Metro

Immersion. That’s what the Metro series is about. Making the player feel like they are in the underground tunnels under a post-nuclear-war Moscow. I was concerned, but also excited, when I learned that Metro Exodus would take us to the surface and open up the world. Despite seeming overly ambitious, the developers delivered on a world just as detailed and immersive as its predecessors. But despite their success in world building and immersion, I felt that the gameplay and story could be very rough and unrefined. As a fan of immersive games, I wanted to fall in love with Metro Exodus, but I just couldn’t.

I almost immediately dropped Metro Exodus while playing through its first chapter. I stuck with it because I wanted to complete the series and I wanted to give the game a chance. I’m glad I did because the beginning of the game is not at all reflected in the rest of the game. The game starts in the tunnels of Moscow with our main character Artyom on a quest to find proof of life outside of Moscow. This chapter is filled with a ton of dialogue and slow-paced gameplay as you crawl or slowly walk along restrictive paths. Action is constantly interrupted and control is wrested away from the player to play cutscenes and hear more blathering. To make matters worse, despite the focus on narrative storytelling in this chapter, the story feels incredibly rushed. Artyom discovering the train and the radio station feels like a massive coincidence and plot contrivance and feels ridiculous. Tutorials and opening chapters are often poorly done in games, but this chapter in Metro Exodus was particularly awful.

Luckily, the game’s best chapter immediately redeems the awful introduction. Artyom and crew leave Moscow by train and arrive in the tundra area known as Volga. This is an open area with freedom to explore as you please. It’s an incredibly detailed area with a ton of side stories to naturally discover. You deal with a church of extremists who believe that all technology is evil, bandits who enslave prisoners, and of course radioactive creatures. What makes Metro Exodus excel here is its immersion.

The game takes great strides to immerse the player in its world. The UI is minimalist so you are always looking at the world rather than a mini-map or objective marker. The map and your goals are printed on a clipboard that you can pull out. The compass is physically attached to Artyom’s wrist rather than being a UI component. Movement is purposefully sluggish; this isn’t a fast-paced arcade shooter and you aren’t superhuman. When entering radioactive areas, you need to wear a mask and constantly replace its filters. The mask can also get muddied or cracked and need to be cleaned and repaired. Ammunition, filters, and medical supplies are fairly scarce so you are discouraged from wasting any supplies. A single bad encounter can leave you without resources.

The dedication to making the game so immersive is what makes Metro Exodus enthralling. Trudging across the tundra without surplus health kits or ammunition leads to careful and thoughtful gameplay. Even basic encounters are tense as they could massively drain your resources. The relief that I felt whenever I would come across a safe house was massive. These little shacks are peppered throughout the world and they provided me with a sense of safety with their warm light and respite from the harsh world. Taking a few minutes to sit in the warmth, replenish my supplies, and listen to an audio log while in these shanties were some of my favorite moments in the game. While the areas following Volga don’t quite reach its heights, I do think they are varied and have interesting twists on the formula.

Outside of its immersive elements, I was a little let down by Metro Exodus. The gameplay and story have some significant issues that I found it difficult to look past. It’s ok that the gameplay was basic, I wasn’t looking for a fast-paced DOOM style shooter. The guns feel impactful and shoot-outs can be wonderfully tense because of the implications on your pool of resources. But it’s not ok that the gameplay is just… boring. I found that shoot-outs were few and far between because the game discourages you from killing human combatants. Humans also had poor AI that waffled between standing in the open to be killed and having superhuman accuracy that can shoot you through walls from a mile away. And non-human enemy encounters are repetitive and feel a bit janky.

The thing is that Metro Exodus, through various means, encourages the player to play stealthily. Because of the emphasis on resource management, it feels risky to get yourself into direct combat. Why waste bullets and health kits when you can just sneak around and avoid combat altogether? I don’t hate stealth in video games. It’s fine to supplement other systems and it can be very fun on its own like in series such as Metal Gear Solid and Dishonored. But stealth in Metro Exodus is barebones. It boils down to sneaking from cover to cover as enemies look the other way. There are never any new tools introduced other than the decoys you have access to from the very beginning of the game. If you want to avoid combat, be prepared to spend a long time slowly walking.

I think stealth could’ve been more interesting without even needing to introduce new features. Trying to sneak around but getting caught and having to rely on shooting your way out could be a fun gameplay loop. The more enemies you avoid, the more resources you save. But there would still be intense and chaotic gun fights if you got caught. But the moral system in Metro Exodus discourages you from getting caught at all. If you want to get the “good” ending in every area and the finale of the game then it’s incredibly risky to kill any enemies. I didn’t know which enemies are ok to kill without repercussions without looking it up online, so I just avoided killing anyone that I didn’t have to. This encourages a lot of reloading of saves whenever you get spotted. Not only is this boring, but it’s immersion breaking.

Maybe it’s entirely my fault that I would reload saves to prevent myself from having to shoot enemies. Maybe I should’ve just let the game play out and got into more shoot-outs. It probably would’ve been more fun. But the game actively punishes the player with dire story consequences if they kill anybody. At the very least, the morality system in Metro Exodus is much less obtuse than its predecessors, making it easier to get “good” outcomes in each area. But still, I felt like the game is discouraging the player to play naturally.

I quite liked the general direction of the story and how it weaves its narrative into each of the major areas. The game focuses on themes of guilt and morality and what humanity will do if nobody is watching. Some groups blame technology and things they don’t understand for the apocalypse. Some groups take advantage of others and utilize slavery to get ahead. Some groups form childish tribes and treat the world like high school cliques because they never grew up. Society has to relearn morality. It’s a fantastically thought-out world with complexity and depth to it, but the story itself fell flat for me. Metro Exodus has a serviceable story that is severely hampered by two major blunders: Artyom being a voiceless protagonist, and the voice acting in general.

I understand the desire to have Artyom be a stand-in for the player and their decisions. But having Artyom be silent for the entire game leads to many stifled interactions that feel unnatural. Characters talk at you and have pauses where Artyom would respond if he could. I frequently found myself zoning out as characters would monologue for upwards of 10 minutes. These conversations were meant to be 2-way, and would be much more interesting to listen to if Artyom could actually speak for himself. The Witcher series showed us over a decade ago that the player could make moral choices for the main character even if the main character also speaks for themself.

The bigger issue I had with the story is the quality of the voice acting. Nothing pulled me out of the moment more than comically over-the-top Russian accents. At times the characters’ accents feel like a parody. There’s also plenty of awkward pauses leading to disjointed conversations. I also have a suspicion that dialogue lines were recorded 1-by-1 and stitched together because many lines have disconnected delivery from the previous line. I also had issues with bits of dialogue playing over each other making it difficult to parse what any of the characters were saying. I really don’t know what happened here but I was regularly distracted by all these issues with voice acting and scripting. It’s a massive shame because Metro Exodus has an interesting premise. Moreover, when immersion is the game’s key aspect it is unfortunate that the quality of voice acting regularly broke my immersion.

I wanted to like Metro Exodus more than I did. I love games that can truly immerse the player in their worlds. And Metro Exodus does put in a ton of effort to fill its world with details and it’s clearly designed to engross the player through minimalist UI and dangerous environments. But the underwhelming gameplay, stiff morality system, and poorly executed story left me disappointed in Metro Exodus. I hope other studios take inspiration from the immersive aspects of Metro Exodus as the poor execution of the concept left me wanting something more.

Every so often, a sequel to a janky game will make a concentrated effort to improve the mechanics, but somewhere along the way lose part of its charm. Metro: Last Light is one of those games. My biggest complaint with Metro 2033 was a number of glitches and overall clunky gameplay, but the atmosphere and survival aspects were on point. Metro: Last Light is ultimately a smoother experience, but it has lost some of the more nuanced characteristics that made the original great.

The setting and plot of Metro: Last Light obviously follows it predecessor. You play as Artyom, a young man living in the metro tunnels of Moscow after the world has been decimated by nuclear wars. Communities have formed across the metro stations, and factions have fragmented society. The Rangers, a peacekeeping force of which Artyom is apart of, control critical sections of the tunnels that more violent groups want to overtake. Tension is boiling over between the Rangers, the Nazis, and the Communists over who will ultimately control the metro.

One of my problems with Metro 2033 was how little time was spent exploring the communities living in the metro stations. Thankfully, Metro: Last Light lets the player indulge in the post-apocalyptic society that has evolved in the Moscow underground. Throughout the game the player will visit the hubs of activity for all the major factions, as well as some other interesting stations. While there often isn’t a plethora of things to do in these visits, it was nice to spend a few minutes talking to inhabitants and just observing their way of life.

The Metro series has become synonymous with terms immersive and atmospheric. These games have the player creep through dark and dingy tunnels with nothing but a flashlight as a light source. Unknown horrors lurk in the shadows, and you can hear them skittering and stalking you. With a minimalistic HUD and a focus on scavenging to survive, these games thrive on their ability to be immersive. Metro: Last Light is no different than its predecessor in this regard. There will always be a sense of dread when exploring the ruins of Moscow and hearing eerie whispers of the dead. Or spelunking through the collapsed tunnels while mutated beasts travel in packs to hunt for their next meal.

The biggest improvement that Metro: Last Light makes over its predecessor is its focus on better designed combat scenarios. I often felt that Metro 2033 railroaded the player into forced gunfights, despite that being the weakest aspect of the game. Luckily, this game constructs its encounters more carefully and makes the gunplay more enjoyable. In forced combat there is more space to kite enemies around the arenas, rather than being cornered and mauled. In battles against humans, there is often a way to stealthily take out most of the opposition before engaging.

With its higher emphasis on combat, something seems to be lost in the design of Metro: Last Light. The original game placed importance on conversation of your tools such as bullets, health kits, and filters to survive the radioactive zones. Yet I never worried about my use of resources in Metro: Last Light. I never ran low on anything, which certainly deducts some of tension of encounters. When I’m not worried about running out of bullets, standard enemies don’t pose much of a threat. Moreover, I felt less of a need to scavenge for bullets and filters, which was a critical component of the previous game.

One of the other issues that I have with this game, along with its predecessor, is its implementation of morality. The series attempts to immerse the player as much as possible, and as such does not intrude on the game to tell the player whether what choices they are making are morally correct. The game does not even mention that it has a moral system, you are just shown one of two possible endings depending on what choices you have made. On one hand I like this implementation as it feels less “game-y”, as you aren’t being bombarded with messages telling you whether you’ve been well-behaved or not. But after completing the game and seeing online what actions were morally important, I can’t help but feel like they were overly arbitrary.

Making choices to save captured civilians should obviously be a “good” moral decision. Similarly, executing soldiers who have surrender should clearly be counted as “evil”. But Metro: Last Light contains many seemingly arbitrary actions that can ultimately determine the fate of the metro civilization at the end of the game. Choosing to strum a guitar laying around, eavesdropping on certain conversations, or walking to the back of a train are all somehow deemed as morally correct and will gain the player moral points. But tipping a dancer or killing monsters that usually attack you are considered bad behavior and you will be penalized.

Overall, I don’t have too much to say about Metro: Last Light that I haven’t already said about Metro 2033. They are remarkably similar games, unsurprisingly. While Metro 2033 does focus more on the survival aspects of the game, Metro: Last Light improves the combat encounters. I wish that Metro: Last Light did have more resource scarcity, as that would have led to more tense encounters and encouraged scavenging. At times, the game can feel a bit derivative of some of the generic first-person-shooters that were its peers. While it certainly was a more polished game, it did partially lose what made the original game special.

stephensopinions

Metro Exodus (2019)

Metro: Last Light (2013)