A brief on how this game is: First I want you to find someone you know, hug them ... feels good doesn't it? Now they have to kick you in the groin for a good 10 minutes every hour roughly. That's the difficulty scale in this game. It goes from the easy to kill standard cyborgs to three gekkos, two armored cyborgs with RPG's and a heavily armored soldier with a power hammer. That's just on Normal. If you find this challenging you can always gear it down to easy, which the difficulty scale is between cutting butter with a hot knife to cutting a cake. This doesn't make it a bad game necessarily.
When you think of the Metal Gear series what do you think about? How Hideo Kojima can vomit on a page and turn it into some sort of semi-coherent game that almost everyone loves? David Hayter? Plot twists crazier than a M. Knight Shamalon movie? Repressed memories and anti-war pro technology undertones? Well you can throw most of that out the window because Kojima pretty much threw a concept at Platinum Games and he was there just to make sure the story was intact.
Again, all of this does not make this a bad game, it's just the black sheep of the Metal Gear series. The plot is very tame and doesn't have any twists. However, this story does delve into the psyche of Raiden. If you don't like Raiden then I can't really help you with this game, but you can play it with Raiden wearing a Mariachi outfit!
So with the plot and odd difficulty curve out of the way, lets actually get into the gameplay. If you'd played Devil May Cry or Ninja Gaiden you will feel right at home. This is the epidemy of ball-grinding run around and either wreck shit or get your ass handed to you. The upside is, the amount of damage you take doesn't effect your score, unless you take none ... then you get a bonus. I found this game to be very fun and in several occasions pretty intense, which is a rare for me.
The only problem I have with it are the QTE's (Quick Time Events). They are what get you into a mode where you can destroy their armor and cut them to pieces and in many occasions kill bosses or sub-bosses. In several occasions you can just attack them and skip the QTE's but int he dire moments you NEED to so the QTE's. And if you fail and you don't have a health upgrade or a heal it will straight up kill you. In some cases that doesn't matter, your still straight up dead. And the final boss had a part where you have to cut up something he throws at you and the cuts have to be exact which is a pain in the dick. The last gripe I have about the game is its parry system.
There isn't a block button, you need to stop attacking, press the attack button and the direction of the attack simultaneously. If you were in the middle of an attack then you can't block or run away or even cancel the attack, and you are getting something in your face. If its a boss, there is a good chance that you are getting dead ... and don't even get me started on the second boss that can throw his body parts at you.
Oh and one more thing. In case you can't tell the enemy is about to attack, there is a glowing visual queue and there are two of those. The red kind you can block or try to stop with a power attack. then there is the yellow kind that you can either run away from or try to do a power attack to stop, but if you try to stop it and fail, you are getting wrecked.
Besides the QTE's, which shouldn't even exist anymore, these battle mechanics are bad, in fact they add to the difficulty ... except the fact that you can't block or cancel in the middle of an attack. I found the fighting can be seamless and the fighting can easily go from one attack to another, unless you get stuck in a yellow move. This game is really fun once you understand how the enemies attack and you get your bearings.
Now with all that out of the way, the story is short. Like really short. I beat the story mode on Normal in 7 hours. Granted there was like 4 hours of just me dying and 2 hours of that specific cut thing on the final boss. However there is quite a bit of replay value in it. There are certain officers arms you need to cut off, hidden MIB's (Men In Boxes), Data tags you need to find, completing the games in certain ways to get titles, finding/completing and gold staring VR missions and upgrading all of your weapons and stats.
If you're playing this game for the story, like you would do with most Metal Gear games, then this is a rent. If your playing this game for the sake of unlocking everything, like I do with all of them, then this game is for you.
This hair tearing, ball grinding, masochistic, murder mayhem game is definitely worth the play. It's fighting mechanics can take awhile to get to, the story is interesting but not as corkscrewed as others, the QTE's are a pain in the ass and the story mode is short but has many hidden things. All in all I really enjoyed this game.
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