I'm a huge MGS fan, played through the series multiple times and MGS3 is easily in my top 5 games of all time.

So of course I picked this up on release day, so far I'm only up to story mission 10. (Way too distracted fultoning people and building Motherbase)

My impression so far is they have NAILED the gameplay, it is arguably the best open world action game ever made (makes the Assassins Creed games look so shallow). It is completely addictive, even when I'm at work I'm thinking about what I'm going to strive for the next time I play.

I was never really a fan of the MGS series for its gameplay before this so it is a major improvement. That leads me to MGS5's biggest weakness however.

Story. The best thing about the MGS series was the cutscenes and CODEC conversations, they did such an amazing job developing the world and characters. I loved PARA MEDIC talking to you about how influential the original Godzilla movie was when it was released hahaha. It broke the tention and the back and forth between Snake and everyone in the Codec calls was amazing.

They really stripped all this away in MGS5, cutscenes are very minimal, Snake is a mute and codec calls are pretty much gone and replaced by briefings (where snake also barely says anything) I imagine this was in response to the backlash of MGS4 being basically a movie. It really hurts the game and makes the lack of Haytor even more noticable however.

Don't get me wrong, it's still a solid 9/10 from what Ive played so far.