When comparing Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain vs NieR: Automata, the Slant community recommends NieR: Automata for most people. In the question“What are the best singleplayer games on Steam?” NieR: Automata is ranked 43rd while Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain is ranked 69th. The most important reason people chose NieR: Automata is:
The combat in NieR: Automata is fantastic. It has a hack-and-slash feel to it, with an emphasis on agility and showy acrobatics. With the fluid and responsive controls, you can switch seamlessly from using swift attacks with your weapon to devastatingly strong attacks as you combo them together. You also use customizable ranged missile attacks from your personal robot pod, such as powerful laser beams or a giant hammer attack. It can be difficult to win battles sometimes, especially on the harder gameplay settings, but it's worthwhile to keep at it and watch yourself progress and improve.
Specs
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Pros
Pro Freedom in approaching a mission
Metal Gear Solid V gives players multiple choices on how to approach a mission.
You can choose to use stealth, taking out enemies only when it's absolutely necessary. You can run in guns blazing, killing everyone on sight. You can get on a high vantage point and take out everyone with a sniper rifle. Or you can call in air support to do all the work for you.
The choice is up to you and the game doesn't penalize you for sticking to a single way. This helps keep the gameplay fresh for a long time.
Pro Allows players to create their private military company
Throughout the game, you will be trying to rebuild your private military company.
Your base of operations is the "Mother Base", which is a giant structure similar to an oil rig. You can expand it and add new facilities such as Research and Development.
You'll also be managing your personnel, allowing you to recruit (capture) enemy soldiers and assign them work in their area of expertise. This can be research, development, various upkeep tasks around the base or earning resources out in the field.
All of these things truly make you feel like you're running a PMC.
Pro Reflex system helps you stay unnoticed
Time will slow down for a short time if you're spotted by an enemy. This allows you to take them out before they can sound the alarm or alert other soldiers. This is quite refreshing compared to other stealth games, where messing up means an immediate end to being stealthy.
Pro Enemy AI adapts to your playstyle
The enemy will pick up on your habits and react accordingly. For example, if you use tranq darts to knock enemies out, they will try to wake up their comrades at first. Do this for a couple of missions and they'll immediately run to sound the alarm when they spot someone knocked out. This way the game expertly keeps you out of the comfort zone, having the later missions feel as tense as the first.
Pro Large assortment of weapons and tools
MGS V has a lot of weapons, including pistols, shotguns, machine guns, and sniper rifles. There are both lethal and non-lethal variants, allowing you to find something suitable for any playstyle.
There are also many tools such as the Fulton device, which allows you to capture enemy soldiers and animals, sending them to your base. It's a ton of fun experimenting with new gadgets.
Pro Fast-paced, action-packed combat
The combat in NieR: Automata is fantastic. It has a hack-and-slash feel to it, with an emphasis on agility and showy acrobatics. With the fluid and responsive controls, you can switch seamlessly from using swift attacks with your weapon to devastatingly strong attacks as you combo them together. You also use customizable ranged missile attacks from your personal robot pod, such as powerful laser beams or a giant hammer attack. It can be difficult to win battles sometimes, especially on the harder gameplay settings, but it's worthwhile to keep at it and watch yourself progress and improve.
Pro Unique storytelling with a real emotional impact
NieR: Automata's outlook on storytelling is incredibly special. To get the full experience, you have to run multiple playthroughs of the game, each of which offers a new experience and perspective. Your world view of the story events and characters expands drastically as you complete each playthrough, playing on your expectations to help you develop a deeper emotional bond with the protagonists and become invested in their plight.
Things take a real turn on your third playthrough, putting you on an emotional roller coaster all the way to the true ending. The plot twists and knocks on the fourth wall elevate the story to a truly unique place. Getting all the way to the very end can be a religious experience from how much heart and meaning you discover in the symbolism.
Pro It's got a hauntingly beautiful environment
NieR: Automata is set in a post-apocalyptic landscape after Earth has been overrun by hostile machines, and the artists really nailed what that would feel like. Abandoned and overgrown cities litter the landscape along with old refineries, graveyards, and eerie forests. When you add the beautiful soundtrack to the experience, it fills you with a bittersweet mix of loneliness and hope.
Pro Varied genre-spanning gameplay elements
NieR: Automata has different types of gameplay to keep things interesting. From the very start, you're on an on-rails bullet hell section, and then you switch over to the more traditional action RPG style of fast-paced combat. Things change up again not long after with some side-scrolling platforming from a 2D view. Later on in the story, there's a hacking mini-game where you navigate a tiny ship through a short puzzle, with the music changing to a charming retro sound to fit the theme and mood. This is a game that doesn't stay boxed in a single genre.
Pro An incredible amount of content
Outside of the main story, there's plenty of optional content to dive into. The side quests are the best way to get to know the characters and lore of the world, with some of them giving clever and subtle foreshadowing of the game's most critical events. There are also weapons to collect and upgrade, each of which offer nice little tidbits of lore after you get them to max level. And after reaching a certain point in the story, you get access to Chapter Select that lets you go back and replay whatever you want. You can easily spend 60+ hours exploring the world and still have much more to do.
Pro Gorgeous, ethereal soundtrack with amazing vocals
NieR: Automata's music is out of this world. It's so stunning and elegant in a way that nothing else can really live up to. The soundtrack manages to emotionalize the game through music, from the action-packed tracks with hard-hitting wind instruments and percussion, to the softer, somber songs that encapsulate the hauntingly beautiful environments and story moments you encounter. Vocals in the lore's indescribable language makes the music even more memorable, adding to the ethereal quality of the sound. This soundtrack is definitely one that you can go back to again and again without getting sick of it.
Cons
Con High learning curve
MGS V can feel really overwhelming at the start. First the controls have various nuances such as different ways of crawling. Then you get a bunch of mechanics thrown at you, such as stealth, base managment, etc. It will take quite a while until you can fully enjoy the game.
Con Micro transactions make multiplayer pay-to-win
You can buy bundles of in-game currency, which can be used to gain an advantage in multiplayer. This makes multiplayer not fun for the players who don't intend on spending extra money. It also makes it boring for the ones who spend the money. Both of these things negatively impact the longevity of the multiplayer.
Some of the bundles go for $79.99, which is more than the game's price. It's sad seeing Konami milk their fans with microtransactions like this.
Con Limited open world
Even though NieR: Automata is technically an open world game, it doesn't always feel like it. It's more that there's a big open space in the center of the ruined city you explore, with branches that lead off to vastly different environments, like a desert, a village, and a few other places. These locations aren't that spacious, either, and it's a bit of a stretch to even imagine all of these places being so close together in the first place. It's not too much of an issue as long as you find the story and combat engaging enough.
Con Second playthrough can get repetitive
Once you get to Route B, your second playthrough, you may find that too much is the same. There are some big differences, such as the new way you get to see things play out, but a lot of it rehashes Route A, your first playthrough. There's a ton of hacking you have to do as well, which gets pretty boring after repeating it over and over again. But if you stick with it, Route C and onward are absolutely worth the time spent getting to that point.
Con Some boring fetch quests
The pacing gets messed up when you're forced to run certain fetch quests near the start of the game. This is somewhat forgivable after the fun and action-packed introductory level, but the quests themselves are still a drag to play through. Some of the side quests can also boil down to the same thing. Even though these quests give a lot of useful information about the world, they're not all that fulfilling, and you may dread having to repeat them when playing through the game again.
Con Buggy on PC
Some players complain about the game crashing, freezing, their save files mysteriously disappearing, and more. As of June 2018, over a year after the game's initial release, there is still no patch to fix these problems. Not everyone on PC will have these bugs, but it's still quite prevalent. If you continually run into issues, your best bet is to find a mod or play the console versions instead of waiting on an official patch that may never happen.