Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain

Kojima Productions' 2015 entry is the series at its most systemic and its least finished. Big Boss is dropped into open-world Afghanistan and Africa with a helicopter, a horse and almost no scripted direction, and missions are built as sandboxes rather than corridors: extract a target, and how you get there - night infiltration, a sniper on a ridge, driving a jeep straight in - is genuinely up to you. The Fox Engine makes that legible, with sightlines and weather you can read at a distance, and the stealth is the most responsive the series ever achieved. Mother Base sits behind it as a management layer, staffed by soldiers you balloon out of the field and spend on research. The famous problem is the second half: Chapter 2 recycles earlier missions at higher difficulty, a filmed but unbuilt final chapter exists only as a bonus feature, and Konami and Kojima parted ways before release. What shipped is still the best stealth toolbox in games, attached to an unfinished story.