Metal Gear Survive (2018)

This game got so bad. I'm really disappointed. I'm probably about three-quarters through the game and I've hit kind of a wall, both of difficulty and patience. It seems like my character level and my equipment has not kept pace with the difficulty of the story missions. I get the impression that I should have been doing the optional co-op salvage missions along the way, but there's basically nobody playing this game anymore and they aren't very fun to play solo. Worse, it seems all of the base building and management systems are gone on this new map, and I don't think I'll get back to my base until the story is over. This also means that I can't find any of the blueprints that I missed on the last map to help me with the late-game difficulty spike. In a better game I'd be inclined to take the time to get good, but the tedium has killed that inclination. My avatar moves so slowly and death comes so quickly that my game time is 95% trudging and 5% bleeding. I want to finish this game, I really do, in the interest of rounding out my Metal Gear completionism this year. I'm honestly very close to trying Cheat Engine or something.

This game had a really rough start, but after one big hurdle (the first wormhole generator defense mission) I started to get into it. I do enjoy the slow-but-steady progression of doing a little excursion to find more materials to upgrade your equipment so you can do tougher excursions. Unfortunately, most real advancement in the tech tree seems to be gated behind discrete story missions. I much prefer the open, free-form way Subnautica handled this kind of survival game progression. In that, hard-to-get materials and the technologies they opened up were real, logical stepping stones of progress. It really let the player live out the right-libertarian fantasy of bootstrapping one's own little settlement in the pure wilderness (I am not a right-libertarian but it's a fun fantasy for video games). Anyway, aside from being a much more artificial way to gate progress, Survive's story missions also serve up its puerile (had to look that one up to make sure I was using it right) attempt at a plot. It moves incredibly slowly and I can't say I'm invested in any particular character or concept. Sure, Kojima's own titles in the series have had a bit too much going on to make sense of at times, but this game tosses in bits of conspiracy, distrust, and techno-babble like it's running down a Metal Gear story checklist. If the unlocks continue to be good and the gameplay improves with them, I suspect I'll be able to look past the story and have a fun time with this weird title.