IGN gave Metal Gear Solid V a 10/10. Konami had fired its director two months earlier.

Let me tell you what was happening in the spring of 2015 while Vince Ingenito was presumably loading up his preview build. Hideo Kojima — the man who created Metal Gear from nothing, who turned a stealth-action game into a 30-year meditation on war, memory, and the ethics of violence — was being locked out of his own studio. Konami banned him from attending The Game Awards. They stripped 'A Hideo Kojima Game' from marketing materials mid-campaign. They fired him before his own game shipped. The credits were altered. The man was erased. Easy to say from the press box.

The review that landed on August 24, 2015 — six days before public release, on an embargo lifted by Konami's PR calendar — contains zero mentions of any of this. Zero. Not a footnote. Not a 'the development circumstances are notable.' Just 2,000 words of pure praise and a 10/10, delivered warm and on schedule like a catered lunch from a publisher who had also, by the way, granted IGN exclusive 'IGN First' preview rights to the game months earlier. IGN First means IGN paid for access. You don't audit the books of the company that sold you the accounting software.

And here's the thing about that 10/10: the game is unfinished. Chapter 2 is a monument to a production that ran out of runway. Missions are recycled. The story collapses. The True Ending — an entire cutscene about nuclear disarmament — was gated behind a server-side condition requiring players worldwide to collectively eliminate all nuclear weapons from the game. It stayed locked for nine years. NINE YEARS. A 10/10 game with a cut ending that required a global population event to unlock is not a 10/10 game. It's a 10/10 first half with a napkin sketch stapled to the back.

Vince Ingenito wrote a technically competent review of a genuinely impressive open-world game. That's true. But a review is not a spec sheet. A review is supposed to give readers the full picture — and the full picture in August 2015 was that one of gaming's greatest auteurs had just been publicly humiliated and discarded by his publisher, and that publisher was now asking you for sixty dollars. Giving that product a perfect score without a single word of that context isn't reviewing. It's gift wrapping.