When Hideo Kojima left Konami, people had the impression that Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain would be the last big video game for the series. For a while, that’s what it looked like. The only news we got for a while was that Metal Gear Solid Pachinko machines were being made. But then the announcement of Metal Gear Survive came and changed everything. Our introduction to this upcoming video game came in the form of a trailer that showed us the alternate timeline premise of the story. Branching out from Metal Gear Solid 5‘s plotline, history itself is altered when wormholes in the sky appear, unleashing strange creatures from other dimensions. The surviving members of Mother Base have to find a way to get back home.
Until now, we didn’t get the chance to see Metal Gear Survive‘s gameplay. Today we do. Over at the Tokyo Game Show, there was a 15 minute demo shown off that takes us through one of the game’s missions.
The mission is to send out a distress signal at the base of a particular wormhole. The first phase, infiltration, focuses on a team of players trying to reach this point on the map. The squad of four splits up into teams of two, and we soon encounter some of the most basic zombie types of adversary on the way to the objective. Throwing a lure, these otherworldly creatures are attracted to it, allowing the soldiers to stealthily take them out when their backs are turned. Collecting resources is vital for survival, and the men extract these corpses to harvest later. Further pursuing the acquisition of materials, they advance towards a building that has goods inside. Slingshoting a zombie and impaling it on a wooden barrier wall, this first team of two is able to score some cargo. Checking in on the second team of two, they face a problem when they come to a more open area of the map. It’ll be impossible to take the patrolling zombies head-on here. They attempt to pick one of them off, but one of the guys gets distracted and injures his leg by stepping too close to a zombie corpse that still had a bit of life in it. Individual body parts can be damaged in Metal Gear Survive, and speedy treatment is crucial to limiting the effects of it. The duo Fulton Cannon a sheep, suspending it in mid-air as a zombie lure. When the zombies crowd around the spectacle, one of the soldiers throws a Molotov cocktail at the mob and lights them on fire. After finally reaching the distress signal wormhole, the second team sends out a meet-up beacon to the first team, coordinating a strategy of where the point of focus is. Now both teams are back together, converging on the objective. Taking a high point on a ledge, all four soldiers open fire on the nearby zombies, clearing the way to the base of the wormhole.
The second phase focuses on defending the distress signal while it’s transmitting an inter-dimensional call. One of the squad members serves as a lookout, sighting a box of goods as it drops into their world via a portal. But unfortunately, he also sees a large group of zombies converging on the group’s location. A battle unfolds between these invaders and the soldiers. The group is able to successfully set up some defense fences and keep the enemies at bay. Between waves, one player is able to craft some more deadly barricades. The group manages to outlast several onslaughts, but as they keep coming they realize more offensive measures are necessary, crafting a machine gun nest to raise some hell. But eventually the zombies overtake the area, and the squad has to retreat.
Metal Gear Survive comes out in 2017 for PC, PS4, and Xbox One. To learn more about the game, check out their website.
