The Metal Gear Survive beta launched yesterday. It’s 8GB, and is available on XB1 and PS4. Has anyone tried it?
I launched it last night and…well look. Here’s the deal for me: I am in awe of the tightness of the Fox Engine. I personally feel that MGSV is the best-controlling, most versatile third-person action game of all time. Everything about it looks and performs exactly as I feel that it should. I went into this game knowing that (probably) no one involved with MGSV is involved with this game, but hey, if they use the Fox Engine as a platform and don’t mess with any of the control mechanics, how bad could a survival game built on that model possibly be?
Well, I haven’t played much yet, but I’ve made some unfortunate observations right off the bat. Notably, everything about this game is modeled on MGSV, but every element is missing a sense of polish that makes everything feel at least a little bit off. The menus are uglier, and in most cases, are more difficult to navigate. Some animations are straight-up fucked up. For example, pull out a weapon and ‘aim’ with it, which locks your character’s view straight ahead. Walking left and right while crouched causes your character’s legs to shoot out in those directions like fuckin Octodad. Compared to the precision of the animations in MGSV, this is extremely jarring.
But I mean, I’m willing to look past flaws if the core gameplay is good. As yet, I can’t tell. The interface is just awful. It’s extremely unfriendly, and makes no apparent, intrinsic sense. The mission setup interface is your character, placed in a sort of Animus-type empty white area, which has objective markers on the ground around you, identified by ambiguous floating iconography. You walk into them and they present you with different options.
I was trying to get into the game, so I walked to the first one I saw and it presented me with a short menu. I chose one of the missions on it, and the menu closed. I just stood there, waiting. I discovered I now have to walk over to a different marker to start the game. So, I did, and it just dropped me in to a mission with no real explanation as to what I was supposed to do.
I ran around the area while a countdown timer expired, collecting materials and killing a few zombs, but the game never told me what I could do with materials and what the timer was for. This felt like a serious shortcoming: I should have been presented with a tutorial before I could go so deep like this. I’ll bet that there is one, somewhere in the Animus area, but dude…what the fuck. Just give me a text menu.
Does anyone have any experience with this thing yet? If so, what the hell is it?
