The remnants of war-torn frozen Moscow remain as the dominant species of this world has pushed themselves to the brink of extinction. Skies have been scorched, buildings have crumbled and nuclear winter has become the norm. The air itself pulsates with toxic fumes, only sustaining the most hostile of life in this bleak future. Yet through all strife and desperation, civilisation lives on beneath the freezing wastes. Moscow's Metro system has been become the last refuge of humans existence as stations create makeshift towns and tunnels present danger around every darkened corner. The hope of Moscow's patrons lay in Artyom's as he battles his way from one side of the Metro to the other against Nazis, mutants and bandits.
Atmospheric yes? This buildup of ambiance is only aided by the world in which Metro 2033 is set. Graphically the environments are extremely appealing even if the majority of them are tunnels, however this can sometimes be quite demanding on your system. Toning down the graphics though does not disappoint, as the scaling of hardware capability to visual effects is user friendly as well as aesthetically pleasing. Another great tool adding to the feel of the game, amongst other things, is the story itself. The author of the book Metro 2033, Dmitry Glukhovski worked very closely with the developers in order to make sure his vision was portrayed properly. The development time utilized on the story did come at the loss of multi-player capability, however the story does make up for it, and its nice to see for once a game that values its source material enough to stick to the original creators ideas.
Whilst the whole feeling of the game is rather impressive, there are a few mechanics and development issues which really let the game down. A major problem throughout the whole game, especially at the beginning is damage recognition on enemies. In an FPS when your attacking enemies you need to be able to feel as if your doing damage to your opponents, otherwise how do you know that your hitting them at all? This problem is felt more so during the frantic parts of the game where multiple enemies are launched against you whilst your boxed in. Its extremely hard to prioritise targets and risk assess when you don't know if you've even done damage. This damage recognition follows through to the damage you take as well, which is also hard to recognise. The lack of a health bar is not the problem in this game, its pretty obvious to know when your being attacked or hurt. The big problem is realising which direction your being attacked from. Enemies will more often than not pass right through you, be crouched and be attacking you from behind without you realising, which becomes extremely annoying during certain times in play.
The enemy and ally AI is extremely poor, and leaves you frustrated when your allies just walk through danger zones without care and get themselves killed, pushing you back to the last checkpoint in order to retry. Undoubtedly the most annoying part of the game was when later on you encounter a gauntlet of exploding goo creatures, which just didn't fit into the game at all.Your ally would just walk through them, effectively making you put way more effort in than would have been required if the AI were better. The whole scenario felt really sloppy, as if they'd just created one way-point on the other side of the gauntlet for your ally as opposed to several smaller ones. Another thing about your allies that is rather annoying is that they always seem to be equipped in a far superior way compared to you. Why are my allies torches always better than mine? Why does one ally during the end of the game have a laser hand cannon that is unavailable throughout the whole game? Actual gun combat up until you acquire laser guided weapons feels unresponsive riddled with major recoil. However once you do acquire weapons with laser guided targeting, combat changes entirely and becomes a lot easier. The problem is though that enemies stay at the same level of difficulty throughout, therefore later on in the game in becomes extremely easy, its as if the challenges of the game are designed backwards.
Game play as a whole is slightly choppy. The major reason behind this unfortunately is down to the game being so story driven. Whilst the story itself gives the game an epic, almost movie like feel, a great deal of the time your not actually playing the game, more watching the cut-scenes and pre-determined events on rails. The game will last you around 8-10 hours, during that time you'll be spending a third of that time allowing the story to unfold without your influence. Also the game never really takes advantage of its horror genre. Upon acquiring the game I expected to be terrified beyond belief by mutants jumping from dark corners or appearing behind me, but it never really happened. These aspects are not a total disaster to the game but it really feels as if these points could have been utilized better, improving the game infinitely.
All in all Metro 2033 sets out what it tries to, pays homage to the book and author whilst telling the story in such a way that it effectively saves the game from its flaws. Nevertheless it was such a disappointment to play a hyped up game which didn't deliver when it comes to game play.
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