METAL GEAR SURVIVE
This strange spin-off endures through its winning waves
Does the Metal Gear series need Kojima? Find out if Konami’s online spectacle can cut it.
This really shouldn’t exist. ‘A bizarre survival sim/horror hybrid that shares only the thinnest narrative thread with its parent series’ is hardly a slam-dunk pitch. That the Kojima-less Metal Gear Survive arrives at a time when Konami has never been less popular, with the publisher staggering from one PR nightmare to the next, hardly helps. So here’s a Raiden-sized twist: Metal Gear Survive is actually rather good. First, let’s clear some issues up. Survive isn’t the game you’re expecting. Contrary to what pre-release press releases and trailers may have suggested, this is primarily a methodical single-player survival game, not a madcap co-op adventure. While four players can team up for zombie-slaying fun in matches of the wave-based Salvage mode, the core of Survive is very much a lone wolf experience. I can’t recall too many games in recent memory that have so poorly conveyed what they actually were prior to launch.
SO LONG SNAKE
Suffice to say, Survive isn’t Metal Gear Solid 6. Although it’s built on the same sturdy Fox Engine foundations of The Phantom Pain, this Kojima-free curio has little in common with Venom Snake’s wonderful stealth epic. You won’t be tranqing guards or using D-Dog to highlight eagle-eyed patrollers here. Instead, you’ll stab the undead in the head, protect objectives by building barricades to keep these Wanderers at bay, and juggle oxygen, hunger and thirst meters to keep your generic created character on their feet.
While the controls are more or less identical to MGS5, sneaking doesn’t play anywhere near the
role you’d expect. Sure, you could creep past the myopic Wanderers, but considering they usually hang out in huge groups, it’s ruddy difficult to avoid triggering the pack’s sociopathically shuffling attention. As such, stealth resolutely plays second fiddle to a surprisingly robust and enjoyable melee system – more on that later.
Survive ties into the Metal Gear mythos in ludicrous, barely plausible fashion. Set shortly after the events of Ground Zeroes, you control a mute Mother Base soldier, who’s whisked away through – wait for it – a wormhole… to another dimension. As story premises go, it makes MGS5’s ‘Skeletor cosplayer tries to take over the world with vocal parasites that extinguish language’ look positively grounded.
DITE THE WAY
Not that you’d know Snake’s subordinate had been sucked into a different dimension at first glance. The sprawling desert sandbox of Dite is bloody similar to The Phantom Pain’s Afghan map. It’s almost as if Konami produced the game on a massively stripped down budget and had to reuse existing assets wholesale to keep costs down.
The most blatant example of this copy-and-paste mentality comes late in the campaign, when you’re whisked to another bizarro world… a location that’s a near-identical recreation of the mountain clearing where you fight the Man on Fire in MGS5’s Angola-Zaire map. It’s undoubtedly shameless. Then again, Hideo Kojima had a history of going over budget on his games when he was still with Konami. To play advocate for the goat-legged dude with the killer goatee, there’s an argument that the publisher is entitled to make as much of that investment back as possible.
If much of this reads as negative, it’s because examples like this lazy environmental design try to cut the legs from a game that, in many respects, is actually a rather lovely surprise. Make no mistake: I really like a lot of Metal Gear Survive. This is a game of evocative, eery exploration through an environment where your vision and map markers are hobbled by the Dust, a phantom foggy mire. Getting lost can be terrifyingly disorientating, and seeing your oxygen levels plummet as you scramble for your bearings while Wanderers aggressively stagger towards you from every direction is a nerve-shredding, involving spectacle.
Combat is really strong, too. Other than the odd bout of scrappy CQC, Metal Gear has primarily let fetishstically detailed firearms do the heavy lifting when Snake’s cover was blown. Here, though, using a series of machetes, clubs, bats and spiked poles is often every bit as effective at beating back Wanderer attacks with a pistol or automatic rifle. Stabbing and bludgeoning foes feels super-
“KONAMI CHARGES YOU £8 TO CREATE A SECOND SAVE FILE. YES, A SAVE FILE.”
impactful, and controlling crowds through deft spatial awareness and desperate swipes recalls some of Resident Evil 4’s best encounters.
When the wave-based defence missions kick in – both in the main campaign and matches of Salvage – the action morphs into a hurried, plate-spinning exercise in split second decision-making and canny resource management. Do you blow your Kuantan Energy in the first wave building as many fences as possible, or do you try and save your money and let your blade swipes do the talking so you can save your defences for the final wave? Protecting the game’s Wormhole Diggers can be thrilling, tactical, and gloriously frenzied. Survive constantly asks you to think on your feet.
THE LONG KON
Sadly, some mean-spirited moves on Konami’s part further scuff up the game’s already bruised reputation. Cynical microtransactions offer XP boosters to help ease the early grind that comes from foraging for food and water – the most expensive pack of SV Coins will cost you a stonking £39.99. Worse, Konami essentially charges you £8 to create a second save file. Yes, a save file. There’s almost no reason to run two characters, but it’s a vulgar decision all the same.
But with a surprisingly strong campaign and enjoyable (if thinly sketched) co-op, Survive may well win you over. I never spent a penny on microtransactions and still got a lot of enjoyment out of this deliciously strange survival sim.
VERDICT
Somewhat cynical and clearly a little low budget, it isn’t always easy to pull for Survive. Thankfully, some of the best wave combat on PS4 saves the day. Dave Meikleham