METAL GEAR SOLID V: THE PHANTOM PAIN
Worth it · Shooter · 2015
Steam Deck PlayableThe verdict
BUY IT.
Worth it at $19.99.
- Length
- 45.7h
- Value
- $0.44/hr
- Reviews
- 92% positive
Watch this gameOne email when it is worth buying. Your call on what that means.
Get one email when METAL GEAR SOLID V: THE PHANTOM PAIN is worth buying.
One email per game. Unsubscribe in a click.
Minimum on the Steam store: 4 GB of memory, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 650 (2GB) or better (DirectX 11 card Required), 28 GB of storage. Windows only.
Ushering in a new era for the METAL GEAR franchise with cutting-edge technology powered by the Fox Engine, METAL GEAR SOLID V: The Phantom Pain, will provide players a first-rate gaming experience as they are offered tactical freedom to carry out open-world missions.
What drives the score
How to read this
Every input gets a grade, S to D, read from the buyer's side. The score is multiplicative, so an input only counts as raising when it sits near the top of its own scale. Anything with real room left is holding the score back, because that room is the gap to 100. ▲ marks a lift, ▼ a drag or a dock, ? an input we do not have, • a fact this genre's score does not use. The exact weights stay secret.
The value story
September 2020 is where it bottomed out, at $4.99. Its cuts run 50 percent off as a rule. There have been 48 in the 11 years tracked, about 8 weeks apart.
On value it sits in the top 10 percent of its genre. It is pricier than 76 percent of its genre, and better reviewed than 89 percent. Among the games that feel like it, DEATH STRANDING DIRECTOR'S CUT ($9.99, scores 88) beats it on value, while it beats METAL GEAR SOLID V: GROUND ZEROES ($19.99, scores 59).
This site sampled 800 of its Steam-purchase reviews; 7 were written by buyers who refunded it, sampled from reviews written August 2025 to September 2026. That is fewer refunded reviewers than 7 in 10 paid games this site has sampled to the same depth, and among the 725 games in its genre sampled this deeply, 595 have a larger share. Inside the two-hour refund window, 60 percent of the 1,910 reviews written there were positive, against 92 percent overall, and those are 3 percent of everything written about it. It sells extras on top of the sticker price (boost, currency); the score docks it lightly for that.
Finishing takes 45.7 hours; clearing it takes 163, which is 3.6 times the campaign.
Still 1.3K concurrent players, 11 years in.
The drop-off
89% start to 3% rarestNo achievement in this game marks the ending, so there is no finish rate. The curve runs from the most-unlocked achievement to the rarest, and its shape is where players stop. Steam global achievements
Players
1,333 players at peak in the last day.
The chart appears once this game has been counted more than once.Player counts via SteamSpy.
What players say
They added Denuvo, now the game runs like sheeet. It's like they are incentivizing piracy at this point. Edit: It seems like a recent update fixed the performance issues. I will leave this review as it is as a reminder of Konami's incompetence. Long live project PHYSINT!!!
Gave it a thumbs down because so many people were gushing over this and saying how great it was so I got it. Then after playing for a bit I found out it was a half finished game, with no real ending. Lots of filler, and you get to replay missions because the creators went their separate ways during the making of it. Even before that you go to the same area over and over again in a lifeless and dull open world that...
This would have been a tricky game to review normally, some parts are extremely well designed while other aspects are obviously unfinished or padded out to a ridiculous extent. That said, it became a lot easier to review about 10 hours in when I realized that the constant mobile game level of time and grind walled content was there to sell you on real money transactions. A singleplayer game where Konami engages in...
Player reviews from Steam: the most helpful all-time, plus the newest that clear the same quality bar, with the hours each player had put in when they wrote it. The mix of Recommended and Not recommended follows the game's Steam ratio. Rotates daily. Opinions are theirs.
Cite this score
Embed the live badge, copy the line, or download the card.
METAL GEAR SOLID V: THE PHANTOM PAIN scores 74/100 on the BANG Score (worth it). The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/287700/metal-gear-solid-v-the-phantom-painThe BANG Score is one number for value, 0 to 100: price against how it reviews and how long it was built to be. It answers the money question and stops there; whether the game is for you is still your call.
Reviews set the ceiling and price moves you inside it, so a cheap game that reviews badly cannot climb. Ratings from few reviewers are shrunk toward the middle, so 100 percent from nine people does not outrank 96 percent from ninety thousand. Length comes from HowLongToBeat where it can be matched, measured against a per-genre floor so a five-hour narrative game is judged against other narrative games rather than against a sixty-hour RPG. Where no verified length exists the score says so and carries a dock, because the biggest input is then a guess. The full method, including where it is weak → Steam reviews as of Sep 12, price as of Sep 24.
A number here look wrong? Tell me what it got wrong and I will look at the inputs behind it.