While a slice of what is to come, it is a competent little game in its own right, though not worth the price at the time.
Metal Gear Solid 5: Ground Zeroes (2014) is the immediate follow-up to Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker (2010), sending mercenary leader and famed soldier Big Boss into a race against time to rescue his captured allies from an enemy camp in Cuba. It is the first, and one of the only two games made in the new and impressive FOX engine, touting great performance alongside good visual fidelity. Due to MGSV being delayed, Ground Zeroes released as a separate game, and is intended to be a prologue to The Phantom Pain.
Gameplay has been given a significant facelift here, taking most of the gameplay innovations brought on by MGS4, and refining them further. As usual you come equipped with a weapon menu, a slot for a primary and secondary respectively, as well as ancillary menus for your equipment such cardboard boxes, grenades, etc. Movement tech is expanded, giving you much more control over how you traverse, with a newly-added dive button to get into prone quicker, a much faster crawling maneuver, and a context button to control your stances (standing, crouchwalking, crawling). You can also roll on the floor while prone by holding the aim and sprint buttons and strafing. Enemies are probably the toughest here in terms of AI since MGS2, being able to use searchlights and flashlights to spot you easier, and having overall a much farther detection cone than in previous games. Being one large map, there is a lot of ground to cover, so you're handed a small spyglass to analyze and mark enemies with from greater distances. It also has a speaker function, letting you listen in for sounds of enemies in a certain direction. Enemies no longer show their alert states, so now you have to track their behavior to be able to tell when it's safe to sneak around again. Many returning mechanics return, of course, such as being able to hold up guards if you sneak up from behind while pointing a gun, chokes, interrogations, etc. With the new gameplay systems in place, you have a lot of options, such as destroying nearby comms equipment to prevent further reinforcements, using the cover of night to sneak around, smoke grenades to block enemy vision, and many more. CQC returns, very similar in nature to before, with your usual grapples, but now you also get a multi-move takedown combo. Vehicles are introduced, being able to steal them from enemies, as well as call in an attack chopper to either exfiltrate you or provide cover support, and you can change the music it plays from a loudspeaker for extra style points. You come equipped with an iDroid, a sort of smart hologram device that displays multiple context menus for you, such as mission information, a map with placeable waypoint markers, and the beloved music player options seen in past games like 4 and Peace Walker. I'll go more into detail about the mechanics in the MGSV:TPP review, but know that it has even more depth with its sandbox than in previous games, and that tells you something.
Story this time is very simple, since it's just a prologue. The year is 1975, one year after the events of Peace Walker, and MSF (Militaires Sans Frontieres/Soldiers Without Borders) mercenary company leader and legend in the wetwork world Big Boss is on a mission to rescue his two allies Paz and Chico from detainment in Camp Omega, Cuba, while avoiding the detection of the faction detaining them, XOF, formerly the support unit for FOX, which Big Boss used to be in, now reorganized as a strike force for Cipher, a secret government organization meant to control the flow of information. Only this rescue mission is a setup to leave MSF's base of operations, Mother Base, unguarded during a 'routine safety inspection', which is actually a coordinated attack on the private military company. Big Boss is blown up by a shrapnel explosion while on a rescue chopper, sending him into a nine year long coma.. to be continued.
Ground Zeroes comes with some additional gamemodes, though I mostly concerned myself with story bits relevant to the overall timeline, so I only did as much as was necessary, but you have several challenges as well as alternative story missions to tackle here, which would help pad its runtime. Presentation-wise, the game is obviously a large step-up from MGS4 (the last console game at the time, Peace Walker had to be scaled down due to being a handheld title for the PSP), with more detailed character models, even for just the nameless guards patrolling the area, much improved terrain and object quality, and boasting some very flashy and angular cutscenes with dynamic shots.
MGSV:GZ is a great prologue for an even larger game to come, but it isn't worth the asking price. Nowadays it gets bundled with the Definitive Experience edition of MGSV:TPP, and also goes on sale, so make sure to grab it there with the rest of the package.
