This offshore rig is the home of The Diamond Dogs, and it requires Big Boss to recruit soldiers, find supplies, armaments, and other items to bolster its strength. You’ll of course be given missions to complete to progress the main story along, but you’re also tasked with building Mother Base in the process of all of this. This time around, you’re simply not just travelling down a story path. The stealth gameplay of previous games is still the heart and soul of The Phantom Pain, but things have changed drastically from Guns of the Patriots. Metal Gear games have always given you a sense of freedom in how to attack your objectives, but overall, they’ve been pretty linear.

That may or may not sit well with some fans. This time around though, Metal Gear doesn’t waste as much time on the story as it’s a much more compelling gameplay experience than ever before. As in all Metal Gear games, the story gets a little more complicated than that. The Phantom Pain is the story of Big Boss and his quest to rebuild the private military group The Diamond Dogs. Regardless, in The Phantom Pain, players control Big Boss as he awakens from a nine year coma.

The best thing you could do to prep yourself for the Phantom Pain is to play Ground Zeroes, as that will at least give you some frame of reference for the events that are set to unfold. The Phantom Pain storyline resides somewhere after Metal Gear Solid: Peacewalker and somewhere before the original Metal Gear NES title that launched in the 1980’s. It would be understandable if you didn’t know the minutiae behind the Metal Gear series, but you don’t necessarily need to have all the twists and turns processed to have fun with MGS V. You might not. After all, he kind of looks like Solid Snake.

The Metal Gear series is a complicated beast from a story perspective and we’re not going to try to explain it here.

Metal gear solid v review pc