As someone who saw the shitty reviews, never watched any gameplay besides some Dunkey/Jim Sterling clips, and was absolutely cold on this until release, I was shocked by how much I ended up liking this game as an impulse buy a few days ago.
I know some other people were on the fence here or whatever, so I thought I might do some small advocating, as this game is a bit of a surprise for being a budget title. This is probably going to sound a bit shilly/apologetic/
, but I'm not sure how else to recommend a game when there's a lot of fuckery around it. I also don't know how the fuck I'm going to structure this thread, so it's probably going to be a bit messy.
Lazy Asset Flip 
Before I bought the game, something I had issues with right away was how basic and lazy the game looked. The map looked recycled, enemies were all samey and can get abused by items/environment etc. But it turns out there's more variety and new shit than I had anticipated.
The first "map" of the game looks it'd take up the entirety of your playthrough, and walking around a rocky desert with basic ass enemies looks like it's going to be a trash fire. But as I played through this section I saw that most of the copy+pasted sections of the map were actually just setups for digging sections, and that a majority of the game's map offered a lot more in terms of ruins, dungeons, and assets.
The game does a shit job of leading you into believing your time in the game is just a basic survival game, but as you go on to what you think is the "ending of the game" (depending on how thorough you are) you start seeing the horizon. After you enter your first dungeon you see a weird "bomber" enemy, thought honestly it seems a bit uninspired, it just blows up if you stand near it for an extended period of time. But upon leaving you get to see this absolutely massive creature, designed by the dude who did the Silent Hill monsters, whose massive size is enough to stretch seemingly infinitely, killing any mobs its leg steps on, (even when they are 400+ meters away.)
Moving on to Africa, the game opens up since abusing the environment becomes impossible due to the huge variety of enemies they throw at you. There's some Skull-esque enemies, drone-like bugs, spiders, a mortar-shotgun hybrid that fucks your shit up from afar, and more. All have pretty cool designs by Ito.
The traps, weapons, and survival elements of the game are insanely unique and have a meaty amount of depth. The basebuilding is great and the crew managment is a small step up from TPP.There was a clear effort into making things fun and varied. By no means did the devs sleep on any of these features.
Progression Problems
A lot of this comes at the caveat of progression. The game tutorializes you a lot, but they kind of let you fuck around too early where you can be doing basic bitch stuff for hours on end without having vital upgrades/weapons and going through missions that opens up the game's loop more.
A lot of the issues highlighted in the Dunkey/Jim videos I saw become instantly trivialized only a few missions in, and they're
really quick and natural to progress through.
It really is on the game for not making as much clear, or available early on though. I guess it makes the survival elements harsh in the beginning and let's you feel some sense of big progression, but it can also totally turn people off like me who normally put off story missions until later.
Mulitplayer
Not much to say, the multiplayer here is really fun and great. There's a problem with certain players not loading into a lobby after joining, causing a missing member in a game sometimes, but it's pretty infrequent from what I've seen.
Like the other parts of the game, focusing too hard on this is meaningless when a lot of the more open/fun/varied shit comes in when you've unlocked stuff through your single player campaign, or reach certain player levels for harder missions and more open maps. You have to hit
level 25, which takes a while to get to, just to progress past noob missions that don't give out much interesting besides loads of Kuban energy for leveling.
I liked MGS V, should I buy it?
This game may have some control similarities, but the gameplay loop is totally different. There's less infiltration in this game than V, and "sneaking" around enemies isn't nearly as involved. Any sneaking elements are to hide+run from enemies or for backstabbing foes. Other than that, enemies have semi-random placements, don't have an involved movement pattern etc. This game is definitely a "survival" game first, the only change to that is when you get to have at it against huge hordes after big points of base progression. Though needing to keep your life/stamina/injuries managed, the hordes serve as a "score attack" that instantly give you huge amounts of Kuban for kills.
There's a lot of "mainlining" when it comes to the controls though, and a lot of the more advanced/complex bits that made MGS:V's controls pretty much perfect become either obsolete or are removed wholesale. The game still feels pretty good though.
Should I buy it?
Honestly, even at launch price ($40) I'd say this game is worth a solid buy, wouldn't have normally wrote all this shit otherwise despite some minor complaints. It has a lot of content, even more than some meaty modern PC expansions like XCOM, and I think it provides a lot in terms of unique enemies, a fun gameplay loop, and some involved thought put into weapons and "gadgets".
I don't know, it might not sound like a huge "sell" when I bring up issues like progression, but honestly just minding that you need to do early story missions before you can fully fuck around is all you need. I've been totally into this game and pretty much everything it has to offer since I bought it a few days ago. There's a lot of clear work that was put into this game despite some budgetary constraints in cutscenes, but that's to be expected of a $40 title. From what I've heard from REEE, a sizable amount of members that worked on MGS1-V worked on this game, and while it doesn't have that Kojima attention to detail or story, there's a lot of work put into areas of the game that normally would be half-assed or shallow.
If you still aren't sure I'd suggest renting or at least getting a copy when it goes on a sale. Otherwise, I could answer Q's y'all have as the sole dumbass to have bought this game.
