When the parents got divorced everyone wondered what would happen to papa Kojima and Mama Metal Gear. Konami reassured us that the Metal Gear franchise would stick around, even without series mastermind Hideo Kojima. Many wondered what that could possibly look like, a Metal Gear sans-Kojima. Well. We have an answer.
Metal Gear Survive
The trailer starts with the Ground Zeroes Mother Base incident in which Big Boss watches his life work decimated and sent to the bottom of an ocean. We then switch perspective to a man trapped atop Mother Base, presumably a Militares San Frontieres soldier, watching on distraught as the battle scarred helicopter transporting his mentor, commander, and last hope for salvation disappears into a night sky choked by tangles of black smoke and chemical clouds. The soldier watches as the world around him burns, explosions shattering the well laid concrete and fire engulfing their endless stores of munitions. A quick flash in the soldier’s face gives us all the revelation we need. This is the end, his military career put to a cruel halt by some faceless betrayer.
And then a wormhole opens in the sky and he fights shrapnel zombies.
The game is described as taking the stealth elements of Metal Gear in a new direction that relies on 4 player co-op as you use multiple weapons to aide in your navigation and survival across different maps. The weapons displayed in the trailer look as though Metal Gear Online engaged in an awkward three way with Rust and Dead Island giving us this result.
I was really, absolutely floored when I saw this trailer. I quite simply had no words. In some world this could be the madness of Hideo Kojima, but in this one it’s the machinations of yet another video game company I simply can’t work out. My first instinctual reaction is that it reminds me a lot of Resident Evil 6 or Final Fantasy X-2. A switch just seems to have short circuited somewhere, and we get a game that’s thinly recognizable as a world we know but feels more than a bit off. The dislike to like ratio on the video (29k dislikes vs 5k likes) is an early indicator folks aren’t very keen on this. I could be keen on it, but Metal Gear multiplayer has never astounded me and Konami isn’t exactly the best at tucking away old franchises with new developers. As always time will tell if it’s a worthy game, either as a Metal Gear successor or the start of its own franchise, but this is one of those don’t hold your breath moments.
