Mist opportunity
With limited oxygen, as well as hunger and thirst meters nipping at your productivity, masses of Wanderers and massively reduced visibility, exploring the Dust is tense and exciting. AT-9 gives you some direction, but your mini-map markers don't work any more, leaving you to orient yourself as best you can and keep an eye out for lights in the gloom that may signify buildings, supplies or old ruins.
By locating abandoned wormhole devices, you can set up a network of teleports that act as checkpoints in the fog, allowing you to beam in and out to ferry resources back to your base. But you can only do this after they've gone through a noisy setup process that brings the Wanderers down on your position, forcing you to erect defences and literally beat them away with a stick for as long as humanly possible.
By now the game has found a nice rhythm: you strike out from your base into the Dust, seek out the latest story objective or just go exploring, claim a bit more knowledge of the murk and hoover up supplies in the process, then return to base and use them to repair your kit, craft shelter and defences, and upgrade your stats.
Better than expected
There's no denying that Metal Gear Survive is an opportunistic spin-off, recycling various elements of The Phantom Pain and borrowing a little greedily from games like Rust that everyone was obsessing over a couple of years ago. The story is nonsense and feels cheaply sewn together through weak codec conversations, even if it does have its moments. And there are various missteps along the way, from the overly fussy menu systems to the dubious (and largely pointless) inclusion of microtransactions.
But having spent over 20 hours in its company, we also can't deny that we've very much enjoyed it. Taken on its own merits, this is a solid survival game with a touch of Stephen King horror that takes full advantage of the FOX Engine's superb fundamentals. It looks and feels great to play, and it's the sort of game you can happily chip away at for endless evenings, getting in the odd scrape and always making progress. After the pre-launch emphasis on co-op play, which works much as you'd expect, it's also satisfying to realise there's a hefty campaign here for lone players.
All of which brings us back to that thought: would Metal Gear Survive have done better in a world where Konami didn't turn everyone against it? Obviously we'll never know, but we're inclined to say yes. There have been successful Metal Gear games without Kojima in the past, and while this lacks some of their character, on balance we reckon it has enough of its own. If you're prepared to approach it with an open mind, you might just enjoy yourself.
