This is another one of those games that i never would have paid money for but it was one of the monthly "free" games on the Playstation Network so I figured "what the hell I'll give it a go."
You'll have to forgive me for not knowing the backstory because the last Metal Gear game I played was on PS2 so I might have missed a lot.
This game starts out in a very frustrating manor because for about the first hour of the game, you are in control of very little of the action. It is just one cutscene after the other followed by you briefly running down a hallway and shooting 2 things only to have the controls hijacked for another 10 minutes of cutscenes. I mean seriously, it is absurd how long this process takes. You have the ability to SKIP all of this, but I kept thinking "there's no way it is going to take much longer!" Yes, yes there is a way. Later in the game there are really long and unnecessary cutscenes that add nothing to the (already weak) story and you CANT skip them at all.
After an hour of cutscenes that you almost certainly didn't watch all of you finally arrive at your homebase on the planet Dite, which is an alternate universe that was accessed during a wormhole that opened up on earth (huh?) You need to, as the title of the game would suggest, find a way to survive and this means grinding and struggling to find and keep food and water. This is where the game becomes even more frustrating because food resources are extremely scarce on Dint so most of the time I am searching for food more often then I am doing the storyline objectives.
A vast majority of the enemies are these slow-moving and linear enemies called "Wanderers" that will almost always walk in a straight line to get to you.
There is way too much material gathering going on in this game. It almost feels like it might have been intended to be an MMO but it wasn't working out so the devs were just like "F**K it, let's release it anyway!"
I'm several hours in and the fighting mechanics are just dumb, the AI on the Wanderers (they're zombies, may as well call them what they are) is moronic. You can trap a horde of them behind a fence and then poke them with a stick until they die, one by one. It doesn't really matter how many of them their are.
And of course if you bother to play for a bit longer hoping that this initial grind will eventually end and the "real" gameplay comes later, you will be disappointed because I'm 6 hours or so into what is meant to be a 20 hour game and nope, nothing has changed except now i have a bow and arrow and I shoot that through a fence over and over instead of my previous trusty stick.
There's a reason why almost no actual gameplay footage is in this trailer... because you would laugh if there was any. The game does have a multi-player aspect to it that you can enter anytime you want (from your homebase) but other than the fact that you are no longer on your own the game doesn't change at all other than the fact that it is simply an instance... after you win or lose you are no longer tied to those players in your "home instance".... if that makes sense.
The scarcity of materials in the world around you is also a devious trick on the part of Konami because you are able to buy the materials you are missing with real-world money... and micro-transactions that are built in to the intentionally bad availablity of materials in the actual game are upsetting to me. This would be infuriating if I had actually paid money for the game and not gotten it for "free."
This game pretty much blows and as soon as Final Fantasy 15 arrives in the mail (fingers crossed on tomorrow) I will likely never play it again.
On a scale of "Urgh!" to "Wowsers!" I give Metal Gear Survive the rating of.....
