Metal Gear Survive Review – Here’s to You, Hideo and Bart

Metal Gear Survive is a flawed but incredibly fun survival game that adequately takes advantage of the weirder side of the Metal Gear series. Though the game has a slow start and cliché characters, the addictive exploration and impressive amount of included content makes Survive a solid spin-off.

Metal Gear Survive
Developer: Konami
Price: $39.99
Consoles: PS4, Xbox One, and PC
MonsterVine was provided a PS4 code for review purposes

Metal Gear Survive is a controversial game. The rocky break-up between Konami and series director Hideo Kojima left many fans feeling spurned, and the announcement of a Kojima-less Metal Gear zombie game shortly after certainly didn’t help. When Survive was first announced, I was in agreement with a large portion of the Metal Gear fanbase, but at the same time, I was and am a weak man. Metal Gear is Metal Gear, and I felt that Survive deserved as much as a chance as any other game, so I put my biases aside and dove into the game with an open mind and an abundance of nanomachines.

Metal Gear Survive puts you in the shoes of a random Mother Base soldier. If you’re like me, you’ll make yourself so you can pretend you’re part of the Metal Gear universe, but if you’re more stable, you can make any type of avatar you want. The avatar creator is essentially the one from the beginning of The Phantom Pain, and there’s a decent amount of customization. Whatever character you make is a grunt in Big Boss’s “Militaires Sans Frontières”, and one of many soldiers on Mother Base during the XOF attack from the end of Ground Zeroes.  After saving Big Boss and Kaz from behind the scenes, your character is wounded and subsequently sucked towards a wormhole in the sky. Eventually you end up in Dite, a seemingly destitute world with relics from different time eras, a mysterious dust-based atmosphere, and crystallized zombies. Don’t worry if you haven’t played Ground Zeroes, or any Metal Gear for that matter. Outside of the opening cutscene, Survive doesn’t require any understanding of the Metal Gear universe, as it explains everything you need to know as events unfold.

The story itself is a fun little adventure that’s almost entirely separate from any form of Metal Gear canon, though the “bad” ending has a nice little tie-in to The Phantom Pain. There are actually a couple strong moments in the story though, with a very Metal Gear-esque twist at the end. Even if the story is largely inconsequential, there are plenty of references and easter eggs for series fans to enjoy. Not only that, but Survive explains the wormhole technology found in The Phantom Pain, which is a neat way to make the game ever so slightly tie into the main series.

The characters are a weak point in Survive, as most of them fall into standard action movie archetypes. The doting nurse who screams a lot, the computer whiz kid, the distant but secretly kind soldier, etc etc. Even though Survive is a spin-off, it’s part of a series that has some of the most intricate and well-written characters in the medium, so it’s a shame that very few, if any, characters stand out. Your A.I. companion(s) Vergil is alright and has some charming proverb-based quirks, but overall the characters in Survive feel lacking. The monster designs make up for this though, as there are some stunning beasts wandering the world of Dite. You can tell that Masahiro Ito, creature designer for the early Silent Hill titles, worked on some of Survive’s more ghoulish foes, with Bombers and the Lord of the Dust standing out specifically.

The gameplay of Metal Gear Survive is exactly what one would expect after hearing the title. Based on The Phantom Pain’s FOX engine, Survive has you gathering resources, fighting monsters, and building your base as you struggle to stay alive. Your hunger and thirst are constantly depleting, while exploring the Dust gives you a depleting oxygen meter to worry about. Not only that, but being hit by enemies and eating bad food can inflict specific injuries upon you, ranging from lacerations to sprains, or even food poisoning. There’s an awful lot to juggle at any time in Survive, but I found this to be a huge positive. I really felt like I was fending for myself and barely scraping by throughout the game, as every animal sighting was like a gift from on-high. When you’re such a fragile character, every defeat is crushing and every success feels herculean, leading to a tense but rewarding sense of danger that permeates the entirety of Survive.

I do think that the first few hours of the game are a bit too tough, as you can’t farm food or resources. You’ll eat a lot of raw meat and drink a lot of dirty water, and the overall difficulty in the beginning could definitely turn potential fans off. Even towards the end of the game, your hunger and thirst drain far too quickly, something I hope can be patched in the future. Having to constantly hop to your menu to replenish your hunger can become grating when you’re fighting a horde of enemies, especially when you ate a ton of food fifteen minutes earlier. Even just hanging out on your base drains you, meaning you really don’t get any time to relax. It takes some of the fun out of Survive, so I hope this gets fixed in the future.

Survive’s combat is tense and sometimes fidgety. Certain weapons are definitely far better than others, with ranged weapons like bows and occasionally guns (which are hard to maintain early in the game) feeling far more useful than sluggish two-handed or heavy melee weapons. Towards the end of the story and throughout the postgame, you can craft far more interesting and balanced weapons. Flaming baseball bats and high-frequency batons are just a couple of the more exciting weapons that become available as time goes on, which help to balance the combat out a bit. It’s worth noting that stealth is quite important in combat as well, as taking down Wanderers stealthily gives you greater rewards and keeps you from having to fight overwhelming enemy hordes. While it’s not the same stealth you’d see in a mainline Metal Gear, I can definitely appreciate how Konami has gone about including such a vital component of the series.

Survive’s multiplayer primarily has you team up with three other players to defend a laser drill as it mines energy. This mining attracts waves of enemies that want to destroy the drill, meaning you and your newfound comrades must work together to fend them off. There’s a real sense of team synergy to this mode, as you and your comrades have to work together to set up defenses around the drill, like fences and traps, while watching one anothers’ backs in combat. Things can get intense, but victory comes with exclusive gear that can be used in singleplayer, making online worthwhile even for those who prefer playing alone. It’s a shame that Survive always has to be online though, as losing connection with the server can kick your from the game immediately. It doesn’t matter if you’re in singleplayer or multiplayer, you’ll be booted all the same. This is a frustrating practice that I hope Konami will rethink and fix, as people with weak internet connections will have a bad time trying to play.

Base-building is consistently pleasant, especially as you unlock different resource farms and upgrade stations. There’s an addictive cycle at play throughout Survive, as you constantly want to find resources to make new stations and items, which will cost you more resources, rinse and repeat. You can also find new color schemes and music tapes while you plunder the world for materials, which serves as a solid carrot on the proverbial stick. You even unlock audio logs as you progress, each of which details the world of Metal Gear Survive. There’s an abundance of rewards for players to earn and find, which keeps things interesting throughout.

Now let’s talk about the elephant in the room, the microtransactions. While I got through the entire story (and a lot of the post-game so far) without needing any microtransactions, the fact that save slots and exploration teams are behind a paywall is definitely shady. While you’ll probably never need another save slot in this game specifically, the fact that the feature is present but locked away shouldn’t be ignored. It’s not the biggest issue in the world since, like I said, the story and online don’t really require any form of microtransactions, it’s still a sketchy practice that needs to be called out.

Visually, Metal Gear Survive is quite impressive. The character models, weapons, and environments are largely lifted from The Phantom Pain (or made using resources from the game), so anyone familiar with recent Metal Gear titles will feel right at home. While the reused environments feel a bit lazy, the story actually explains these locales later on, while the Dust makes them feel slightly different. The weapon/environmental effects and lighting in Survive are something to marvel at. There are moments where rays of light penetrate the thick fog of the Dust, making for a remarkable atmosphere. As previously mentioned, the creature designs are spectacular, and the sense of scale that the larger creatures give off is intimidating and awe-inspiring.

The soundtrack of Survive is rather memorable, and worth listening to even outside of the game itself. While the songs that play in and around the base are full of longing and despair, the boss fight tracks are high-energy and almost exhilarating. The music tapes found throughout the Dust actually contain tracks from previous Metal Gears, as well as other Konami franchises like Castlevania and Policenauts, which is a fantastic touch. The voice acting is a bit more mixed, with some voices and accents coming off as painfully hammy.

The Final Word
While it has its fair share of frustrations, Metal Gear Survive is a fun and somewhat addictive survival action game. Though the game has flat characters and some hamfisted microtransactions, Survive is a fun spin-off title, even if you aren’t a Metal Gear fan.

MonsterVine Rating: 4 out of 5 – Good