While his penchant for hiding in cardboard boxes remains, the cigar-smoking protagonist is no longer confined to slipping through linear levels in Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, the next edition of Konami's long-running stealth video game series. The game centers on a battered and bruised Snake (voiced by Kiefer Sutherland) setting off on horseback to rebuild his private army in Cold War-era Afghanistan. Before he's unleashed on the open world, Snake mysteriously awakens in a medical facility after being in a coma for nearly a decade following the events of "Ground Zeroes," a stand-alone prologue released last year. [...] Phantom Pain" leaves Snake's strategies mostly up to players to decide, rewarding them for being as sneaky and resourceful as possible. After securing or recruiting them, he's able to call on such "buddies" — as they're known in the game — as a trained attack dog, mechanized robot walker and assassin sidekick to accomplish his tasks.