Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain is a dream game. It's the kind of game that, in 1987, the young designer of the 8-bit Metal Gear may have dreamed would one day be possible. It's the kind of game that players like me dream of: an enormous and deep and seemingly endless experience that's worth the investment and then some. It's the kind of game where every hand-polished element slots together into a head-spinningly ambitious structure and they combine into something you can only call visionary.
Metal Gear Solid 5 transplants the stealth core of the series from linear environments into large open worlds, banking everything on great enemy AI and numerous moving parts that allow players freedom of approach in any given situation. The idea is not a completely new one to Metal Gear Solid. Since Metal Gear Solid 3, Kojima Productions has been designing environments around open principles, and in The Phantom Pain the enormous increase in scale comes with a smart caveat: you deploy to main missions by helicopter, and to a more limited zone of operations, which allows for custom layouts.
The two main locations, Afghanistan and Zaire, can be explored end-to-end, and one of The Phantom Pain's great pleasures is riding around taking care of side ops as you go. You drop into locations by chopper but from then on it's either foot or horse, and more often than not the roads are no-go areas. Wildlife scatters as you press through trees, herbivores graze bushes and vultures circle lazily overhead. The transitions from night to day can change everything, casting light into dark crevices and silhouetting things moving on high ground. Most other open worlds go for scale, but Metal Gear Solid 5 goes for density and intimacy, and its world feels alive. Travelling a kilometre is never just a matter of sprinting in a line, but of accounting for passing patrols, impassable terrain, brightly-lit or open areas and fortified positions.
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