Typical. You play 16 hours of Metal Gear Solid 5, choke hundreds of Russian guards, disable an armoured tank with C4, flee from a chopper gunship as your horse’s hooves crumble an Afghan cliff edge and tackle a lightning-fast super-soldier unit of ‘Skulls’ with experimental governmental weaponry… but it’s Billy Idol who kills you. Ok, we weren’t *directly* taken out by the bleach-haired 1980s rock artist, but by our desire to steal his song ‘Rebel Yell’ for our tape collection – and it’s this insane desire to risk everything in the quest for rare items, resources, equipment and, er, a Long Eared Hedgehog, that typifies everything that’s mad, spectacular and uniquely *Kojima* about MGS5.

It’s almost impossible to capture everything we did in our huge hands-on with MGS5, but a few weeks ago we sent in a FOXHOUND unit of four GamesRadar+ editors to see as much of the game as possible. Our collected thoughts are right here, and in another more anecdotal feature, due tomorrow. Don’t worry, there are no big plot spoilers here, but a clearer sense of how the open world works, and an answer to the biggest question of all – will MGS5 truly be the series’ sign off Hideo Kojima deserves?

If you played last year's concise, tonally downbeat but highly replayable MGS: Ground Zeroes – which is currently free for PS+ subscribers – then you have a good idea of the core gameplay (give or take a few UI tweaks). Ground Zeroes is, in many ways, a test-bed for the larger ideas offered in The Phantom Pain. You've got vehicles to drive, buildings to explore, and a variety of gear to help you in your sneaky expeditions.

The Phantom Pain is an evolution of ideas presented in prior entries in the series, with you in the role of anti-hero Big Boss, aka Venom Snake – at least, that’s what we’re led to believe, but we’ll spare you the conspiracy theories for now. The Phantom Pain drops you in open environments, rather than funnelling you down segmented areas like in prior Metal Gear games – no longer can you evade pursuit by simply running to the next screen. Instead, you'll need to use cover (Snake ‘snaps’ to objects when you’re crouching nearby) and scout the area through your binoculars, which will actively mark enemies on your HUD – a bit like Far Cry.

If you get spotted by an enemy soldier, you now have a few seconds of ‘Reflex Mode’ slow-mo time to react with a well-aimed tranquilizer dart to their face and halt the alert. The Metal Gear series has never had the friendliest of control systems, and the lack of tutorials meant many never got to appreciate their exemplary nuance and accuracy.

MGS5 is even more progressive, with richly layered controls and deeper RPG-style upgrades than open-world contemporaries like GTA5. The game’s subtleties, mercifully, get revealed in layers as you progress – but it’s still possible to feel initially overwhelmed by the variety of controls and options. Bottom line: MGS5’s controls are able to keep up with its different ideas, creating a sandbox of almost unrivalled potential.

Sure, you could beat MGS: Ground Zeroes in a four-minute speed run, but most reports neglected to mention the 20-30+ hours required to reach that skill level. Camp Omega’s compact location forced you to experiment with the game’s more nuanced stealth and evasion skills – and MGS5 rewards that investment. The opening Afghanistan section feels around 20-30 times bigger than Camp Omega, juxtaposing wild open plains, valleys and mountains, with intimidatingly huge military bases, encampments and interiors.

This isn’t like any Metal Gear game you’ve ever played – imagine what Kojima hinted at with the intro level of MGS4, but with scale and awe of an open world like GTA5 or The Witcher 3. Sure, there are the expected cinematic sequences, but there's a hell of a lot of actual game here, too – if anything, fans might lament the *lack* of cut-scenes, with some story delivered in Uncharted-style, restricted-control, real-time gameplay, or via hours of (often hidden) audio tapes.

There are multiple ways to get around, whether by helicopter, horse, or simply hoofing it on your own two legs – with some more, well, *mechanical*, assistance in later locations. See an enemy encampment on the way toward your objective? Take it on head-first by force (using the 100s of weapons that can be researched by your Mother Base’s RD department, each with a unique feel) or sneak past it by trudging up the mountain path beside it. You can even tap X to hide on the side of your horse as guards stare obliviously at a ‘stray’ animal passing through their camp. Capturing enemy guard posts not only earns you resources (item pick ups that are sent to Mother Base for building new weapons and equipment), but makes invading nearby larger bases easier – trip an alert, and guards have no allies left to call in.

You can tackle missions in almost any order, with optional side-missions that benefit your progress. For example, one side mission asks you to rescue a translator. Upshot? You can interrogate Russian-speaking guards to learn where their colleagues are hiding, making infiltration easier.

Despite its gargantuan size and scope, MGS5 gets its biggest ideas from the portable game, MGS: Peace Walker. Rather than moving through a series of linear environments, you'll select a mission from a list of ever-expanding objectives, then hitch a ride on a helicopter to the mission location.

Like Peace Walker, The Phantom Pain's missions are set across both day and night - but here, that transition is far more dynamic. Enemy troops maintain a schedule, and as time passes, they'll move around the map, taking over their comrades' posts at various times throughout the day. A ghost town at noon can be teeming with enemy soldiers at midnight, and Snake need only puff on his Phantom Cigar (selected from the item menu) to accelerate the flow of time. Be careful: it’s easy to get too excited by the visual effects and overshoot your intended infiltration time. In daylight, Snake gets temporarily blinded as he exits dark rooms, increasing the risk of being caught. At night, you can use the shadows, shootout searchlights and turn off power generators to stay out of sight – but guards will rush to investigate a power cut.

Mission types are plentiful and varied. Across our 16+ hours, we fought a flaming psychic projection with a shotgun during a tense horseback pursuit, took out key enemy radar emplacements with C4, snuck into heavily-guarded prison complexes to drag out a scientist on our shoulders (with a big benefit for your RD effort) and used an experimental government weapon to fight a lightning-fast cyborg unit called ‘The Skulls’ - the creepy dead-eyed dudes from earlier trailers.

Being a Kojima game, the best bit is that you don’t even need to fight them: one colleague completed this section just by calling his horse and running away. Or, you could simply opt to chopper down to a random Landing Zone (LZ) on the map, tranquilize a stray wolf and send it on a Fulton recovery balloon back to your HQ (there’s a Red Dead-style list of rare animals to collect). Whatever you decide, you'll need to find as many supplies as possible, because the biggest idea The Phantom Pain yanks from Peace Walker is its best: the Mother Base.

Mother Base acts as the game’s central hub. It’s the home of your ragtag cadre of mercenaries, and where all of your equipment research takes place. It's not just a hideout - it's the factory for everything you'll ever use while you play The Phantom Pain, churning out new guns, grenades, and upgrades for you and your crew to use on missions.

While you're out exploring the Afghanistan desert, you'll come across blueprints for additional gear, as well as countless enemy troops out on patrol. These soldiers can be, ahem, 'persuaded' to join your team by knocking them out and strapping a Fulton balloon onto their person. Upgrade your Fulton balloon (by ‘hiring’ more soldiers to work in RD, completing missions for GMP currency and exploring the map for precious metal pick ups – it’s a virtuous cycle), and you can steal gun emplacements, or even tanks. As long as you're in an open area (and the weather is clear), the balloon will send items, animals and soldiers sky-high, where a helicopter will collect them, give them the new hire paperwork, and voila - they work for you now. Collecting soldiers will expand your base, allow you to research and upgrade new gear, and you can even send your burgeoning army on excursions against enemy encampments – rewarding you with improved conditions (like destroying enemy helmet and shield supplies) to make missions easier. And as you gain more skilled employees, additional wings of Mother Base will open up, allowing you to store vehicles, additional supplies, and even animals. But that's not all...

Mother Base isn't just a glorified menu screen like in Peace Walker. As you play and gather new recruits (one early mission asks you to find the scientist who developed your metal hand, unlocking research upgrades that allow you to scale previously-inaccessible rock faces, or use the hand like a radio-controlled rocket…) your base continues to grow and evolve, and what starts out as a single platform in the middle of the ocean quickly blossoms into a military fortress. When we unlocked our first base extension (unlocking a shooting range mini-game), it took us almost 5 minutes to drive across the connecting bridge by jeep. Just time to pop Aha’s Take on Me on your Walkman, or catch up on a backstory cassette about the formation of The Patriots, or the fate of Dr Strangelove.

It's not just for show. You can unlock a portable shower for washing blood off your fatigues, practice grappling with your troops and popping in to say ‘hi’ will actually improve soldier morale - which is important if you want to keep your troops from constantly trying to pick fights with each other (and consequently, ending up in the brig or sickbay). If you manage to find and capture the cute wolf-pup DD, you can keep popping back to Mother Base to see how he grows up – with some priceless interactions with Revolver Ocelot. Better yet, when DD is big enough, you can equip him as a buddy on the mission load-out screen, who can be tasked to distract or maul guards. Oh, and don’t forget to visit Mother Base on your real-life birthday for a nice surprise…

The deserts of Afghanistan can be a harsh and lonely place. Thankfully, Snake's got a buddy or two he can call on to help him out. When you first land in Afghanistan, you'll have D-Horse, a trusty steed that will carry you with haste over the sandswept plateaus to your next objective. But a horse can only get you so far - he’s hardly combat ready (unless Kojima later introduces soldiers with throats made of sugar cubes). D-Dog is the more aggressive buddy, leaping up guards and keeping them busy long enough for his master to finish them off. Order him to sit and bark - using the context sensitive command wheel on L1 (also used to whistle for D-Horse) - and he becomes a manual distraction. A little too ‘Crufts’ for your liking? Research new doggie costumes back at Mother Base and more brutal tricks will be added to the command list.

Incredibly, this entire dog-training path can be missed entirely, should you fail to extract the puppy D-Dog in the first place. If you’d kick yourself over that, you’d be distraught if you failed to recruit Quiet - yes, the clothing-averse sniper is another buddy. The how and the when are dangerous spoiler territory, but enlisting Quiet makes life that much easier: her cloaking device lets her enter distant outposts and feed back intel about enemy placements, or she can be ordered to fixed points on your iDroid map to act as overwatch. With her scope trained on the battlefield, any alerted guards can be silenced before they call for their friends. Look closely and you can even see her laser sight dancing on their heads.

If Quiet is the graceful killer you can see yourself buying an action figure of (embarrassment about malleable torso aside), at the other end of the scale is a pair of hoofing great mechanical legs known as D-Walker. It’s hilariously clunky: stomping around on noisy metal limbs and firing tranquiliser darts out of a massive cannon. Sure, it has a stealth mode, but this simply means dropping to its knees and trundling along on a set of hidden wheels - it’s like trying to infiltrate a secret military facility in a shopping trolley. Of course, all this is set to change by exploring deadly upgrades in its tech tree - alas, we simply don’t have time to recruit the necessary specialists (certain kidnappees have unique skills) to develop them. D-Horse won’t be put out to pasture just yet…

The more you take each buddy with you on missions, the more loyal they become, making them more responsive to your commands and capable of using a wider range of equipment. We didn’t have time to fully explore this idea, so we’re not entirely sure how it works as yet.