“Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain” is the eighth installment in the canon Metal Gear series. This game has been transformed into an open world game with sets of large areas for the player to travel.

These areas contain fortresses, forests and bases with enemies patrolling them. Most of the areas contain military gear that you can steal and bring back to your base later in the game.

“Metal Gear” is known for its stealth game play, applying it to “The Phantom Pain” but allowing the player to choose whether or not they want to go guns blazing or take it quiet and slow.

In MGSV players take on the role of Punish “Venom” Snake, also known as Big Boss. Snake wakes up from a coma nine years after the events of the previous game, “Ground Zeroes”, having the game set in the mid 80s.

The game throws the player straight into the action with stealth mechanics, having to sneak past the enemy forces searching for Snake as they attack the hospital he is in. After the long tutorial level, the player can explore the world with side missions and the main story missions.

There is a new base created in the story, letting Big Boss collect enemies that he has knocked out, supplies and military gear at the enemy bases to lift back to the mother base with the Fulton surface-to-air recovery system, commonly known in game as just the Fulton.

Upgrading weapons and tools in “The Phantom Pain” is fully customizable, allowing for different silencers and parts to be added to make the weapons and tools more effective.  Materials collected around the world can be used for currency, which is used to upgrade key elements of your helicopter, mother base and other items.

Part of the game is spent in a helicopter, having Snake send out his crew to their own missions; having better crew members means better results on the missions. These stats on enemies make the game more interesting, having the player see them as important targets to lift back to base.

In the game’s late production, some key story elements were cut out to meet deadlines, leaving a big part of the story unfinished. Pieces of the story can be found through casette tapes scattered throughout the game.

If people haven’t played the previous games, they can still play this game first if they listen to the tapes and read about small bits of the story.

“Metal Gear Solid V” is running on the Fox Engine, allowing for photorealistic graphics that enable amazing scenery to be shown in this game.

Even without some key story elements needed to fully experience the story, “Metal Gear Solid V” has great game play aspects, graphics and an interesting story with lots of twists and surprises. It also has replayability, letting the game last as long as you want it to.