle - you even have to as the enemy is adaptive and counters your playstyle - however the missions are always the same. Every armoured vehicle battle, every capture highly skilled soldier mission, every armoured unit mission, they're just copied and pasted throughout the world and that's it. Chapter 2 is absolutely awful for this, for every Main Op mission you complete it gives you 2 missions from Chapter 1 with a new rule that makes the game slightly harder.

My next problem is the adaptive AI. I have always played Metal Gear games challenging myself, that means no kills, perfect stealth is what I aim for ALL the time. I feel that the adaptive AI limits what you can do if you want to achieve this end. If you use your tranquilizer gun and aim for headshots, the guards begin to wear helmets, eventually they wear body armour, rendering your tranquilizer gun completely useless unless you hit them in an unarmoured location, wait out the effects or shoot them multiple times, or if you're close enough to hit them in the face under their helmet. So my first few missions were done using a mix of CQC and the Tranquilizer pistol, then the rest of the game was played with just CQC and hold ups because my tranquilizer pistol was useless. Combat deployments can be used to minimise the amount of gear soldiers are issued, however I found it to be extremely time inefficient.

Lastly in terms of problems is the story. I enjoyed the majority of the first Chapter, I feel it was well paced and it really did feel like we were chasing after Skull Face from the shadows until it was time to strike. The presentation of the story and the way it ends is what falls apart. Metal Gear games were always known to have eternally long cutscenes, and when I heard that this was being changed I was kind of glad, especially after Metal Gear Solid 4. However now it feels as though the story is very minimal in terms of presentation. The first mission - the Hospital - was amazing. It was completely on rails but it gave me that feeling of an epic game which would be in store, however I found this the highest point of the entire game despite it being completely on rails. After this mission the game becomes extremely silent and barely tells us much about the story. The story is presented through mission objectives, post-mission dialogue and cassette tapes, which kind of sucks. The Cassette tapes are very similar to the codec, which I quite enjoy, but I never felt very in touch with the story at all, or my character since he never spoke. Switching voice actors from David Hayter to Kiefer Sutherland never made sense to me, even though I like them both, however Kiefer Sutherland seems like he had the shortest role due to the absolute minimal amount of dialogue. It didn't feel like I was playing Big Boss the entire game, which - SPOILER ALERT - isn't Big Boss.

I have so much more to say about this game, some more about the bad, some about my mixed opinions and quite a bit of good to say, however Steam won't let me type much more. What I have posted here is what I feel most strongly about, unfortunately I have very strong negative feelings for this game. Hopefully Metal Gear Online will redeem this final installment of Kojima's saga.