A game that is not really a Metal Gear game but has the branding stuck onto it due to story aspects and the engine it is running. Not to mention the power that the Metal Gear name carries in the gaming industry, it is bound to sell copies. Metal Gear Survive is a survival game set in the Metal Gear Universe. Developed by Konami Digital Entertainment and Published by Konami, Metal Gear Survive is available on the PlayStation 4, Xbox One and PC. So, is this really a game that deserves the honour of being a Metal Gear game or is it just an attempt at a cash-grab, let’s find out.
Metal Gear Survives starts off with a wormhole opening up above Mother Base which sucks a lot of things and people in, including you, a soldier aboard Mother Base. This alternate world where zombies are a plenty and time seems to be warped is your new home. Metal Gear Survive is a mish-mash of a game with elements of action, stealth, horror, resource collection and base building. The game’s loop is pretty simple. Gather resources, build your base while also gathering resources to keep yourself alive. While the story mode is around 25-30 hours long, the initial grind of the game can be extremely tedious and will be something that will put off a lot of players from playing the game. Since it is running on the Fox Engine, the mechanics are similar to that of The Phantom Pain but with a lot of fun stuff missing.
Another frustrating and annoying aspect of the early game is the huge number of tutorials. Tutorials are rarely fun and this game is chalk full of them and it does it get very, very tiring after a while. The resource gathering and zombie fighting is mainly done in a place known as the “Dust” which is a place heavily blanketed with fog. This place is the Afghanistan map from The Phantom Pain with a lot of the landmarks and points of interest removed. The common zombies found, known as the Wanderer are all the same with little to no variety among them and fighting them felt like a chore. Especially when a certain late game mission had me defend a point for about 15 minutes which really felt extremely cumbersome and bored me out of my mind.
The game does feature a 4 player multiplayer co-op mode where you and 3 other players take on waves of zombies while defending a point, which was a little fun since I was running around frantically while trying to strategize how to take on the huge number of zombies with the other players on my team. Sadly, it couldn’t rectify the boredom I felt while playing the rest of the game. The base building is solid and seeing your base grow alongside the NPCs who help take care of it is satisfying. But that’s about all the good things I found in the game. The game is very microtransaction heavy, you can buy upgrades and better NPC squads with your real life money but what really had me disgruntled was the fact that you have to pay $10 for an extra character save slot. I mean, say by chance someone enjoyed the game and wants to have another character and play it a different way, they have two choices. One is erasing your old character and playing over it and the other is buying a slot for $10.
Metal Gear Survive is not a Metal Gear game. It is a survival game with the Metal Gear title stuck onto it because they used the same assets and engine especially since they just threw in an alternate reality to justify the setting of the game. It is extremely repetitive, grindy and filled with microtransactions and just feels like a cash grab attempt. Not to mention, it is published by Konami. I really would not recommend this game, not unless you really want to play a survival based resource gathering and base building game that is highly repetitive which tries quite hard to make you spend your money.
