Recent reviews by Spinnerweb

There could be a really good game in here, if they'd let me play it. If there was more combat and less snatching of control from the player. Most of Shadow of the Tomb Raider is walking from one cutscene to the next, being forced to walk and not play while Lara chats on her radio, and squeezing through tight spaces. You know the ones. The graphics are really good, but there is really nothing to justify this being a game rather than a CGI movie except that the bar for storytelling in video games is lower.

Speaking of, the story is still awful, but at this point you can't expect any more from writers who, three games in, can't come up with anything other than, "And then everything explodes and crumbles!" It seems they watched Apocalypto in between and decided it was missing a white saviour. What a joke. The entire reboot trilogy turned Lara Croft from THE video game heroine into an irrelevant knockoff. Thank God it's over.

The one positive thing about Rise of the Tomb Raider is that Lara's posh accent turns 'Divine Source' into 'Divine Sauce,' so you can pretend to yourself that all these people are killing each other over the McNugget Mulan Szechuan sauce from Rick and Morty.

Otherwise, what a terrible game. Somehow they made it far, far worse than the first reboot. It's the exact same story, just transplanted into a different setting. Lara still falls from heights every few seconds and always talks out of breath, even while resting. Environments explode and crumble if you so much as look at them. Where the original reboot is a third-person shooter that relies heavily on setpieces, Rise of the Tomb Raider is a movie you occasionally get to control.

And just to finish sucking the soul out of this once-iconic franchise, they put in a lootbox system. In a single-player story-driven game.

I often describe Tomb Raider as 'The Last of Us but good.' Unfortunately, it's also 'Resident Evil 5 but terrible.'

It's got good graphics and is a mechanically solid, if occasionally buggy, third-person shooter. There's really not much more to say. The story is terrible and Lara's characterization has been utterly bastardized to the point it's easier to think of her as a different character. NuLara is fairly likeable in her own way, but she doesn't compare to the character classic fans are used to.

The 'Not Recommended' is mainly for fans of the series. If you like cinematic third-person shooters a lot, go ahead and enjoy. It's not an awful game, though not an especially good one either. For fans of the series though, this game is a middle finger and a half. If you play Tomb Raider for exploration, puzzle solving, or simply for a game that shuts the hell up once in a while, this isn't it. Every single square inch is packed with explosions, screams and Lara falling over. This is a ryona compilation disguised as a video game.

I owe Sonic fans an apology.

Through much of my adult life I've derived pleasure from making fun of Sonic fans and the way they pretend post-1993 Sonic is ever any good. Yes, the soundtracks are great and the cutscenes are sometimes awesome, but it doesn't make any difference if the game ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ sucks to play, does it?

I spat into the wind, and on my umpteenth playthrough of Tomb Raider: Underworld, it finally landed on my face. The realization hit me that this series is basically just Sonic for adults. It's almost always rushed, it's clunky as ♥♥♥♥, and yet its fans keep loving it because they're way too attached to the character. Yes, the soundtracks are great and the cutscenes are sometimes awesome, but it doesn't make any difference if the game ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ sucks to play, does it?

Wait, is there an echo in here?

Underworld has the best storyline out of any Tomb Raider game. It also stars the definitive Lara Croft character design, and I doubt any game has ever had sexier box art than this one. The music is excellent: the vocal track coming in as you emerge into the Thai jungle, melding with birdsong and the chirping of forest critters, is one of the most unforgettable moments I've ever had in a video game. It looks great when it's not in motion, which makes it a shame that Steam Overlay doesn't work with this game, as it's so screenshottable.

But it's also a complete and utter disaster. This is a forever janky, constantly buggy mess of a game. It is extremely lacking in its level design, and the worst level is the one immediately after the prologue. Lara sinks into the floor at random intervals, and there's a game-breaking bug at the second puzzle that can force you to start over. It's just a constant stream of frustration. You can see that they were trying to make this game good with more freedom of movement, but when even jumping onto a box doesn't work, the whole thing is an abject failure.

You can also spot the devs' exhaustion. Secrets are placed carelessly in obvious locations: you don't find them, they find you. The smoothest animations are Lara ragdolling when she dies, because the developers didn't have any control over those, ironically. The camera is horrendous. It's never cooperative, is too close up, and is in a constant struggle with the player to revert onto Lara's butt. I wish I was kidding, but here is one of the dark thoughts I had playing this game that illustrates the issue: "Why don't they just shove the camera up her ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ and be done with it?"

I am focusing on the PC version, but having played three different versions of the game (many times for some reason), I can give you a quick rundown:

- Avoid the PS2 version. It's impressive that they got the game to run at all and kept it largely faithful to the seventh-gen version, barring a few exclusions, but the game often turns into a slideshow.

- The Nintendo DS version is a functional but rather uninteresting side-scroller, though it includes the console versions' cutscenes as FMVs.

- The PC version is a hacky console port with many elements tied to the framerate, causing a few extra issues in an already-buggy game, but it's your best bet - particularly as it goes on sale for pennies, which are all this game is worth, sadly.

For some reason though, here I am 16 years later, playing Underworld yet again. Maybe because the story is good enough that once I forget how terrible the gameplay is, I'm ready to subject myself to it again. Maybe because the environments are so evocative. Maybe I'm just trapped, like a Sonic fan, because I've loved this series since I was a kid and this is the last mainline game with the 'real Lara.'

Each time however, I like Underworld less and less. On my last playthrough in 2020, I wrote about the game: "Yeah, the final boss fight is one of the worst puzzle bosses in video game history, but Lara has a great ass so 8/10." I must be getting old if that's not enough anymore.

For years, when people talked about great remakes like the 2002 version of Resident Evil, I would advance Tomb Raider: Anniversary as another contender. Having replayed both the 1996 original and Anniversary this year, I retract that statement. I've played this game countless times, and am fond of it. But a great remake is one that surpasses the original. Anniversary, despite being more accessible to a newcomer, doesn't do that.

Anniversary is fairly faithful, and recreates a lot of the environments that are now as familiar to a veteran raider as the house they grew up in. It's hard to find many flaws in the first half, and having played it across the PS2, PSP and PC, I must say it looks very good on all three platforms.

Would that the second half were as enticing. My thoughts on the second half can be summed up with one sentence I spoke to my sister while she was watching me play it 13 years ago: "These games always get buggier and ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ the longer they go on, because developers aren't really expecting most people to play that far." The slippery physics result in Lara dropping off ledges she's already climbed for no reason, and she sometimes doesn't register that you want to grab a ledge, especially in the later sections with moving platforms, because they haven't moved into just the right position yet.

The combat is also downright awful, and was egregiously so on this run as I played on Hard difficulty. I highly recommend playing on Easy - there's no shame. It won't make the puzzle-platforming sections any easier, and they're the point; it'll just make the awful combat more bearable. Holy ♥♥♥♥, this combat. Nearly every single enemy except mice and bats force you to do this Max Payne-style dodge to get a headshot on them, and it's an unwelcome gimmick because they become invincible when they bum-rush you for it, resulting in wasted ammo and repetitive combat. Lara goes flying into the air at the slightest provocation, so when you're fighting 3 flying enemies while standing on a tiny platform, expect a lot of unwarranted deaths because this gorgeous woman can't keep her feet on the ground.

I feel the PC version is far worse than the PS2 and PSP versions, which I would rate higher. The biggest reason for this is the controls. Playing Tomb Raider: Anniversary on the PC is a handicap in itself. Despite its Steam page promising full controller support (and LAU Tomb Raider is meant to be played with a controller), this game does not have true analog control. Rather, it feels like eight directions mapped poorly to your analog stick, and the results range from irksome (coming to a standstill in combat because the game didn't register a sudden change in direction) to infuriating (falling to your death because the game thought you wanted to jump backwards rather than sideways). There also seem to be serious issues with the auto-targeting system that I've never encountered with the console versions.

Even the graphics get worse, feeling hurried in the endgame, and this is really disappointing. If this is the case, there have been more Tomb Raider games that suffered from being rushed than not. Being rushed is the constantly haunting bane of this series. I was disappointed in the designs of the last few levels. The living walls of flesh and less-defined, more-horrific enemies in the original were a lot more inspired than the generic sci-fi designs they went for in the remake. I understand their desire to convey the Atlantis aesthetic, but it doesn't have to look like Disney dictated it did.

Lastly, while the story is mostly enjoyable, the daft attempts at characterization around Lara's first murder would have been better left out. If you took two shots of vodka for every time she looks uncertain and stares at her hands in the endgame, your liver would spontaneously combust. Sometimes it's better to leave things unsaid. The 2000s were not the age of subtlety, but this is gratuitous.

Now that I'm done tearing the game to pieces, it's time to tell you that I do sincerely love it. For all its flaws, it's still a good alternative for newcomers who can't bear the outdated graphics and tank controls of the original. There's a lot of detail to it, right down the soundtrack changing based on the enemies you encounter. There are moments when the puzzle-platforming simply clicks, which is the essence of Tomb Raider: the riveting cycle of climbing and jumping and solving puzzles in a wonderfully isolated, zen-like state. But please, for the love of God, only play the PC version as a last resort, despite the fact that it goes on sale for pennies. And once you're done, consider developing Stockholm syndrome for the original like I did. It'll pay off, I promise.

I wasn't expecting Valkyria Chronicles 4 would get made, ever. After:

- a PSP sequel that was too harshly judged,

- a third entry that never made it out of Japan,

- a browser card game that was too early to ride the gacha wave (but served as a pretty good excuse for character designer Raita Honjou to draw more art of the characters, for which reason alone its existence was justified)

- and a spin-off that was Valkyria Chronicles in name only

there didn't seem to be any point in Sega moving forward with the series. That is, of course, until the high early sales of the first game's remaster kicked in, as people uncovered this gem of a series. I'm fairly sure that alone was the impetus for Valkyria Chronicles 4's creation, and I'm thankful for that. Like the first game, Valkyria Chronicles 4 is somewhat flawed, but is a unique and beautiful experience that I highly recommend.

I last played through VC4 in 2020. Four years have passed, and I thought I was no different, until the very end. The anti-war, anti-nuke message of the ending struck a much more powerful chord with me now than it did four years ago. I'm glad to have matured in that way. VC4's plot is actually pretty good: much more grounded, showing heavy influences from European anti-war films, right down to a guy being hung with a signboard saying, "I sold out my country for scraps," around his neck. Amateurs borrow, professionals steal, as they say. It was also one of the few games to make me teary-eyed at a character's death. The localization is pretty good too, with puns aplenty. You can tell the translators had fun working on this game, and I salute them for not bowdlerizing it.

That said, the story does have its weak points. Both the hero and the Valkyria are the dullest of their ilk in the entire series. Claude is a decent protagonist, but he doesn't seem half as memorable as Avan, Kurt or Welkin from previous entries. Despite (and partially due to) her unique design, the Valkyria - Crymaria - is the worst in the series as well, unless you count that chick from the Valkyria Revolution spin-off, which I don't. Crymaria is such a pointless pile of PMS that if she had been removed from the story, it wouldn't have made much difference. All she does is cry and ♥♥♥♥♥ and moan and whinge about being damaged. Go to a therapist, lady. She cries so much her character model has red, puffy eyelids by default. I find it amusing that Selvaria from the first game has such a stranglehold on the series that, despite only appearing for two milliseconds' worth of flashback images in the main campaign of VC4, she recently had yet another figure[imgur.com] made of her, being sold under the fourth game's brand. I like her little cap.

On the other hand, the character design and characterization of the femme fatales - the 'girlboss twins'[imgur.com] as my friend calls them - is excellent. Raita Honjou is a hentai artist by day, and his character designs straddle this fine line between sexual and grotesque that absolutely fascinates me.

VC4 is the most beautiful-looking game in the series, and is able to simulate battlefields, storms, blizzards and such in a way that the previous entries couldn't - the technology simply wasn't there yet. This game looks absolutely amazing, and is worth checking out for the graphics alone if nothing else. The tank designs, especially in the final levels, are extremely cool too. I love the design of the Ultimate Tanks, with their turrets on backwards. Because they move so fast, I like to imagine their turrets were affixed that way to reduce air resistance. They look backwards and only swing the right way around when they're planning to fire. I just find stuff like this cool.

One small pity is that, halfway through, the story dictates that all levels from then on will be snow levels. After enjoying so many beautiful and varied landscapes in the early game, it's a pity that the second half is so samey. People still harp on about IGN saying that Pokemon game had 'too much water,' but if they had said Valkyria Chronicles 4 had 'too much ice,' I'd wholeheartedly agree.

But hold on, friends and neighbours! I've always waxed poetic about the gameplay of this series. So how is it in VC4? Well, it's very good. If you're a veteran player you'll appreciate the amalgamation of all the positive features of previous games - the always-compelling gameplay improving incrementally throughout the series. However, with VC4 it's apparent that this franchise will never fix its propensity to being cheesed. Nearly every single level in the game can be rendered trivial if you know what you're doing. That is part of why I hold that the PSP games are better gameplay-wise than the console ones: with their divided maps, VC2 and 3 aren't quite as easy to break and beat every level within a couple of turns.

If you're a new player (and VC4 isn't a bad place to start, though I do recommend playing the previous titles anyway) you'll hopefully just be awed by the unique hybrid of real-time and turn-based combat these games have. That was one of the major things that made me fall in love with this series to begin with. So don't even worry about scout-rushing, kitten. There's also a new unit class in this game, the grenadiers. Who are the grenadiers? Just listen to this song and you'll get the gist.

There may never be a Valkyria Chronicles 5. As someone who's loved this series for over a decade, I'm fine with that. If a new game comes out, I'll be happy. If it doesn't, at least it ended without becoming a franchise zombie. VC4 is a gorgeous game with a stirring soundtrack, and an eighth-console-generation experience that I consider a must-play. It tried very hard to amalgamate the gameplay features of every game that preceded it to make it a definitive experience. But it's also flawed, and some flaws are harder to forgive when the series has had 10 years to fix them. Don't let that hold you back from trying it out though. This is a wonderful game.

Talk about a comeback! After the abortively disastrous Angel of Darkness, who could have imagined that Lara's next adventure would be one of the most fulfilling, replayable and, yes, underappreciated games of the entire console generation? Probably Nostradamus, if he wasn't too busy predicting his own death.

Tomb Raider: Legend is a tour de force and a half. Sporting a revamped gameplay system and a design philosophy consistent with the century it's in (a big ask of a Tomb Raider game up to this point), it's one of the breeziest and most enjoyable games I've ever played. It's short - so short you can beat it in one or two sittings - but immensely satisfying. The controls are smooth, the story marvellous, the graphics stunning, the soundtrack exquisite. This is the one Tomb Raider game all newcomers should play.

This is among my most-replayed games ever, and the definitive Tomb Raider adventure - encapsulating all that was good about the 2000s and about the world at large. I don't need to summarize the Wikipedia article or any of that stupid ♥♥♥♥ for you. Just take my word on this and go play it. Just be sure to keep the 'Next-Gen Content' option off, as it's not worth getting a plasticky early-Xbox 360 sheen on Lara's beautiful face once the textures start spazzing all over the place.

Uncharted, eat your heart out. This game codified action-platformers for years to come and yet somehow never gets credit for it. What is wrong with people?

There have been dozens of Angel of Darkness reviews before this one, and there will be dozens more after, that start with the vapid high-school-essay preamble about how Core Design had to work really hard and Eidos gave them impossible deadlines and that's why Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness was stillbirth in video game form. To them I say: Bull-♥♥♥♥♥♥♥-♥♥♥♥. Angel of Darkness had a three-year development cycle. Imagine the horror Core's veteran designers must have felt when they walked into the office, two years into production, to find out that their team had achieved ♥♥♥♥-all.

Angel of Darkness is infuriating to think about, let alone play. There genuinely is the potential for a wonderful game in here, and they could have gone about it any which way. The early Paris segments showcase the potential for an open-world, Shenmue-style murder mystery, or a Eurojank immersive RPG like Gothic. Lara Croft is at her queeniest bitchiest here, and any 'X minutes of Lara being iconic' video you find will have half its runtime dedicated to her dialogue in this game. Any decision would have been better to make it an action-platformer like past entries, because this game controls like ♥♥♥♥. I would have taken a point-and-click over this.

The biggest reason Angel of Darkness sucks is the controls. These are not the precise, responsive, consistent tank controls of the previous games. Nor are they the three-dimensional, free-floating controls that the series had spent seven years refusing to adopt. Instead, they are the synaptic routing of a slug trying to do ballet. For ♥♥♥♥'s sake, Angel of Darkness, make up your damn MIND. Do you want to be a medieval tank sim or not? Do you want to register my button presses as holding them or a toggle switch? I activated sticky keys more than once trying to get the game to WALK. It's downright vulgar.

A lot of discourse around Angel of Darkness is, "the gameplay sucks, but the story is pretty good." These people did not finish the game. Yes, the setup of a murder mystery is an intriguing one, and the early game shows a lot of promise - particularly as the killer is literally Jack Nicholson. Talking to NPCs and doing chores for story bits is the best part of the game, particularly because Lara is well-written. But this whole system is soon abandoned in favour of the miserable platforming and combat, and the plot unravels completely in the second half.

A prologue segment in the main menu showcases how even making Angel of Darkness a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ audiobook would have been a better choice. It tells us how Lara survived the events of the fourth game, became a Bedouin tribeswoman, and formed a rivalry with a guy named Scar who looks like Jafar - two Disney villains in one. This is never brought up again in the main game. Instead, at the end you meet a guy who Lara recognizes, and it is heavily implied that the audience should recognize him too. I have no ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ clue who this man is. I have never seen him before in my entire life. Not in this game, not in the entire series before that. It ruined the entire boss fight to constantly wonder, "Who is this guy? Am I supposed to know him?"

But no character stirs quite as much animosity in me as Kurtis Trent, the deuteragonist who walked right out of a ♥♥♥♥♥♥ young-adult novel. This guy is a void of charisma. He is without charm. He is without nuance. He is a combination of every bad-boy trope the nineties and noughties are made fun of for today. He has a big motorbike and an unfortunate soul patch. He wears a turtleneck-and-T-shirt combo over baggy cargo pants. He has a cowboy holster. He has these annoying ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ oily bangs that almost, but not quite, cover his eyes. He smokes cigarettes and hardly speaks and sexually assaults Lara in their very first proper meeting.

I found this character so downright abhorrent that I decided a bit of investigative journalism was in order. Since Kurtis was obviously added as a bit of fanservice for the ladies, I had to find out if any of them actually found him attractive when the game was released. My intention was to find a 40-year-old veteran raider, and ask her if Kurtis really is what girls liked back then, or if it was just what a middle-aged executive thought girls liked. I found out there was an entire fansite called Kurtis Trent Estrogen Brigade. This proves nothing. There are Reviewbrah groupies too.

And get this: you play as him. Why they thought people would want to play as this ♥♥♥♥♥♥, I am unaware. He's weirdly animated, too - Lara looks okay when she stands and runs with her legs together, because she's a woman. Not this macho bastard. When the guy's entire personality is trying to tell you he listens to Incubus without telling you he listens to Incubus, it's funny to see him wiggling his gynoid hips all over the place.

Angel of Darkness harboured great promise in its design, but in execution it's a disaster beyond redemption. After such a colossal failure, it would be an act of sheer naivety for a publisher not to confiscate the IP. Core Design created one of the greatest video game series of all time, but they had lost their mojo long ago - from Tomb Raider III, in fact. If I ever feel sympathetic for Core, remind me to replay Angel of Darkness. Thank God for Crystal Dynamics.

Tomb Raider: Chronicles is the penultimate nail in the coffin of a tired, rehash-driven annual franchise that was forced upon Core Design over and over by their demonic overlords at Eidos. Even the developers didn't want to make it, and it shows. It is a dull, drab affair with disjointed storylines that were little more than an excuse to be sponsored by Timex Watches. A soulless cash grab cobbled together from B-sides, like a has-been rock band trying to squeeze a few more dollars out of their brand before being relegated to the county-fair circuit forevermore.

... is what I would say if I was a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ SHEEP who simply parrots what he heard a talking head on YouTube say without having played the game. This game is actually pretty good!

Look, a lot of the above is true. Core Design were tired of making Tomb Raider, and the biggest victims of their revenge were the fans. After finishing the third and fourth instalments, which were all but designed to frustrate and sell strategy guides, I was so disheartened that I put my marathon of the series on hold for two months. Every time my cursor hovered over the Play button for Chronicles, I felt sick to my stomach and would find any excuse not to play it. I didn't want any more punishment.

But eventually I manned up, and I'm glad I did. Chronicles is an enjoyable game. Not as good as the first two, not even close. But a suitable last hurrah for this era of Tomb Raider, one of the many series that launched the PlayStation brand into the stratosphere.

In this game, Lara Croft (or as she's known in Indonesia, Lara ibn Croft) has died - buried alive in Set's tomb, as you remember from The Last Revelation. A statue of her is erected once they find granite strong enough for her thighs, everybody boo-hoos at the funeral, and goes home. When my grandfather died, we kids all huddled together to play Bounce on his Nokia phone while the adults grieved. Similarly, Lara's closest friends huddle together to pour themselves shots of her finest whiskey and reminisce about her finest moments while her rival/mentor Von Croy actually tries to dig her corpse out of her sandy mausoleum.

This forms the frame story for four separate adventures that were designed to mock as many accents as possible. Whether you are French, Texan, Russian, Irish, Russian again, German, or African-American, the voice acting in Tomb Raider: Chronicles will bring you together in saying, "What the ♥♥♥♥ is this racist ♥♥♥♥?" The game is a lot more cutscene- and dialogue-heavy than any entry up till that point, and the CGI FMVs were done by the same people who did them for Final Fantasy IX, so they're pretty neat.

Something else the game is: a lot more balanced and... like a normal game. There are only a couple of the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ traps and deaths that TR3 and the second half of TR4 were inundated with, and the puzzles can actually be solved without opening a guide. Stealth elements play a major role in the final levels, and while it's still no Metal Gear Solid, the game does them far better than in TR3. Platforming is finally based on skill again instead of save-scumming and guesswork, and the areas you need to go are mostly telegraphed properly, or close enough to discover without logging onto Stella's Tomb Raider Site.

You can tell the developers were tired at points, such as piles of coal being square because cutting some polygons is too hard, or ventilation ducts being diagonal because they couldn't be arsed to make a new texture along the stairways. There are reportedly some game-breaking bugs in the final level, though I encountered none myself - I'm unaware if this was because I completed it in one go, or because the Steam version has been patched.

Yet by and large, Chronicles plays well, and is far less dreary than I'd been led to believe. It seems that the burnout that forced Core Design to handle this game with soft hands was for the greater good in the end. Tomb Raider: Chronicles is neither excellent nor essential. But for someone looking for the Tomb Raider experience in 2024, this is a far more accessible game than its two predecessors.

This was the last title that was developed by Core Design's veteran team. Elsewhere, a new team was assembling Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness at the same time. It seems no one at Eidos had ever read about the dangers of overexposure - Chronicles' unfortunate reputation, in hindsight of having played it, seems largely due to just how hard Lara was being milked at the time. There were Chronicles and Angel of Darkness being developed concurrently, there were the Tomb Raider films starring Angelina Jolie, and there was the U2 tour that Lara Croft was the mascot for. If Bono picks you to represent him you know you're sunk deep in the mire of commercialism.

This entry, however, is fun - so much so that it's rejuvenated me to give Angel of Darkness a fair shake. Though I would have anyway. I love Lara Croft so much I wish I had schizophrenia so she could talk to me through the screen. Though not at 3 am, that would be too scary.

There was a time in my life where I would rate every Metal Gear game a 10/10 on video game sites and pretend to myself that I was being objective. After all, it had to be perfect - it was Metal Gear, one of my favourite series. Reaching the age of maturity (which, it seems, was 25 in my case) and playing through The Phantom Pain a second time forced me to accept something. It isn't perfect. The series isn't perfect. The first Metal Gear has to be played on mute because its 8-bit sounds are aural torture, navigating the Big Shell in Metal Gear Solid 2 can be frustrating at times, and The Phantom Pain is unfinished. This doesn't mean it's not a great game, just like Metal Gear is still a great series.

Hell, it's the greatest unfinished game ever made. It's among the few games that define the eighth console generation. But, on my second playthrough, it also left me feeling empty.

Much has been made of Konami interfering with the genius of Kojima, so much so that anything I try to write feels trite. This game wasn't developed in ideal conditions, and the publisher shoulders a large portion of the blame for that. But I also feel that Kojima made some missteps too, as I'll explain.

Before that, however, we must laud the Phantom Pain where it's deserved. It is an absolute masterclass in sandbox stealth. There are so many ways to carry out missions, limited by your imagination. The simplest way to explain MGS V's gameplay is, "If you can think it, you can do it." If you've got to take out a tank battalion, you can do it explosively with landmines and rocket launchers. Or, you can let them reach their station, wait for a sandstorm and attach Fulton balloons to them - in and out, like the storm itself swept them away.

If you've got a hostage to rescue, you can invade the camp where he's being held and interrogate the guards about where they're holding him; free him, and be on your way. Or you can wait till they're transporting him, lie down with a sniper rifle on the opposing mountaintop, shoot the jeep driver, and then move in for the rescue.

If you're feeling lazy in a seek-and-destroy mission, you can just call in multiple airstrikes and be done with it. There really is a lot you can do in MGS V.

The enemies aren't complete idiots as well. They take note of your tactics. If you prefer infiltrating at night, they'll start wearing night vision goggles. If you're a headshot junkie, they'll be issued helmets. As the enemies adapt, you're obliged to too.

Few games are optimized as well as MGS V. This game worked perfectly even on my old craptop, which lacked a GPU. There is no ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ way this game should run so well on seventh-gen consoles and 2010-era computers, but it does. Whoever programmed this, I love you.

Unfortunately, around the time MGS: Peace Walker was being developed, Hideo Kojima's son did something terrible. He told his dad, "This is ♥♥♥♥! All the cool kids are playing Monster Hunter now." Kojima took this to heart, and decided that from now on, MGS would also be a mission-based series. This, I feel, is to its detriment. For all the banal jokes about its cutscene length, MGS was originally conceptualized as a relatively short game that adults could play - they didn't have to care about levels, or collectibles, or multiple objectives.

MGS V is the exact opposite of that philosophy. A lot of time is spent deploying and taking off in helicopters, and if there's one thing that you can think but can't do, it's that I wish the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ helicopter could fly me across the open world from side mission to side mission, rather than having to go back to the level select menu or make the long trips manually. Base management is gratifying, but also tangential to why I play Metal Gear games. You spend a lot of the game on the verge of brokeness, and have to be very selective about the items you develop. You also have to wait for raw materials to process before you can do so - which means you could have all the fuel, metal and GMP needed to build a new platform, but can't because SOMEBODY back at Mother Base is this close to getting fired.

There are things I love and hate about the plot of MGS V. The foremost of the former is that the cutscene direction is award-worthy: this game really consolidated what would become Kojima's signature style in the coming years. Almost all cutscenes are 'filmed' from a single camera in one continuous shot, lending the game its grit. On a second playthrough, it's incredible how in-your-face the plot twists are, yet I didn't spot them the first time.

Hideo Kojima has never shied away from wearing his influences on his sleeve, and he sure incorporated some classics into this one: 1984, Brave New World, Lord of the Flies, Heart of Darkness and Apocalypse Now... There are nods to all of them - some subtle, some not. Watch out for the pig's head and the 'Big Boss is Watching' posters. The music selection is great too.

However, there's no getting around the fact that this is very much an unfinished game. The pacing of the story is completely off, with the beginning and end of Chapter 1 being the most substantial portion - by the last few missions, I was thinking, "Boy, they're really speeding up, aren't they?"

After that, the game's basically over. In Act 2, you're handed a collection of already-completed missions to repeat under specific conditions, with the odd story bit nestled here and there. It's immensely unsatisfying. The cutscenes are great, but half their context has been ripped out. The number of story-heavy cassette tapes also jumps up, which I assume was Kojima trying to finish fleshing out the plot in whatever way he could once development ground to a halt.

There is never a good time to listen to these cassette tapes in this game. If you try to play the game while listening to them, you'll keep having radio chatter or idle conversation play over them, and Lord help you if you try to listen to them during infiltrations - being deaf to the world is a massive disadvantage. As much as people complain about the open world being too empty and big, it still isn't big enough to listen to one of these ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ cassette tapes in peace while driving from outpost to outpost.

As easy as it is to pick on Konami for hobbling the story, I feel some of the blame lies with Kojima himself. I really dislike the /v/-tier opinion that's constantly bleated into the void, that Kojima is a terrible writer and Tomokazu Fukushima was the real hero. But here he ♥♥♥♥♥♥ up, okay? The second act seems solely dedicated to the demythologization of the series, with massively detailed explanations of how everything that seems magical works. Really, Hideo, it was better when a guy was made out of bees just because it was ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ cool. It didn't have to make sense. And you didn't have to give us such a roundabout explanation for why Quiet has such a skimpy outfit. Just say it's sexy, man. This breaking down of the series' more fantastical elements feels almost like an act of revenge against the playerbase.

'Revenge.' That is the biggest reason I have for believing that The Phantom Pain was only about 40% complete on release. People say Skull Face is a terrible villain, but if you see him as what he was supposed to be - only the villain of Chapter 1, it makes a lot more sense. Revenge is the leitmotif of the first chapter, and having played through every game in the series except for Survive multiple times, I'm certain the plot was supposed to centre upon some three-stages-of-anger theory Kojima read in a psychology book, ending with a more self-actualized Big Boss. What we got does manage to bring the story around full circle to the original Metal Gear, but the journey there clearly isn't what was envisioned. The Metal Gear games generally end on a very poignant note, and to believe that it was supposed to have an epilogue full of repeated missions, scattered bits and pieces and no proper ending feels so hollow. Almost like a...