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By the time of Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, Kojima Productions' series - often thrilling, sometimes tiring but never anything less than fascinating - had twisted itself into a dead end. In the creaking fatigue of the ageing Snake, a battle-weary individualist at odds with wars fought by faceless corporations and their automatons, it was hard not to see some of creator Hideo Kojima himself; a man with a singular vision lost in the broad, mundane chaos of contemporary games development, slowly tiring of the very thing that had forged his own legend. Peace Walker, the PSP entry that followed some two years later, stripped back the excess, partly through necessity upon finding itself on a portable platform, partly to inject new life into the series. Those excisions helped remind players that, for all the narrative bloat that had blighted Guns of the Patriots, beyond the cut-scenes and heavy-handed exposition Metal Gear Solid remained a video game - and an often exceptional one at that.
Ground Zeroes, a sequel of sorts to Peace Walker and a prologue to the full-fat Metal Gear Solid 5: Phantom Pain, goes even further. It's a short, concentrated burst of the newly introduced open-world gameplay systems, and it suggests that Metal Gear Solid 5, across its two instalments, could be the most significant evolution in the series since it gained its Solid suffix. There are questions about how short exactly the experience is, and how that sits with Ground Zeroes' not insignificant price tag - but forget all that. Like the Ennio Morricone and Joan Baez anthem Ground Zeroes heavily leans on, it's a punchy, proud and stirring experience. You can't put a price on class like this.
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