Having not watched any trailers, I expected the Metal Gear Survive multiplayer beta to be similar to 7 Days to Die, or ARK but what I was greeted with was something more along the lines of a third person tower defence game. That’s not a complaint, it was just a surprise.
There are two maps and two levels of difficulty (easy and medium), where on each one you and your team of up to three other players are tasked with defending a drill against three waves of zombies. You need to search the surrounding area for materials to craft and place traps to delay the incoming waves, manage your resources so you don’t run out of ammo, and gather kuban crystals, the currency you need to level up.
To begin with, you start off creating you character, allowing you to alter facial structure, individual eye colour and skin tone, after which you’re promptly taken the multiplayer area, a large white expanse where you can start preparing for your missions. This is a really nice idea in part as it gives you the freedom to test out weapons, gadgets, and new moves but herein also lies a drawback. You have to walk between different stations to manage and change your loadout, a number of different stations for crafting and strengthening weapons, medical supplies, gear, food and ammo, a separate one for levelling up stats and initially, it can all feel a little bit too time consuming. Some menus are repeated on each station and some appear to serve no real purpose with an option or two not being in logical places, but as you’ll end up spending a lot of time in this area perfecting your setup before the mission starts, you will eventually get used to where the most important menus are. Hopefully the full release navigation will be more streamlined and simplified.
While the game mode itself doesn’t feel particularly inspired, it does play rather well. The controls are smooth for the most past and it feels like a Metal Gear game (although some would argue it’s not a Metal Gear game as it has no tangible connection to the other previous ones, and the Konami vs Kojima issue, but that’s a whole different discussion). The environments, effects and animations look great and if the immediate threat of zombies weren’t present I would have spent a lot more time just exploring and sightseeing. While the experience has been fun, at the moment there is nothing compelling enough to want to bring me back to game once the full release is available. Getting an S rank feels far too easy even on medium difficulty, you simply have one person constantly speeding up the drill until you get to S rank, on the third wave mini-mechs appear which pretty much guarantees a win, and levelling up your character happened extremely fast. Material drops on a successful mission need a better balance, some common items you can have a few hundred of while other common materials seem non-existent.
At the moment the salvage missions feel like a small added on mode rather than a full fledged multiplayer experience, so unless there is going to be significant expansions to this in the full release, or an actual survival mode where you last as many days as you can in a large open world, you can probably just play the beta to get your fix of this one.