Preview: Metal Gear Survive is a lackluster spin-off that takes multiple steps back

It’s probably safe to say that everyone was caught off guard by Konami’s decision to announce a new Metal Gear game centered around zombies a year titled Metal Gear Survive after the release of Metal Gear Solid V, which ultimately resulted in creator Hideo Kojima being fired. Fans were immediately angry and confused, not many people were welcoming of the idea as it felt like Konami was attempting to cash in on the IP by using the Metal Gear license and reusing mechanics and assets from MGS V.

About a year and a half after its reveal, we’re a month out from Metal Gear Survive and we’ve gotten our hands on the open beta and well… it’s probably not going to win many skeptics over. Metal Gear Survive is a poorly constructed spin-off to the Metal Gear series, they took just about everything good about it and put it in the trash and made it as dull as possible. I went in with an open mind hoping that this could be something worth playing, however, I don’t see myself playing this for more than a few days after I complete the main story which is being held secret by Konami.

One of the reasons some people had hopes for this game is that it looked to use a lot of the mechanics from Metal Gear Solid V, which was praised for its incredible sandbox gameplay that allowed players to try insane new things for interesting results. There was near limitless freedom and it kept people playing for weeks. Metal Gear Survive just ignores all of those mechanics and turns into something that lacks the flow and rhythm of Hideo Kojima’s swan song.

Since this is a survival game, players will find themselves using melee weapons a lot because ammo is scarce. The melee weapons include spears, machetes, axes, and other weapons for close encounters, but they’re all terrible because MGS V was built for stealth and action with guns, not lots of melee combat. Sure, you could run up to someone and unleash some punches of fury like Keanu Reeves in an action movie, but that was usually in a situation where you’re out of ammo or when a weapon seemed like overkill. Here, you can swing or jab your melee weapon three times slowly until the game makes you pause for a moment, allowing the zombie to attack you, usually knocking you backward and on your back.

It’s completely unintuitive and feels like no thought was put into a mechanic that is clearly a big feature in the game. The only time it works well is when zombies are stuck behind a fence and you can poke at them through the holes, but that’s the only time it’s really truly worth using. Because of this, I would often feel useless in the game. I wouldn’t bother using my melee because it was impossible to make an impact against large hordes. I’d just run to high ground and watch as they swarmed everyone else because there wasn’t much else I could do if I didn’t have the resources to make ammo.

When you’re using a gun, whether it be one that you came equipped with or a turret that you place down, it can feel really satisfying to unload piles of lead into large groups of zombies all clumped together. Other than that, combat is weak and feels like a major step back for Metal Gear.

In the beta, the game makes very little effort to explain to you how to play. It throws you in and expects you to understand every mechanism, but it’s not that easy. There are so many menus and systems in play in this game, it’s impossible to just understand every single thing without even a small text bubble telling you how something works. There’s a lot of layers and if explained well, it could be cool. Unfortunately, it just becomes overwhelming and frustrating because you don’t know what you’re doing.

It took me two matches to figure out how to build defenses around my area, I discovered that even if you heal fully yourself, your individual body parts can be damaged and bruised. This leaves you looking for a bunch of different types of medical supplies to heal those. In addition to that, there’s even a food and drink system which made no sense from the context of the beta.

None of these things had any explanation and were made more confusing by the fact that some of the content required to understand these things were seemingly missing from the beta. I watched a recent impressions video from Giant Bomb where they got to go hands-on with a nearly complete build of the game and there were animals running around to make food, from my experience with the beta there were no animals to be found. Turns out food and drink are required to keep your health and stamina at its highest capacity.

There’s a lack of variety with the zombies themselves, they look really uninspired and have this generic grey look to most of them. There are a few different variants of them, some are armored, some explode, but there’s never anything very challenging like a boss. The only thing that seems to change is the amount that comes at you, which results in the difficulty never really changing. The only time I ever failed to win was when I played by myself for the first time and that’s because I was confused by the mechanics and the melee combat was lackluster at best.

If you were looking for a fun and interesting take on the Metal Gear universe that combines the critically acclaimed gameplay of MGS V, this isn’t it. This is a low budget Call of Duty’s Nazi zombies and it feels like the end of the road for Metal Gear for quite some time. Maybe there’s something valuable in the game’s campaign, but from an overall gameplay and multiplayer experience, it’s a hollow shell of what Kojima created.