Dirty water, which was much easier to find, inflicted an annoying status effect that could either be cured with consumable medicine in the pause menu (which doesn’t pause the game) or ignored at the cost of the occasional barf. While water replenishes your maximum stamina, I found no way to reliably craft clean water, instead just hoping to come across it randomly in the open world. Your unforgiving metabolism mandates a “hunting” side mission in between almost every activity in the early game.
Managing your food and water in Metal Gear Survive, at least initially, is little more than tedious. This was my first major "Why is this called Metal Gear?" moment. The sole driving force of the game, at least at the beginning, is robots you don’t care about telling you to find data to bring back to your camp to analyse, while the hunger and thirst meters slowly tick away. In a franchise that’s known for having interesting characters and companions, why have two dull, humourless robots speak to me over an intercom rather than human NPCs I could form an attachment to? In fact, the only other actual character present during my playthrough was seated in my base, but couldn’t be interacted with in any way. The systems aren’t hard to understand and the tutorial is ultimately helpful, but this was my first major “Why is this called Metal Gear?” moment. There’s also a station specifically dedicated to leveling up, and all of these are explained by two off-screen robots that speak infuriatingly slowly. It’s a fairly bleak but customizable base setup that initially has stations for crafting gear, weapons, and medicine, plus a fireplace for cooking raw meat so it becomes edible.
We dropped into the game’s seemingly expansive open world right after a series of somewhat uninspiring story cutscenes, and were immediately introduced to Survive’s version of Mother Base. This is an action-first, crafting-driven adventure that, based on our three hours of hands-on time, has almost nothing but environments in common with previous games in the series, for better or for worse.
On the other hand, the “Metal Gear” part of the title is much less literal. This is, first and foremost, a survival game, with unforgiving thirst and hunger systems that deplete by the second. The “Survive” in the title of Metal Gear Survive is a lot more literal than the first glimpses of gameplay might’ve made it seem.
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