I'm not gonna tell you that Metal Gear Survive is a hidden gem, or that it's a 10/10 game that you need to play. It won't change your life, and some of the criticisms thrown at it are justified. What I will say is that this game is proof that a huge portion of the gaming community can't be trusted to think for themselves, because I still see people crawl out of the earth every time this game gets mentioned to call it a stick poking simulator, having absorbed their entire opinion of the game from that one Dunkey video (you know the one). Between Kojima's departure, the late 2010s seeing zombies as played out, and the microtransaction drama, Metal Gear Survive had basically everything stacked against it, and it's no surprise that it flopped. But at the end of the day, it's still a survival crafting game using the FOX Engine.
The review could honestly end there; if "survival crafting in the FOX Engine" lit up some part of your brain when you read it then you will probably at least somewhat enjoy this game, and if you see gathering resources as a "grind" and just want to shoot zombies, you won't. But it's the MGSV at its core that really carries the game. You can CQC shoulder toss zombies off cliffs, you can blow them to pieces with Walker Gear, you can make big goofy swords out of helicopter blades, and along the way you get loads of pointless, stupid gadgets like the fulton balloon trap or a cardboard queue line that the zombies obediently follow along that turn a zombie survival situation into a prank TV show ran by people who understand that just because shooting them is easier doesn't make it funnier. You spend most of the early hours of the game building your base into a cozy homestead and relentlessly bullying zombies, and while it stops short of exceptional it is fun.
This all changes when you enter the Dust, though. Most of the map is covered in a thick fog, which aside from hiding that it's MGSV's map again has a number of gameplay twists. The game's map starts out totally blank, only filling out where you've explored and then returned to base, and when you're in the dust you lose all GPS capability early on. Your visibility plummets, your stamina costs rise, and you become reliant on a limited tank of air that constantly ticks down. They fully commit to the idea, and I love it; you're forced to navigate through it with nothing but natural landmarks, player-placed objects like flags, and the rare but welcoming green light in the distance that usually means shelter. All it takes is one fight for you to end up turned around with no exit in sight and your oxygen draining, and it makes exploring it feel pleasantly stressful at times. It's a feeling you don't get from AAA games often, especially these days when most devs are afraid to not have a stanley adventure line somewhere in the UI.
I genuinely think if this game had a higher budget and more time it could've been a hilarious co-op classic, but as-is it does stop short of its potential. The game starts too slow and ends too quickly, drip feeding you the base building features one mission a time and then cutting the story short just as it's getting good. It takes too long to learn how to even boil water, but the plot leaves you feeling like it's missing its middle act, with most of the cast feeling like they were supposed to get more exposition than they do. The game isn't necessarily short, since even if you rush through it with a stick and ignore all the exploring and crafting you'd probably get at least around 10 hours from it (I finished the story at around 25, I think), but I wish it were longer. The parts that are present are interesting enough that it makes you want to know and see more.
That feeling carries over to a lot of the game, really; the UI design and items lead you to expect that there are going to be various developments that were probably planned but cut. Your fulton device and air tank both have an equipment slot, implying that you might get upgrades for them to swap out later (especially since you get to put together an R&D team again), but you don't. You can find cars and Walker Gears out in the environment sometimes, but you never get to bring them home or deploy your own. You can build a cute little broadcast station that plays your walkman cassettes (of which there are plenty, though it's all konami music now) across the base so that everyone has to listen to Calling to the Night with you, but it turns off whenever you're doing a base defense, and you never get a way of listening to them on the go or in co-op. Occasionally you find metal storage containers that can be transported back to base with the wormholes, but unlike in MGSV you can't ride them home, which would've been nice in many cases. That isn't to say Metal Gear Survive doesn't have funny ideas of its own, but considering all of this was practically already there for them to just take and stick in the game it feels like a long list of missed opportunities, and an especially sad one considering MGSV itself is also conspicuously unfinished despite its ingenuity. It has all the bones of MGSV, but it's missing the endgame of wearing a box with Paz's picture on it while playing Love Deterrence through your iDroid on speaker to distract guards from the tank being airdropped on top of them.
The more dubious side of the game is if you know anything about the game beyond stick poking, you've probably heard about its always-on nature and, more likely, its microtransactions. They aren't even good ones; you have to pay extra for a second character slot, but you can customize your character any time and change classes at will, and if you have a sibling or something they're probably playing via family share on their own profile anyways. You have to pay for more exploration teams, but compared to the previous games they're not even very useful, and basically just passively farm resources that take a long time to actually be worth the resources you have to put into even one team. And you can pay to skip various real-world timers, which otherwise work exactly the same way that they worked in Peace Walker and MGSV. It's all so pointless that even having dabbled into them once to see what the purpose was I was just left with the realization that there isn't one, and I don't know who would ever buy them. If anything, once I got into the postgame I kept holding out hope for a big button that would just let me pay $20 for a mountain of rare weapon lootboxes or something more egregiously beneficial.
On that note, while I can't really call it a good or bad aspect of the game, something I'm very neutral about is that most of the game's more outlandish content is in the post-game. After you beat the story the game suddenly adds more enemy types, more bosses, more crafting stations to build, etc, and every time you reach a certain milestone it piles on even more stuff you didn't realize was even in the game. There are goofy weapons like jet axes and drill hammers, gadgets like automated turrets, and entire base expansions that are hidden away until the credits have rolled. I get that it was all added after the game released, but I can't help but wish they'd integrated it a little better for new players. A lot of it is locked to the multiplayer mode, which is also fun but obviously dead (though games can be found, through its steam chat and discord) and usually peaks each day at under 30 people. You can even pilot a metal gear, depending on the event you show up in time for! It's possible to solo by stuffing your pockets with every type of auto turret and building your own friends, but the S ranks needed to actually unlock things consistently are pretty hard to manage solo on higher difficulties. Of course, you could just bring your own friends, theoretically viable because the game goes on sale for under $5 nearly every sale. But first you have to convince them that the game isn't just 20 hours of poking zombies with sticks.
