*Editor’s Note* Metal Gear Survive launches today in the US, and Friday in the UK. Being an online-focused game, review copies were not available until today, meaning we’ve only just jumped into the experience proper. Trusted Reviews will be providing our early verdict soon, with a full review coming at the end of the week.


For now, you can read our latest hands-on impressions from the opening few hours of story mode and online multiplayer.
Metal Gear Survive has faced an uphill battle. The first game post-Kojima was always going to receive flack considering his unceremonious departure from Konami. The irony of the series creator’s critique of zombies in a game with mechs, vampires and nanomachines as ‘unrealistic’ was not lost, either.
Having played several hours of the game, it represents a pretty significant departure from the standard formula. This is Metal Gear gameplay blended with old-school survival, and it works surprisingly well. Give it a chance and Survive will prove an addictive, entertaining and enthralling game, in spite of its annoyances and ugly palette. Whether it can win over the sceptical fan base is another question entirely.

Survive is a spinoff episode of Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, in which a wormhole opens above Mother Base following its besiegement, and Big Boss and Miller’s escape. The plant is sucked in along with the soldiers aboard. The alternate, hostile reality in which they arrive is populated by crystal-headed zombies. You must gather resources to survive this harsh environment.
It’s disappointing that a game built using the gorgeous Fox Engine looks this bland. In pause menus, characters are as detailed and beautiful as you’ve seen in MGS5 and the PES series. In actual gameplay, however, textures are murky and colours dull. It’s a shame that the potential of this engine isn’t fully realised.


While Survive controls much like The Phantom Pain, the freedom of movement and power that Snake possessed in the desert plains of Afghanistan is all but gone. True to the classic survival tropes, your soldier feels hugely disadvantaged. Limited attacks, strained resources and thirst and hunger gauges mean MGS is a constant balancing act that will see you having to spin more plates than you can handle.

At first, the system can be annoying. Having to hunt for food, fumbling with a spear to poach sheep as they run – and your cumbersome attacks whiff at every attempt (I still don’t understand why you can’t throw the spear) – and being unable to sprint to your location, because doing so makes you thirsty; and there’s nothing but dirty water all around. You simply want to complete an objective, but it feels like everything else gets in the way. Give it time, though: Survive will sink in its hooks and the mechanics soon become gripping.
Once you procure enough resources to get by, the focus becomes the task at hand. These include improving the defences of your base to defending against zombie onslaughts; upgrading equipment or building new weapons; obtaining the next vital item for a mission from zombie-occupied territory, or building the next warp zone.
Stealth isn’t executed the same way it is in previous Metal Gear games; it feels much more bastardised thanks to the limited mental capacity of your headless enemies.
You won’t be crawling through foliage to remain out of sight. Now, your stealthiness is much more related to sound. Opening crates and moving around the environment as quietly as possible, so that you don’t alert the zombies is the preferred way forward. It’s rarely smart to face them head on, because of the severe cost to your resources. Taking on even a few zombies will see you use up so much food, water and items, that you could end up struggling to make it back to base.



I got to play an early part of the campaign, meaning the mission variety focused very much on gathering resources. However, the climax of the demo came with one of its toughest challenges: repairing a teleporter.
Teleporters act as warp zones, which you can quickly return to throughout the map. As you can jump from point A to B without expending any energy, this becomes as huge help since there’s no need to eat or drink on the way to find new resources. However, to repair the teleporter means alerting a lot of high-level zombies in the area, and this is where you must use all your tools to survive.
Before activating the teleporter, I need to set up defences around it to slow down the the waves of undead. There are two entry points, one on either side of the contraption. One is much narrower and easier to defend than the other, so I set up a series of iron fences along that one, before returning to the larger entry point and barricading it with plenty of fences, sandbag barricades and wooden fences.


Everything I’ve crafted is laid out in an attempt to make this mission a success. Unfortunately, it’s a catastrophic failure, because the zombies climb over the fence, which causes it to collapse. The result is that they land on all of my barricades and right on top of the teleporter.
Attempt two, and armed with this information, I lay out my defences differently. I spread them further apart and in a different order. Every second of the 90-second timer feels like an hour, especially as I run out of arrows for my bow and have nothing to fight with but my spear.
metal gear survive

With ten seconds to go, dozens of zombies have a free run at the teleporter. Luckily, it has enough hit points to withstand the onslaught and build. The frustration, anger and elation proved a great experience, but one that only comes after you complete the task, lamenting every frustration with your soldier, the controls, the overpowered and outnumbered zombies every step of the way.
Then there’s multiplayer, which sees you team with up to three players for some zombie horde mode madness. It can be great fun, but it’s wildly imbalanced right now in a multitude of ways.
For starters, you bring over your character from the single-player campaign into multiplayer in their entirety. That’s their health, thirst, level, equipment, the whole lot. Not only that, but any resource you use in multiplayer is reflected when you return to the main game. This is somewhat countered by the rewards you earn, but it encourages players to be stingy with their cache, and use items only when absolutely necessary.
Also, item pickups aren’t shared amongst players, meaning the start of a match becomes a bit like Hungry Hungry Hippos as four survivors scramble to loot everything in sight before the first wave of zombies arrives. It turns a co-operative experience into a semi-competitive one, creating a somewhat spiteful atmosphere.
The reward payouts at the close of a round also negatively impact the entire game. In the age of microtransactions and loot boxes, it’s strange to say that a game is being too generous with what it gives players. However, Survive gives players so many goodies at the close of any multiplayer session that it makes the scrimping and scraping in single-player feel almost redundant.
metal gear survive

While playing through the story mode I was struggling to collect the materials needed to craft a pistol, as well as a sufficient number of bottles to carry enough clean water to each mission to quench my thirst. After a single multiplayer horde round – albeit one where we were playing against vastly superior enemies, hence greater rewards for any achievement – I not only gained plentiful supplies, but supplies I’d not even discovered in the main game. Napalm, steel, rare armour and tens of thousands of credits, allowing me to upgrade my soldier to levels far beyond my current campaign mission.

First Impressions

I didn’t expect to like Metal Gear Survive as much as I did, especially after the opening hour of the game. However, it soon sinks in its hooks and becomes a very entertaining game of balancing resources and limited abilities and, ironically, surviving.
It has its issues. I still don’t understand how a game made on the Fox Engine can look this ugly, especially off the back of The Phantom Pain, and reward payouts definitely need work to stop players leaping into multiplayer in order to make the campaign a cakewalk. But considering the low asking price, I don’t think you can go wrong with what’s on offer here.
Will it change the hearts of the Metal Gear purists? Probably not, but that doesn’t stop this from being a decent game.