Billed as a prologue to The Phantom Pain upon release, in retrospect Ground Zeroes does work as a nice teaser to the mechanics and systems of the main game. What it doesn't do is represent the freedom and exploration at the heart of its parent title. It was never meant to, really, but going to back to Ground Zeroes after playing The Phantom Pain underlines just how different the two are, not just in terms of what you do but also in how it feels. The latter has its fair share of grim moments – including some fairly well-played body horror. But, so far at least, it can't match Ground Zeroes for sheer pervasive darkness.
If anything, The Phantom Pain seems almost jaunty in comparison, which is saying something given its commentary on the futility of imperial expansion and the fact you're never more than a minute away from slitting throats. But there's downtime here: you can ride around on your horse and forget the war for a while. Pick some flowers, listen to some 80s synthpop in your chopper. You put goats on balloons and watch them fly away, untouched by the twin dullness of logic and reason. There's slapstick humour to watching Snake bumble into a guard outpost and knock over a pot, alerting everyone to his presence. When you return to the field, knackered, all war'd out, you're greeted with open arms by your comrades, and the first thing you'll do is go and have shower. Welcome home.
There's no washing off the filth in Ground Zeroes. Its dank, Abu Ghraib analogue Camp Omega is man-made mould. It's a place of permanent midnight, with tortured prisoners being held in cages and the intimation that Skeletor once made a child have sex with another child. Joan Baez opens the show with 'Here's to You', her lament for two immigrants wrongfully executed by the US. American soldiers go about their business as if they're heading to the PX, and not guarding anguished men with bolts through their ankles to prevent them walking. It's notably short on the magical realism that informs Kojima's work: it has a man called Skull Face as an antagonist, and one character plugs headphones directly into his chest. Apart from that, however, it's grimdark all the way.
Which is the point, of course. The real Abu Ghraib is hell, whose wardens often find reason impossible to comprehend. Ground Zeroes attempts to replicate this, and although it often fails or overcooks its concern to preposterous (and crass) levels, it does make its point. But if you're going into Phantom Pain expecting more of the same, you may be disappointed.
You may also be delighted, if Ground Zeroes wasn't particularly your thing. The prologue may have introduced players to Snake's main abilities, such as Reflex, but there's a scope to The Phantom Pain that is only really appreciable once you're actually playing it. If TPP is all about anticipation, planning – scoping out an area with your binoculars, working out your approach – then Ground Zeroes is 99% execution, in all senses of the word. In my 13 or so hours with MGS5, I didn't encounter one structure with the density of either geography or enemies as Camp Omega. Instead, it focuses on smaller encampments dotted around, a tactical deployment of checkpoints and outposts and not one all-encompassing black site.
It's a deliberate move, and a good one. There's no way that Kojima could have sustained the dread of Ground Zeroes, and The Phantom Pain is richer for it. Looking back on it, however – especially given the opening of MGS5, which I can't really elaborate on as it is under NDA – Ground Zeroes' terrible blackness seems incongruous next to the wider plot of its parent game, where flaming unicorns run rampant and dogs wear eye patches. If the point of Ground Zeroes was to establish Skull Face as a Very Bad Dude, it succeeded, albeit awkwardly. So far, however, TPP's rather playful style (Skull Face wears a Zorro mask in it, for fuck's sake) seems rather at odds with what went before.
We'll see how it all pans out at review, but so far GZ seems more like a setup for a game that doesn't really arrive. Which isn't to say that it won't pick up those threads, or that The Phantom Pain is bad – it's far better than anything in Ground Zeroes. It's just that its prologue, itself one to ANOTHER prologue, seems weirder all the time.
Check the video below for gameplay footage and more of our impressions of Metal Gear Solid 5 :
