Metal Gear Solid Ground Zeroes Overview
Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes is a small chapter that serves to tie up the MGS: Peace Walker storyline and acts as a bridge between Peace Walker and MGSV: Phantom Pain.
It plays like a mission from Peace Walker, but the graphical and game play improvements make it feel much more like MGS4. Honestly I would have said that it is basically a tech demo of what Peace Walker might have been like if they had designed it for a full fledged console instead of the portable handheld system. The dialogue and information that you hear from the tapes is deeper and darker than most of Metal Gear has been so far, Big Boss and Kaz are much colder and less caring than they were in Peace Walker. Certain other returning characters are portrayed differently than they were in PW.
The Ground Zeroes map is rather small when you compare it to some of the older games, but it was never meant to be a full game…and there is a lot to keep you busy on this one single map. There is the initial story play through, and when you finish the main story mission there are a whole bunch of bonus missions with different objectives. Finally there are two unlockable bonus missions (there are normally one each for Xbox and Playstation but PC got both of them) which are fun missions that are mostly fan service referencing older games in the series.
Overall it handles and feels like a properly done Peace Walker, but the modifications to the tranquilizer gun and the new reflex system have significantly changed things. The tranquilizer gun while having a permanent silencer has lost a vast amount of range and the 3rd person targeting system for it has also become a bit more complicated. You have to get much closer to enemies for the tranquilizer dart to work and you start off with a very limited amount of ammunition. Hopefully there will be an upgrade system for the weapons much like there was for Peace Walker but that is yet to be seen. Seeing as the fulton recovery system was demoed at E3 Phantom Pain looks somewhat similar to PW.
If Ground Zeroes is a preview of what The Pantom Pain is going to be like then I’m impressed because the new fox engine has been optimized extremely well, even for older less powerful systems. I greatly look forward to seeing what the next chapter in the Metal Gear saga is.
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