I finally found a youTube video explaining how to turn the MetaHuman into a playable character. True it does require one to install the 3rd person template but looking at all the steps involved and the amount of time saved by doing so I am not complaining about this 
So for anyone else trying to use MetaHumans outside of making cutscenes, check out this video.
Enjoy!
EDIT:
One thing to note… While I was following along with this tutorial I ran into a very strange bug. In one place they said “click on the body and in the Mesh field make a note of which mesh your character is using” but in my case my mesh was set to “None”. In the viewport I could see all the various mesh pieces but in the details panel I had “None” set for every single mesh. Go figure.
When I started following this tutorial I started by duplicaating the BP I created in the MHC and then followed along with the tutorial using that copy. When I ran into that bug I checked the original BP to see which mesh it used and made a note of that instead. This worked perfectly for me.
Hope this proves useful to someone 