Good opener before MGSV,

-Good, short prequel to MGSV
-Smooth gameplay
-Easy to learn, hard to master stealth combat
-Essentially a tutorial for MGSV

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.

Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes is an extremely confusing piece of video game history. It exists only so that MGSV: The Phantom Pain can exist, and, due to that, is hardly more than a demo. It was the first taste of what the new generation of Metal Gear could offer. Snake had never felt so agile, and he had a myriad of tools at his disposal. GZ’s cutscenes are, in my opinion, the best in the series. Kojima had typically avoided violence in previous entries; Snake would always tranquilize or CQC enemies instead of kill them. In Ground Zeroes, however, Kojima established that he would pull no punches and proceeded to show some of the most graphic imagery and storytelling in a game to date. It ends on a bang (xd) that sets up MGSV:TPP beautifully, but, that being said, MGSV:GZ isn’t worth purchasing on its own.