After all the hype and some very high ratings I expected more from the game. It does have good visuals in certain areas of the game. The landscape and Snake's gear are all very detailed with good textures but many of the enemies have very blurry features even when relatively close to them. The particle effects are so far very limited. The ambient occlusion around Snake is a terrible halo effect and almost nonexistent for the rest of the items and characters. There is very little landscape destructibility for all the weapons and explosions possible. The enemy AI is pretty simple, run around two corners and the enemies have totally lost you. One thing that really stands out about Snake that bothers me is that he's some sort of "super soldier" with all the training a soldier can have, but he can't aim worth a crap and needs some guy on the radio telling him how to do everything. Controls were definitely designed for console gamepads with what seems like very little thought into keyboard\mouse control schemes.
The lack of manual save and\or quicksave options also detracts from the game for me. I don't want to do multiple playthroughs of most games so the fact that once a save happens, I'm stuck with or without a certain game progression will ruin some circumstances. Learning afterwards that I missed something or made something negative happen because I took a detour to explore other areas sometimes ruins the open-world experience for me. When you're 2 hours into a mission, the auto-save has just happened, and you want to go back and do something slightly different the only option is to restart the entire mission. I don't like having to create by own backups of saves, exit the mission, alt-tab out, and reload them myself over and over.
Though this game's gameplay and map setup does remind a lot of one of my favorites, Crysis, the awkward & limited keyboard\mouse controls keep it from being as fun. There's plenty of other shooters with similar stealth combat and graphics that play much better on PC. I do like that they've added a CustomSoundtrack option, but the fact that it can't play shortcuts to mp3s ruins it. Why would I want multiple copies of the same mp3s on multiple drives? They would just be taking up space on one of my Games drives for no reason. The only positives that really stand out to me is the fact I can be Snake again. But even with all the negatives it should be a fun playthrough for anyone who grew up with Snake. It is a great franchise, but this game doesn't do it the justice I had hoped for. Five-Six hours in so far and if anything drastically improves over the rest of the game then I will of course edit this review for the positive.