I played it until shortly after getting to the second map area back when it came out, but lost like 10+ hours of progress because of some cloud save fuckery, recently started playing again from the start.
Fuck it’s fun man. I’ve heard it ends disappointingly and is considered “unfinished” (no spoilers please!), but fuck, it’s so fun just running around tranquilising dudes and fultoning tanks. I’ve been progressing the story really slowly because I’ve just been free-roaming with a podcast on, going from outpost to outpost just emptying the place out. I’ve also gotten side tracked going back to get S-ranks on old missions. Even that sting of the MGS theme you get at the mission report screen when you get an S-rank, so great. A lot of nice touches like that.
The controls are so responsive and smooth, it’s really the height of what that series set out to be. And the amount of stupid stuff you can do with weapons and items, and the classic MGS weirdness sprinkled on top, so damn good.
It’s also one of those games that gives you a really satisfying feeling of progression, starting out with lame weapons and slowly developing more powerful and useful stuff, expanding Mother Base and getting bonuses from the various “platforms”, and even just you becoming better as you explore the mechanics and learn the layouts of the maps.
Very, very good game.
MGS5: TPP is the game that got me OUT of gaming. Literally. I couldn't have been more excited for it, more let down, and more ready to just abandon 'gaming.' The incomplete story is a part of why I disliked it so much, but even the repetitive 'open world' was painful, because it was mostly just empty except for the camps you can attack in a very rinse and repeat fashion.
There are so many carefully-designed touches in the older games which are all lost here. My only wish is that Ground Zeroes ran on the improved TPP game engine so that I could replay that some more. GZ is much more fun to revisit because of how dense and well thought out that small area is. If TPP had that same level of attention to detail that they put into GZ it might've been the GOAT. At least as a big plus I don't waste so much time or money on video games anymore.