K-SCORE: 30
(Metro 2033 and Metro: Last Light)
Developer: 4A Games
Publisher: THQ, Deep Silver
“just to run to the exit”
Director: Andrew Prokhorov
Designer: Viacheslav Aristov
Based on Metro 2033 by Dmitry Glukhovsky
Spoiler Level: None
Two main complaints I have about the Metro Redux duet of first person shooter games, one little and one big. My big complaint is that the headlamps the enemies wear are too bright making using any scope, especially a rare night vision scope, a non viable strategy. My little complaint is that the games aren’t any fun.
The stuff of nightmares.
They really aren’t. The selling concept is in a gritty survival game set in a post-apocalyptic Moscow where nukes have irradiated the surface, mutating the animals, and forcing the remnants of humanity down into the metros where factions vie for power. Sounds okay. I thought it’d be kind of like a shorter but more intense, less campy version of Fallout, which, recent frustrations aside, is still a series I look forward to and enjoy playing. Metro 2033 and its sequel Metro: Last Light don’t play anything like that though. There’s no player choice. The games are entirely linear, and frustratingly slow-paced with a third or more of all missions featuring a tremendous amount of standing around listening to characters drone on about “the dark ones.” Don’t get me wrong, I prefer having control over my character while a story is told, but it makes little difference if there’s a cutscene versus if you can walk around if there’s nothing for you to do and nowhere else you’re allowed to go. The amount hero, Artyom, is being shoved from one place to the next, one escorting side character to the next, is insane. There are many chapters to the narrative, they’re all short, they’re all easy, and most of them are about slowly walking behind one of your allies waiting for the one, (if there is even one) wave of generic mutants to attack you. The longest it took me to complete a chapter was Venice in Last Light, where you sit in the audience of a poorly-animated stage play featuring bad jokes and hilarious breast physics, but no gameplay to speak of. It’s a lot like watching actual amateur theater, except here thankfully I was able to get up and play with my dog without social consequence. Each game also has a few human on human combat sections, which are better, but bad. Enemy AI is so dumb that you can “sneak” right up in front of guys and knife them in the throat. The only challenge comes from the false sense of security you get thinking no one will ever see you. If you do screw up though, you can just reload a checkpoint likely only a few seconds of gameplay back, so stakes are low. It’s weird that they match a story with this many Nazis and the occasional lap dance with gameplay easier than Ratchet and Clank.
Technically the game functions. They put in a currency system and shops where you can buy pistols, sniper rifles, shotguns, assault rifles, grenades, and ammo. You can mod your weapons and choose your loadout. You have to scavenge for air filters and gas masks to survive the chemical-laden Moscow air. There are collectible diary pages scattered throughout the levels and safes you can open if you find the corresponding key for bonus loot. I can see where they went wrong though. They screwed up because none of it makes any damn bit of difference in a game this easy and a story this one-tracked. What was I going to do, drop a hundred MGRs on a new assault rifle I’d never heard of even though my shotgun killed everything I encountered just fine? Yeah, I did that. I tried all the guns. They all make bullets go into the brains of mutants and people alike.
The story is equally uninteresting. It doesn’t really have a sense of humor. The few attempts at jokes maybe work better in Russian. It’s bleak, but not in a fascinating way. You don’t get a strong sense of atmosphere or functionality for the Metro communities. The characters are mild be them friends or villains or something in between. Whatever muted personalities they have can’t really come through because of the endless exposition anyway. The monsters on the surface fight a lot like you’d imagine packs of chimpanzees would fight, and though there are a few varieties, they’re never mixed together and don’t require different tactics. They’re also just there to pepper the middle missions with battles and aren’t integrated into either the warring factions story or the dark ones story. The dark ones are conceptually bad. Twenty years after nukes fell on Moscow there’s a whole new race that has evolved from human beings? And humans know nothing of their physiology, culture, or short history? And of course they communicate through dream sequences and telepathy, mostly with Artyom who is a “chosen one.” Even if it wasn’t implausible and stupid, it’d be a bad direction for the narrative because presumably the society of 50,000 Metro dwellers have substantial other conflicts naturally cropping up from the collapse of civilization. If the story integrated these problems (food, dwindling population, destroyed infrastructure, radiation, medicine, power, production, conflicting ideas regarding governance, education, loss of history, barbarism, rape, murder, orphans, etc.) then it would link the world you're thrown into with what you’re fighting for and become something worthwhile. The only variance in anything comes from a morality system which makes no sense whatsoever and leads to one of two endings in each game, all four of which aren’t thrilling. I saw all four, meaning I played through each game twice. I can’t figure out why I was gifted the better ending for exploring more caves with more skeletons, eavesdropping on private conversations, and giving bullets to beggars, but that’s how it works.
So yeah, it’s no fun. But seriously, this headlamp problem is out of control. In any first person shooter, but especially a linear story-driven one where the enemies are big dumb meatshields, my favorite part is sniping. And I can’t make brains explode out the back of skulls when the lights are either completely off or retina-blinding. It sucks. I have to run around shotgunning people, which takes no skill because it’s hard to miss when the spread’s that big. Of course a better strategy is to sneak to the exit, since no one can see you or hear you no matter how close you get to them. An even better strategy is just to run to the exit. Yeah, they’ll hear you and shoot at you, but you’ve got a ton of life and as long as you’re not completely dead by the time you push through that checkpoint door, you’ll be ferried injury free to the next long escort mission. Metro Redux, the package of Metro 2033 and Metro: Last Light, is all escort mission, and upsettingly you - you’re the one being escorted. Imagine Goldeneye - Facility mission - over and over and over again and you’re the Russian bitch.