TL;DR: The story is enjoyable, but almost every other aspect of this game gets it horribly wrong. Rather than unlockable mechanics that keep the player busy, you can pay to unlock features of the game that completely eliminate the core aspects of playing a survival game.

Let me first start out this review by saying that if you are a fan of Metal Gear, this is your Indiana Jones IV moment. Do not enter here. You will have all the wrong expectations and will ultimately leave angry, disappointed, and in general, feeling sorry for your wallet.

At the time of writing, I had 135 hours into the game. I've seen nearly every scrap of content the game has to offer, and all I want to do is play through the main story one more time. But, I can't do that. I either have to set up a new steam account and then share my copy of the game with that steam account to do that, or I need to pony up $10 to buy a new saveslot just to play the game a second time. Big ol' negative point #1: This game wants to charge you for everything:

$10 for a new save slot (You can buy up to 4 more)

$10 per save slot for a new away team that hunts down resources for you in real time (You get 1 free, the other 4 have to be paid for.)

So just to max out one character, Konami thinks it is appropriate to ask $80 of the consumer. To have two characters, The cost is $50.

There are a total of almost $300 in purchases available before you even get into the cosmetics and pay to win boosts. It's just gross.

Yeah, I hear you. I don't have to buy them. But you know what I would like? A game where there's something to do. Where there are small, consequential rewards gated behind little challenges sprinkled around the map, where you can unlock things depending on how much time you devote to the game. You know, little mechanics and missions? Things you can actually do with the game rather than your credit card? Yeah, that'd be ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ great, Konami. Why don't we try that business model. You know, not making such an obvious cashgrab that the game's population is dead in less than a month and it takes 30 minutes to queue for a multiplayer match because LESS THAN 2000 PEOPLE GLOBALLY ARE PLAYING YOUR GAME.

Oh, and we haven't even gotten to the actual gameplay. Let's not forget that there are pay to win boosts that double the rate that everything in the game is harvested, but there's no actual in-game mechanic that boosts harvesting. You know, like every other survival game ever. Instead, if you want more resources, you either have to cough up about $1 a day, or about $20 a month to double the rate at which you earn resources. But wait, you could just dump hundreds of hours into the game grinding resources just so you could participate in multiplayer without getting yelled at for not bringing 300 ammo to kill a boss that you don't have to kill to complete the mission. One which doesn't give you anything for killing it and wastes 10 minutes of your time in an unfun, completely pointless boss fight.

The first 30 hours are wonderful. Survival isn't easy, getting wounded is hellishly detrimental, even just sleeping for a few hours can really screw you while you are working out how to secure regular food. The only problem? This will vary for every player, because recipes are distributed in random crates that repop every single day. The first time you pop the crate, you get the recipe. If you happen to miss a crate, or don't pick up a specific vegetable in a specific place during the storyline, you are completely missing a valubale structure or blueprint that can mean the difference between loving and hating the game. Gone are the days where strategy dictates how well a player progresses, and now are the days where just wandering around hoping to spot a container in PS1-era fog zones that limit your visibility to about forty feet at best. All the while, you are running out of oxygen and need to constantly teleport back and forth between home base and the wilderness to refill it.

Yeah, so the game definitely tries to push you forward. It's structured in such a way that you are deeply uncomfortable exploring as you go, and the pacing is all set up to keep pushing you forward in the story rather than making sure you are set up at home base to actually be able to survive and develop technology that will help you with the story. So the whole thing just feels like a trainwreck of ideas that don't work.

And then at some point toward the end of the story, you figure out that you don't actually have to fight anything except during specific parts of a mission where you need to protect specific locations from the enemy. You can literally outrun all but one enemy in the game at a leisurely jog. The enemies don't path properly, they kind of flow toward obstacles and dumbly swing at them, and the whole engine being engineered for a stealth/gun game having this slow, melee-focused affair where enemies don't communicate and cooperate to take you out just doesn't really work.

The single player campaign, the only enjoyable part loses its title of being truly enjoyable because it's fundamentally not challenging.

But wait, you want to defend the game for the single player just being a tutorial for multiplayer? Multiplayer sucks. Seriously. If you are playing with a group of people you like and know, it sucks less. But let's gloss over the fact that the playerbase lacks the ability to understand basic mechanics, objectives, and simple concepts like: If you are kiting a giant boss that can one-shot all of your defenses in one giant swing, DON'T BRING IT TOWARD THE SPAWN. And let's also gloss over the fact that multiplayer varies from annoying to nonexistent due to the lack of playerbase. And let's also gloss over the fact that half of the time that multiplayer fails to function because inexplicably, one player's connection will drop and the whole lobby can't recover properly, or the lobby will freeze while handing out the rewards, invalidating your reward but still managing to eat all the ammo and materials you used while trying to get said reward. Let's also ignore the fact that the game freezes on loading screens a huge percentage of the time.

Multiplayer is dull and repetitive. It's the recipes/blueprints you really want. But you don't really know exactly what you want, because you don't get to purchase/prioritize rewards. They are just given to you in a random sequence and you have to work with what drops. Even then, the key problem with multiplayer is just the fact that it's gated behind single player. You basically need to be level 25-30 (about 30 hours of gameplay) just to start the easy missions.

Even then, by the time you've finished the single player campaign and gotten high enough level to be of any help whatsoever in multiplayer, the rewards you are getting are tuned for characters around level 5-15. But Hard missions can vary from skull-numbingly easy to infurating (not for difficulty) due to the skill of the randoms you get hooked up with, sometimes you have to bite the barrel and really go overboard on how many resources you use during the course of a mission in order to complete it. This can lead to spirals where you are running out of a resource that isn't rare, but is inexplicably nowhere to be found in the world, like aluminum or lead. How do you fix this? Single player. Go to single player and teleport to bases and loot them. If it's not hard or engaging, why are you making me do it?

It's just not fun. Konami's arrogance and greed really showed through on this one. You can't take a survival game and p2w it so that survival isn't hard. And you can't take all the mechanics out of a game, slap a price tag on the rewards for playing the game, and have a game be fun.

Worst game of 2018. Hands down. </3 Konami. </3