Metal Gear Online is good fun...when it works

"Metal Gear Online finally launches!" proclaims a new addition to one of the endless splash screens that greet players when booting MGS5 these days. Sadly, it's just as likely that players will be saying the same thing, albeit with a rather different tone, when they manage to get into a game. As it stands MGO is plagued by dropped games, frustrating disconnects, and at times an all-out refusal to even get players into matches. Get into one, however, and MGO is one of those rare team-based games where you actually have to play as, y'know, a team.

There are three modes available at present: Cloak and Dagger, Bounty Hunter, and Comm Link. Or Capture the Flag, Team Deathmatch, and Domination. This being Metal Gear though, there are some interesting changes to the way these old staples operate, which hammers home the need to work with others. Bounty Hunter, for example, has a ticketing system: when they run out, you lose. However, for each player you kill you'll retain their ticket for the remainder of the round. If you're knocked out, stunned, tranq'd, whatever, and then Fultoned, the other team get those tickets back.

It's an interesting risk-reward mechanic, putting a tangible price on high-value players, especially in close games, and making better teams move away from the kill-die-kill mentality that usually dominates proceedings. Much like previous MGOs, rounds move at a much slower pace than Call of Duty or even Battlefield, encouraging sneaking (obviously) and stealthy play. This is especially true of the best of the three modes, Cloak and Dagger.

In Cloak and Dagger you're tasked with either defending or stealing one of two data discs and returning them to an extraction point (again of two), with teams switching sides at the end of the first round. The interesting thing here is that the attacking team have stealth camouflage by default, but only non-lethal weapons. If just one of the squad get seen, however, by the (deadly weapon-wielding) defending team, then everyone's stealth camo goes down for a short period of time, potentially exposing teammates who are behind enemy lines.

It's a fantastic setup, and one which is ripe for all manner of Snake-style infiltrations: the tension of making good progress towards the goal while knowing Johnny Sasaki at the back there may ruin the whole thing for you. Good teams will know how to counter this, using stealth to their own ends: hiding in a cardboard box and shuffling it against a wall in the disc room so attacking players think that it's part of the world is an effective and satisfying tactic.

(What is less satisfying is that defenders who have picked the Infiltrator class also have access to stealth camouflage, which ruins the game somewhat. They seem to have all of the attacker's strengths, and little of their weaknesses.)

Beyond the classes, such as the aforementioned Infiltrator (alongside sniper/tag Scouts and more bog-standard Enforcer loadouts) there's also tonnes of perks and other stuff to rank up towards, and at its best MGO can feel like a co-op version of a base assault from its parent game. Which is, of course, exactly what Konami is going for.

What it's probably not going for is the constant disconnections while in games (the one where the host ends it while about to lose is my favourite: there's no host migration). It's been a few days since the game launched and still I'm having huge trouble getting into any game, either from the auto matchmaking option or the manual game browsing list: my latest attempt yielded no games joined whatsoever. (I've been playing it on Xbox One.)

This, so far, is my experience with MGO: interesting, different, utterly determined not to let me play it. I'd love to be able to tell you more about the higher ranks or different weapons, etc, but at the moment, I simply can't. Hopefully things will improve in the coming days, but as it stands it's not a great start. See you next week. Maybe.