Zombie games are a dime a dozen. You can find them anywhere. For people who actually want a tactical zombie-survival game, the pickings are slim – nay, nearly non-existent. Your options for a tactical survival zombie game are basically DayZ – but you’re subjecting yourself to a lot of jank – or, well, that’s it. The only other pseudo-option is Konami’s 2018 outing for PS4, Xbox One, and PC called Metal Gear: Survive, a Fox Engine rehash of Metal Gear Solid V repackaged with two small maps as a zombie-survival base-building game.
Now if you’re like me where you’ve had a taste for a tactical mil-sim zombie survival-game, and you wanted something a bit more polished than DayZ, you don’t have any other options other than Metal Gear: Survive. It’s built on a solid foundation, so you at least know the stealth is solid, the gunplay works, and the mechanics are polished. Your only other alternative might be State of Decay, but that series went down the pronoun route, and unless you’re fine with all of that nonsense, then you’re going to steer very clear from that aneurysm-inducing affair.
Unfortunately, Metal Gear: Survive is not the tactical, mil-sim zombie-survival game many of you might have wanted. I came to the party late – years after its release. Why? Because it didn’t look interesting to me at the time of its original release and I figured I would get around to it when I had more time. Well, that was my first mistake.
You Can’t Leave
See, Metal Gear: Survive has a basic story mode that you can complete in about 20 – 30 hours. Most of that time will be spent grinding/farming crystals to upgrade your character, gather supplies to craft new weapons, and upgrade your base so you can… survive. Basically, like other survival-sims, Metal Gear: Survive</i > has the whole food/water/sleep mechanic going on. So your character gets tired, gets hungry, and gets thirsty. This mechanic is poorly balanced, though, because your character has to eat and drink an abnormal amount of time, and so you’re basically forced to do a whole lot of resource gathering during the early parts of the game, which isn’t that bad. The problem comes in after you beat the game.
There’s a bit of a grace period leading up to the end game, where you have an ample amount of supplies, some equipment to store resources such as food and water, and if you’ve done any of the side-missions then you will have gathered up a few additional survivors that you can put to work on your base helping with agriculture, food supply, medicine, or base defense. So far, so good.
Where the game takes a nose dive is that after you beat the game and you recruit up to 30 people, you realize that even when you aren’t playing the game your base is still active!!!
What this means is that even when you presumably log off the game, your recruits are still consuming resources, still capable of getting sick/injured, and can/will lose happiness/morale while you’re not online.
Essentially, you can’t leave!
If you ever plan on coming back to the game and playing on your time, you have to maintain your base every now and then, meaning you have to login and ensure your recruits aren’t sick/dying, and that means keeping your medical resources supplied, your food resources supplied, and your water resources plentiful. If you neglect to maintain the health of your recruits or a balance of your resource management, then you’ll basically lose everything.
I’m almost convinced Konami probably has a cash shop item where you can reduce base resource consumption, as it seems like the sort of thing they would do.
Always Online Means Always A Pain
The biggest culprit for being forced to care for your base, which never stops running, is the always-online mechanic. Basically, your account, your progress, and your character are tied to Konami’s servers. When they eventually decide to shut it down the way they did Metal Gear Online, it means you will lose all your progress. This is how it’s always been with always-on games.
This is also what really strips away from making the game fun to play. You’re basically locked into playing on Konami’s time, because when they decide they no longer want to support the servers, you will no longer be able to play Metal Gear: Survive ever.
It’s a real shame because the game has a ton of potential, or rather, the concept has a ton of potential. The execution was lazy and bare-bones, and obviously done as a cash-grab to lure in people who enjoy survival sims like DayZ and Rust but also love Metal Gear Solid. If it were done well, then it could have been a timeless classic, but forcing it into the always-on territory makes it a trash heap unless some modders can reverse engineer it and make an offline mod at some point. And what really makes it bad is that it doesn’t even need to be always-on.
No Real Co-op Makes The Live-Service Requirement Null
The big selling point for Metal Gear: Survive was that you would create your own character and then play online with or against your friends. The pitch and glimpses of marketing made it seem like it was a DayZ competitor. That isn’t true.
The game doesn’t have a real co-op other than the co-op staging area where you and a few others can partake in timed defense missions spread across a few maps. Basically the co-op consists of a very limited tower defense mode. It’s not organic, nor seamless, so once you get done doing the base defense you go back to the single-player portion. You can’t do co-op story missions, or team up together and work on maintaining a single base, etc.
I was hoping that maybe the game would have a co-op story mode, or some sort of sandbox co-op mode, but alas, no such mode exists. 99% of the game is played as a single-player, and only the towe defense maps that you have to exit the single-player mode to play can be played in co-op. Sure, the resources you gather from the tower defense mode(s) can be brought back into the single-player experience, but it’s essentially a waste of time for the most part.
You would think the multiplayer would be more fleshed out to justify making Metal Gear: Survive always-on, yet that wasn’t the case. The other problem is that the multiplayer maps aren’t engaging enough to also warrant coming back to other than when you need more materials/resources that you can’t readily find in the single-player. But this leads into another problem.
The Environments Are Lame And Maps Too Small
The main map you’ll play on is about 4 square kilometers (or thereabouts). If that sounds big, it’s not, especially when you consider that majority of the map is inaccessible due to blockades, rocky mountains, and terrain you can’t traverse over due to being too high. So in reality you have a much smaller play space than 4 square kilometers.
The second map is a jungle area with more rocky terrain. This second map is even smaller than the first. You have maybe just under 2.5 kilometers of area to traverse from one end to the other, but it’s extremely narrow, and once again cordoned off with lots of high cliffs and rocky areas, waterfalls, and mountains. Also, in order to stretch out the missions in the second map, they implemented some of the most annoying enemies imaginable. Basically there are these creatures called Grabbers, which sit underground and have tendrils that look like reeds. They blend into the jungle so every few meters you run they reach out and grab you with the tendrils. This makes traversing through the jungle extremely tedious, and missions that would otherwise take a few minutes can stretch up to half an hour to an hour.
They also spaced out the teleporters in the jungle area that you can use to get around the map. The teleporters are essential as all the others outside of your main base are filled with a chemical dust that kills living organisms, so you have a limited oxygen supply when venturing around outside the base. This is a way to also artificially stretch out the gameplay and force players to keep making small trips and plotting out their journeys beforehand, not unlike Death Stranding.
The difference is that in Death Stranding the first map is sizable but kind of small, but the second map is super large. In Metal Gear: Survive, the opposite is true. And worse yet, is that a lot of features from Metal Gear Solid V are just gone. So you no longer get companions in Metal Gear: Survive, and the only vehicles you have access to are the jeep and Walkers. The problem is that there is only one jeep throughout the entirety of the game, and the Walkers periodically appear but you can’t really use them tactically because they last for a limited time and then blow up.
This makes the game feel really small and limited in scope in many ways. Lots of samey desert environments, hills, sand, rocks, dirt, and some occasional clear zones with an oasis is basically what makes up the entirety of the first map. There’s also some small outposts scattered about, a couple of ruined bases that are pretty small, and a cool village that you won’t have many reasons to visit often.
What really would have made the game cool is if they had an actual ruined urban area, with rundown office buildings, or a desolated neighborhood or something. Basically something that felt more modern and unique as opposed to annoying jungle map and the absolutely boring desert map.
Melee Is Serviceable But Not Great
One of the things that really drew me to the game was that it was using the Metal Gear Solid V platform for its gameplay. I imagined that this would be an awesome way to play a zombie game… right? Well, not quite. Metal Gear Solid’s melee combat is perfect for espionage/stealth gameplay, not so much for micromanaging hordes of attacking zombies.
What you end up with is a serviceable but lacking melee system, where fighting a zombie one-on-one works decently enough, but fighting multiple zombies attacking from multiple directions is an exercise in frustration. The characters use the weapons in a stilted, forward-facing direction, which is great for enemies who are right in front of you. But if you get attacked from any other direction, the animation will be interrupted, and so will your attack.
This means you have to preemptively gauge your distance and timing for attacks. The problem is that because characters move like Metal Gear characters, it’s not easy to get out of the way of attacks, and in turn it means if you get swarmed by zombies, there’s basically nothing you can do.
Now I don’t mind zombie games being difficult, and fighting them being challenging, but you can definitely tell that the designers bit off a bit more than they could chew. I do like that you can cut off the limbs of zombies as they swing at you, but I don’t like how some of the weapons are designed only to be effective if you’re fighting Romero-style zombies, and the thing about Metal Gear: Survive is that you fight both Romero-style zombies and the 28 Days Later style zombies. So picking off the slow ones is fine, but when the fast ones appear, it’s tough maneuvering around them, and practically impossible to fight them in melee combat unless you specifically level up that sub-class, which is a post end-game feature.
Some of the melee weapons I think are actually cool, too, especially for fighting zombies, like the giant saw blade, or the various axes, flaming bats, and some inventive blunt weapons. But the fighting is so stilted that it’s only really effective in single encounters. The giant two-handed weapons are basically death traps because the characters swing them so slow that you’ll suffer tons of damage before you even hit anything. In fact, the characters use the giant weapons like from Monster Hunter…. which is great for Monster Hunter or Godeater, when fighting super-sized, slow moving monsters, but not so much when you’re fighting sprinting zombies or zombies that leap around and roundhouse kick you like Jean-Claude Van Damme.
In that regard you can tell they designed some of the melee weapons with co-op in mind, but again, co-op is such an infinitesimal part of the game that I literally cannot tell what some of the larger weapons were designed for. Attempting to fight large boss creatures while swinging slow moving axes around is a recipe for death. I sort of wish the combat was more intuitive like the State of Decay games, where you have directional attacks, positional attacks, and you can target enemy body parts without feeling stilted or locked into place while swinging.
The projectile weapons are really good, however. I love using the bow and arrow in Metal Gear: Survive. It’s probably one of the best implementations of a bow and arrow, and it looks awesome too. Having different ammo/arrow varieties also really add to the appeal of the projectile weapons. The shotguns feel effective, even the pistols are fun to use. Limited ammo also means you have to scavenge, craft, and use your ammo sparingly. It adds a lot to the appeal of the game’s survival and combat loops.
Wasted Potential
The game simply should have come out back in 2012 or 2014, back when games were still being made to be fun. The crafting and survival elements are engaging enough. I like going out and scavenging for materials and supplies, as well as having recruits give out side-missions to acquire containers containing weapon and material cases, which you can use to upgrade your base or craft new and rare equipment.
But the problem is that the game was designed around being an always-online title as opposed to being designed to be a fun game, like 7 Days To Die, or DayZ, or Castleminer Z or Rust or ARK: Survival. Those games have managed to capture an audience because they’re designed to be fun, first and foremost.
I can imagine that if this game had come out back in 2014, before the gaming industry folded itself in under the tyranny of feminism and pronouns, it might have been a right proper smash hit. Losing the always-online and having a proper co-op would have made Metal Gear: Survive a timeless classic for sure. Instead, it’s one of those games where you’ll indulge it with as much time as you can spare, or you’ll play it, and realize that it’s a never-ending time-sink and never touch it again, which is a real shame because there’s a lot of wasted potential here with this game. But such is life.