Metal Gear Survive: What is MGS Without Kojima?

Metal Gear Survive is Konami’s first MG game without Hideo Kojima at the helm. Understandably, this leaves fans worrying about whether or not the franchise is in good hands. It’s been a week since the release, and it’s safe to say more than a handful of players are past the first impressions stage. So how does Metal Gear Survive fare against its predecessors? Let’s find out.

Metal Gear Survive in a Nutshell

Let’s make one thing clear: this is not Metal Gear Solid. MGS is the founding father of the stealth genre, and TPP is arguably the crown jewel of it. Survive is neither a stealth game, nor a gem of any sorts. As Hideo Kojima himself put it in a conference in 2016 when he denied any involvement with the project, “Metal Gear (for me) is political fiction with espionage. There is no way zombies would be in it.

So what is Survive? The story begins six months after the destruction of Mother Base from TPP. The player’s character is an unnamed soldier, sent into another dimension for — without giving too much away — research purposes. He finds himself on Dite, a world destroyed by humans infected by unknown organisms; zombies, if you will. As the title suggests, Survive is a simulation game, where the core gameplay revolves around keeping your character alive in an open-world filled with dangers.

Gameplay: Surviving MG Survive

The player must utilize the needs system, which includes cooking food and drinking fresh water, in order to survive on Dite. The player can hunt animals, scavenge areas for supplies, and collect an energy resource called Kuban from enemies. There is also a crafting system, which allows the player to build anything from tools, to weapons, to full-fledged camps. Sadly, the different means of interacting with objects in the universe boils down to pressing a button and watching animations. Whether it’s harvesting Kuban or preparing water, interaction is lazy and repetitive.

In a completely opposite direction to previous MG installments stealth is nearly nonexistant. It is possible to sneak up behind individual zombies and extract Kuban from them. But because this is also a zombie game, enemies travel in hordes. Every zombie — or wanderer, as the game calls them — on the map is bound to have a second enemy behind them, and so on and so forth. The end result is that it takes less time to charge spear-first into a horde of zombies and kill them rather than patiently wait for an opening to take advantage of the sneak system.

This problem is made worse by the enemy AI. Stealth games typically encourage sneaking around because enemies can overwhelm the player head-on. In Survive, it usually takes only a single barricade to stop them. Enemies are coded to attempt to break it down rather than take two steps to go around. And God help them if you get on top of a crate. While they can collectively push steel fences down and shamble over each other, they have no idea how to climb three-foot high boxes. Multiplayer isn’t much to speak of either. Queue times are excessively long, and for the most part, gameplay resembles extraction levels from L4D.

MGS Without Hideo Kojima

So what is there to love about MGS: Survive? The honest answer to this question is: very little. We’ll get to the bad stuff in a while but for now, here’s the good. Survive makes use of the Fox Engine, which powered TPP, so you can expect some decent visuals. As a lover of the survival genre, I also enjoy the barren wasteland of Dite well enough. But wow, that’s a short list. See, even as I say I enjoy the graphics and the survival aspect, certain features of the game prevent me saying I love anything about it.

To be fair, Konami attempts to cater to fans with several references to the original MGS series. Big Boss appears during the opening sequence, and the unnamed player character actually contributes his share in helping him escape. There’s even a kaiju-sized opponent to give the feeling of fighting the old MG bosses. But beyond that, characters are boring.

Zombie Games: They Just Won’t Die

Here’s the true problem with Survive: interest. There is a fallacy that if you copy a successful game, you can make the same successful numbers as said IP. This makes sense when copying trends in other markets, perhaps, such as cars, but not when it comes to video games. Why? Because what gamers actually pay for when purchasing a game is time.

Gamers invest money to spend time entertaining themselves. And when you already have a game of a certain genre you enjoy, then why buy a new one? The zombie genre is already crowded enough as it is. There’s Dying Light, Left4Dead, L4D2, Dead Island, Dead Rising, Dead Island 2… the list goes on and on. And regarding survival, why buy a generic zombie survival game when I can simply load up Fallout 4 with the Frost mod or Skyrim with Frostfall? In a saturated market, it takes something extra special to grab customers. This doesn’t have that.

Goodbye Kojima, Goodbye Snake

As far as fans are concerned, the Metal Gear Franchise ended when Kojima left Konami. Survive was meant to be the publisher’s message to the public. They were supposed to prove that the title was safe in their hands and in that, they failed. Already, reports are coming in of how Survive’s launch raked in only 5% of TPP’s revenue in its first week. Add to that, controversy that a rogue Konami employee sabotaged the game in support of Hideo Kojima, and you have a full-fledged PR breakdown.

And finally, as the final nail in the coffin, Konami had the guts to put in microtransactions in a predominantly single-player game. What do you pay for? Save slots. Survive only allows you to create one character by default, charging $9.99 for additional save slots. What was once a core feature in all games, we now have to buy as “luxuries.” Now if that doesn’t convince you not to buy Metal Gear: Survive, I don’t know what will. Overall, Metal Gear Survive is a generic, average, survival simulator that dares to charge more than its worth. It does this in terms of time, and money.

Save both. Don’t bother.