I reckon Ocelot's quote “You're a legend in the eyes of those who live on the battlefield” first heard all the way back in MGSV's E3 2013 trailer was a clear nod in that direction-that is, to anyone who looks at Venom Snake, he is Big Boss, even if it's just an artifice. The reveal is by far the most interesting thing about it, however, and it’s telegraphed throughout the game in many ways, some clever, some obvious. But there is still one key moment in this messy tale that lifts everything else about the game for me. As someone who's followed the series very closely since the original Metal Gear Solid, though, I find so many of the creative decisions behind the story baffling in tone, approach and content. To a PC audience coming to Metal Gear for the first time, I imagine it was a case of brushing the story to one side and cracking on with destroying watchtowers with rocket launchers while listening to The Cure-the game does allow you to divorce story from game in a way its predecessors didn’t. Sitting uneasily against that is Metal Gear's narrative baggage, over two decades of increasingly complicated lore that's woven into The Phantom Pain through brief, bland cutscenes and a ton of dull audiotapes you can listen to at your leisure.

It's a sandbox game that offers the sort of detailed stealth-action scenarios that Metal Gear has always been famous for, now on a gigantic scale.

I really rated MGSV when it was released in September, and it already ranks as one of my favourite games of all time.

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