Snake can roll on the ground, crouch-walk, aim while prone, and all the actions are beautifully animated. A new dive move lets him escape detection in the blink of an eye, and many of his moves from Metal Gear Solid 4 and Peace Walker return in refined forms. Ground Zeroes sees Snake at his stealthiest. Ground Zeroes is a short game, but side-quests and formerly console-exclusive DLC missions-Deja Vu (which recreates scenes from the first Metal Gear Solid game) and Jamais Vu (which features cameos from Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance ($24.79 at Amazon) hero Raiden and the bad guys from Snatcher)-flesh out the game quite nicely. It would have been nice to have a more substantial plot here, but the long-take cutscenes are fantastic. It's effectively creepy stuff, but all it does is set up The Phantom Pain's long-awaited revenge story. But this time the torture and the sadism take a front seat, particularly in the disturbing cassette tapes hidden around the camp that fill in the backstory. Metal Gear, silly as is with its cardboard boxes and giant mechs, has never shied away from the horrors of war. Theirs is a brief, dark tale cut dramatically short (you can blow throw the main story in roughly 90 minutes!) by a disturbing cliffhanger. Legendary soldier Snake must infiltrate Camp Omega, a Guantanamo Bay stand-in, and rescue his young subordinates Chico and Paz. Ground Zeroes's story picks up after Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker (available on PSP and in the PlayStation 3's Metal Gear Solid: The Legacy Collection ($24.79 at Amazon) ) and before the upcoming Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain.
Ground Zeroes, despite its extreme brevity, has more compelling action gameplay than most full games. Don't let that stop you from purchasing it, though. However, the lack of mouse cursor support, missing graphics options, and a few other nitpicks keep this port from being PC gaming perfection. That alone makes this the best version of Ground Zeroes available. Some PC-centric expectations are met, most notably the beautiful graphics that were built on Kojima Productions's impressive FOX Engine they outmatch Ground Zeroes's PlayStation 4 and Xbox One visuals.
The latest series entry, Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes ($19.99), originally appeared on last- and current-gen consoles, but it now comes to PC via Steam with those versions' flaws and strengths intact. Stealth-action series Metal Gear started life on the MSX home computer and at long last returns as a PC game after an extended absence.