A wonderful 1 hour romp for the whole family, all for the price of... wait, what do you mean they sold this for 30$?!

I kid, I kid. I got this for 9 bucks, and it scratched the MGS V itch that I had. I could just go play the full game but I get sad everytime I see how unfinished that game is, so this is the next best thing. I'm surprised by how well the game holds up visually, and obviously that MGS V stealth gameplay is still as fun as it was back then. It is nice to see the formula of the main game in this much smaller form, makes me wonder what other games would benefit from a similar treatment.

Anyways, happy new year y'all! I'm starting the year with one game already finished, not bad eh? :p

its... alright. Disregarding the egregious pricing and short length of this title, There's something about the gunplay that ground zeros and subsequently the phantom pain has that makes me feel a little disappointed. on one hand, the menuing and overall aiming mechanics are snappy and fluid; its just that it never has fulfilled the same niche for my brain that mgs2-3 have. The story in ground zeroes feels so incredibly barebones with nothing to really go off of except name references to past entries and a small cipher mention. The funny thing is i have been playing peace walker more recently and the overall game experience is similar to the later metal gear games but it feels much more fluid despite being definitively more clunky than mgsV. One of my main issues is that i dont have much to latch on to here, there just isnt much going on and its not even that satisfying to play!! I wish i enjoyed the more open ended areas of the mgsV saga, but as it stands i am a little saddened by this entry in the series

Ground Zeroes sits in a weird spot in the Metal Gear series. Not a full game by any means, it serves as an essential quasi prequel to The Phantom Pain, and for what it's worth, it is a blast, for the few hours it presents. Ground Zeroes' "story" can be completed in just under an hour, less if you've figured out the right path to speed run it. However, you'd be doing yourself a disservice to dismiss all the game had to offer if you only gave it that story mission. The base in the game is packed with easter eggs and side missions to take on. Though essentially a demo, Ground Zeroes is still a great introduction to the utter chaos that would be The Phantom Pain, and it's a must play before jumping in.

Obviously it's stupid and just downright disgraceful that this was sold on its own for such a high price. It should have been shipped with The Phantom Pain because it's the perfect opening, it's the tanker section of Metal Gear Solid 2 but better in every way. The design of Camp Omega is still incredible and so fun to navigate almost a decade later, I could play this five times over and have a wildly different experience each time depending on how I decided to proceed. The gameplay is so much fun and gives you a small taste of the freedom of gameplay that makes The Phantom Pain so great.

I can't imagine you'd get much out of this narratively if you haven't played Peace Walker, which I think is a lot of people's issues with the story in The Phantom Pain as well. Ground Zeroes is dark and depressing, the darkest the franchise has ever went. Most of it works to great effect, but some of it is a little too shocking for the series (at least to me personally.) For what it is, it's a great set up for the wider conflict of Metal Gear Solid V, and serves as an incredibly sad conclusion to the Peace Walker era.

This is what should've been from the start.

Ground Zeroes started as a demo for Phantom Pain. It features signature Big Boss as he inflitratres Camp Omega to rescue Paz and Chico, the ones from Peace Walker. It's short, about 1 or 2 hours of length. Maybe 10 minutes if you know what to do.

It's just one mission. That's the entire Demo? Not exactly. The game canonically ends there, the events and the story itself that connects with Phantom Pain are all in one mission. But you still have plenty of missions to explore and complete besides the main one. These objectives are as varied as in the ones from Phantom Pain. Rescue this guy, destroy that, find intel. You name it.

The main star here is Camp Omega, an American base located on Cuba. A big base that is reminicent of the big outposts we see in Phantom Pain, but expanded and that being the whole map. I love it, the complexity in it's layout leaves your imagination to go wild and start making tactics to complete the objective the way you see feet, just like in Phantom Pain.

It's contained, it doesn't have the open world of the final game. And that's a good thing. But, this game is just a prologue for Phantom Pain. Nothing more than that storywise. The rest of the missions can be considered filler or extras, fun nonetheless.

In short, if you were tired of Phantom Pain's empty open world but loved the stealth mission were you go to a certain outpost. This is the game for you.

Buy it at a disscount though or in the Metal Gear Solid V: The Definitive Edition which includes this game too.

"Excellent, Snake. Age hasn't slowed you down one bit."

Came back to this again to replay the first mission and complete all the side ops, left it realising how much this game was better than I remember it being, albeit being a small prologue to the main event, it still manages to stand and shine on its own.

Gameplay elements are a great test trial to Phantom Pain and hold up a lot more than I remember when you spend hours on TPP, making this a much easier experience, the prospect of infiltrating the base countless times with different objectives never gets old and dare I say rescuing Hideo Kojima or accidentally blowing him up is one of the best level designs in the entire series.

Ground Zeroes is a bit odd to talk about and review in isolation, since it's pretty much tethered to the main game's story and its too short in itself to actually go out of your way to dissect all its mechanics, it really just serves as a technical demo showcasing the newest and final era of Metal Gear running on the all-new Fox Engine. It doesn't try to be more than that, and honestly if I was excited for The Phantom Pain back in the day getting a fully-featured demo with pretty much the exact gameplay as the main game and a shocking and thrilling couple of cinematic cutscenes of that caliber following the events of the Peace Walker Incident, with those dreadful and honestly pretty dark moments, damn, I would be sold with getting TPP the day it released no matter what.

The only real complaint is that they actually charge you a pretty penny for it, and while yeah you can get some mileage out of it considering that there's multiple missions to do and whatnot, it's way better to get it nowadays bundled in with the main game for dirt cheap.

Hm. It do be a tech demo, lets make sure we get that out of the way first. Game's like one mission long, which I'm honestly fine with and the level is pretty cool all things considered. This game tries to go for a much darker sort of vibe than what usually goes on in metal gear, and theres some kinda gross scenes that are made grosser by the shiny photorealistic new FOX engine they got going here. Doesn't exactly end on a very positive note either, but I guess that's to set up the Phantom Pain. All in all, don't buy this on its own since there's not enough game here to be worth any price on its own, but if you wanna play phantom pain, you should probably play this first to understand whats goin on