However you feel about the Metal Gear series, there can be no denying that it is the gaming medium's foremost auteurist work. No series in the industry can more famously be tied to the vision of a single person. So why Konami would throw that person out on the street and make Metal Gear indistinguishable from a thousand other games on the market is, like everything else Konami has done over the past several years, a mystery.
Konami being its awful self is partly why I feel comfortable abusing Metal Gear Survive despite very clearly not being in its target audience. Survival games aren't my scene, and there are few things I'm more sick of than zombies. I recognize these biases. But then I see the microtransactions, the maps recycled from Metal Gear Solid V, and the always-online requirement despite Survive predominantly being a single-player game, and I don't feel terribly guilty.
Understand that I'm no purist. I'm fine with the Metal Gear franchise branching out into other genres, as evidenced by my positive review of Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance. But zombies suck, and they have always sucked. And nothing has more vividly illustrated that than the transition from MGSV, which had arguably the most advanced and emergent AI I'd ever seen, to Survive, which transplants many of the same mechanics and locations into a world where all of the enemies are stupid. By definition, they are stupid. If they acted intelligently, they wouldn't be zombies.
Lo and behold, the best and most intuitive stealth mechanics ever conceived are now wasted on a game in which stealth is never necessary, not even once. Survive's encounter design is more about horde control, which it turns out is staggeringly simple, since players can erect defensive barriers out of thin air, and one segment of fence is literally all it takes to hold off a group of zombies. They'll all just pile up against it instead of, I don't know, walking around it. And then you can just stand there, poking a spear through the links, safely picking away at them until they're dead. Survive is an insultingly easy game even when stealth never enters the equation.
I don't know why Survive actually incorporates survival elements. They don't really add anything. Setting up gardens and water collection facilities at your base is a simple affair, and so the need to constantly relieve your hunger and thirst is a task rather than a challenge.
Most of Survive's world is covered in "Dust," a thick haze in which vision is extremely limited and breathing is impossible without an oxygen tank. Monitoring your air supply is a mildly interesting mechanic, as is the need to maintain your bearings with so many navigational handicaps attached. (Map data isn't logged until you return from an expedition, so you have to rely on light beacons whenever you venture out into new territory for the first time.) It is offset, however, by there being nothing interesting to see or do in Survive. Exploring yields the reward of more dumb zombies, more stockpiles of crafting supplies, and more defense missions.
I suppose there is one exception: the Lord of Dust, a hulking monstrosity that greatly reminded me of the towering creature at the end of The Mist. It's so large that, in the thick Dust, you can only see a fraction of it at once. Bumping into it in the wild, and feeling the controller shake with every step, is an arresting image.
But even the majesty of that doesn't last, since the Lord of Dust spends its later appearances in broad daylight, in which is looks like a featureless lump of coal rather than the Lovecraftian horror we thought we were looking at when own vision was obscured. It's featured in a couple of major set pieces in the back half of the campaign, but despite the game frequently telling you that you'll be fighting it, all you really do is hold off waves of zombies while it gets itself stuck in a trap.
Survive's plot is dumb, by the way. That may sound redundant to people who were never on board with Kojima's particular brand of storytelling to begin with, but at least the guy researched what he was writing and gave his characters an abundance of personality. He had ambition - too much, if anything, the polar opposite of Survive's phoned-in attempt to expand the universe. Most of the "cutscenes" are just static portraits accompanied by voiceovers, and the only memorable characters are memorable for being annoying: the two AI buddies, who speak with the most excruciating "robot voices" I've ever heard, and who constantly - constantly - ring you up to alert you about things you already know. The story's intended emotional payoff for them is laughable.
I played about 95% of Survive with the sound off, listening to podcasts. I was never scared, excited, or engaged. I rented this expecting to hate it, yet the reality is even worse - Survive is just so damn dull, so drab and unoriginal and corporate and boring, that I can't even bother to get worked up about it. It's just 20-plus hours of my life spent doing a thing.
It's a 4/10 by any objective measure, but let's lower that to a 3/10 since Konami felt like charging an extra ten bucks for a second save slot. Not that I would ever want to play through this crap more than once, but it's the principle of the thing.
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