Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain Gameplay And Performance Review - Snake's Triumphant Return

Name: Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain Gameplay And Performance Review
Brand: Metal

by Shawn Sanders — Thursday, September 17, 2015, 12:52 PM EDT

Getting To Know Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain

Page 1: Getting To Know Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain

The wait is over. The time is nigh for sci-fi super-spy gadgets, cigar-smoking, and rampant exclamation points. Oh yes, the one-eyed one has returned. Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain has landed on the PC and it’s a doozy. Utilizing the same Fox Engine for its visuals, this latest effort nicely follows-up last year’s Metal Gear Solid V Ground Zeroes—the prequel which set the stage for this, the epic and more open-ended Phantom Pain.

Despite being one of the industry’s most beloved visually-challenged protagonists--with numerous sequels, prequels and remakes under his belt, Snake is a veritable stranger to the PC platform, visiting the master race all of three times before now (unless you count action-heavy MG: Revengeance). The original Metal Gear game launched on the Commodore 64 back in 1990. Fast-forward 13 years to 2003 when MGS2: Substance launched on PC, then again another 11 years to 2014 with Ground Zeros.

No time like the present, right? Joining the PC master race now, more than ever, just seems right. Plus we finally have a simultaneous launch to PC and consoles. The Metal Gear Solid series has shown tremendous growth not only in features, mechanics and gameplay complexity, but also the Fox Engine is a PC-worthy platform in terms of visual fidelity, a wealth of graphics settings and its ability to scale to provide a technically stable gaming experience across various types of hardware. As you'll see, its game engine is very efficient and mature at this point, while the visuals are still very much state of the art.

The Setup, Playing And Testing -

On the following pages, we'll give you our experience testing with and playing Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain on a brand new test machine. Setup with Windows 10, we have an Intel 6700K CPU atop a Z170 chipset-based Gigabyte Gaming G1 motherboard with 16GB of Corsair Vengeance 2666MHz DDR memory. Our OS is installed to a 256GB Corsair Neutron Series XT SSD drive, with the game itself installed to our ASUS USB 3.1 enclosed external drive comprised of dual 128GB SanDisk mSATA drives in a RAID array.