You just have to be ready to look for it. The length might bother those coming to Ground Zeroes looking for a full-fledged Metal Gear game, but it does prove itself to be more than a glorified Phantom Pain tutorial with five sizeable side missions and a number of accessible and ingenious ways in which to play most of them. When I rushed through it, I was done in less than an hour, but taking my time to smell the roses I finished it in three. I suspect Kojima was going for ‘heartbreaking,’ but the final blow (and I really found no issue until then) felt unearned a “look what we dared to do!” statement shoehorned in for shock value and very little else.
While I do appreciate these ambitions - particularly because the series has been known to veer into cartoonish territory - I found its ending, which features unusually provocative cruelty, to be awkwardly handled.
There has been some talk of Creative Director Hideo Kojima’s desires to move Metal Gear into a grittier and more provocative territory, and the gristle and grime on display in the game's unflinching cut scenes and audio tapes certainly suggests this is the case. Ground Zeroes’ central plot focuses on Metal Gear’s usual concerns of high concept political conspiracies and conflicted triple agents, but contrary to the norm, there is very little of it.The plot that is here is darker in tone than what we’ve come to expect. The prologue to the upcoming full-bodied Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain (expected in 2015), Ground Zeroes takes its structural and tonal cues from Peace Walker, 2010’s largely overlooked but wonderful PSP game.
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