Metro 2033 - Review

Introduction

Metro 2033 welcomes you to post apocalyptic Moscow in this creepy and atmospheric first person shooter.
You join the survivors of the apocalypse who fled into Moscow’s underground Metro rail system to escape the apocalypse.  As if living in the subway under a radioactive and toxic wasteland while constantly battling various mutant creatures wasn’t bad enough, there is a new threat to the survivors - the Dark Ones. 

This is where you come in, taking the role of a young man who has never been beyond the safety of his home station and it’s up to you to venture across the Metro system to find help to protect your home.  Metro 2033 provides a gaming environment well worth venturing into, its state of the art DirectX 11 graphics create a detailed and rich environment that fully captures the claustrophobic squalor of the tunnel system and the bleak desolation above ground.

It’s fair to say that the narrative is a little patchy, while the travel from point A to point B is well explained virtually all the other aspects of the game world remain a mystery.  You do pick up some details and background information from overheard conversations, but the main characters and narrative provide very little background.  You will get plenty of information about some of the challenges you face, however that is typically practical advice rather than any explanation of how they came to be there in the first place.



There are the mutants, Nazis and Communists battling it out and there was the “apocalyptic event” itself, neither really gets a decent explanation.  It’s not like a little explanation here and there would be out of place as your character was born in the tunnels and had never left his home station to see the big, wide, underground world.  Even the nature of the Dark Ones, the threat you are supposed to stop, goes largely unexplained other than several visions (rather like those in FEAR) and a frankly baffling finale.

It’s not a problem as such, more a missed opportunity to add a bit more depth and mystery to what is otherwise an very good game world for a first person shooter.

Game play

The game play is the standard first person shooter fare; use a variety of weapons to kill anything that gets in your way.  There is usually a variety of tactics you can use, picking bad guys off at range with scoped weapons, rushing with shotguns or attempting to sneak around with throwing knives and silenced weapons.

The stealth aspect in particular was promising.  By sticking to the shadows, avoiding booby traps or tin can alarms and staying out of view, you can get some satisfying sneaky kills.  However, on occasions the enemy become alerted to your presence for no obvious reason, add to that the occasional bullet/knife seemingly disappearing in midair despite clearly being on target, the stealth approach becomes a little hit and miss.  There are also occasions with the shotgun, particularly the early shotgun where shots that you think clearly hit don’t.

The selection of weapons is adequate; there are the usual pistols, shotguns, submachine guns and assault rifles, along with pneumatic ball bearing and mini spear gun type things and a couple of flavours of pipe bomb.  There are usually a few types of each and they can be upgraded at weapons shops with scopes, silencers etc.

The majority of the game is battling through tunnels and enclosed spaces, which is broken up by a few rail shooter sections and set piece battles.  This, along with surface sections, breaks up the game nicely and prevents it from getting too repetitive.  One nice touch on the surface levels is the need for a gas mask, this adds a challenge of finding air filters for it and you need to be careful not to let it get damaged or you can find yourself choking to death.  The gas mask also helps maintain the games claustrophobic feel on the above ground sections.

Some parts of the game are definitely less fun than others.  One sees you giving a piggy back to a lost child you find, this makes your aim sluggish and unresponsive, which feels very similar to every first person shooter fans favourite thing, lag.  The game then requires you to kill a bunch of these fast moving dog things that dart in and out of holes and the result is more frustration than fun.  Then there are the weird glowing ball things that really like you, head straight for you and once close enough they get so excited they blow up.  Not really a problem individually, but when there are dozens of them spawning all around you it gets not fun very quickly.

I’m all for challenging games but Metro 2033 does occasionally forget that challenging still needs to be fun.  There were a couple places in the game that did test my resolve to keep playing, not just because it was hard, but because it wasn’t fun and an unnecessary, contrived difficulty.  The glowing balls (last mention I promise) are a good example of this; the NPC you are with is supposed to be this amazing, experienced and knowledgeable veteran of the Metro and yet he chooses to walk really slowly.  You can run through the sections with ease, but then the NPC dies because you aren’t covering him and it is game over.

The enemy AI is a bit disappointing, while it’s reasonable that the mutant creatures follow predictable patterns, you get the same feeling when battling human enemies.  They will move around and use cover but if you watch for long enough it’s a set pattern and they occasionally try to take cover in front of cover despite knowing exactly where you are.

Graphics

The graphics really are the highlight of the game, even without the fancy effects that DirectX 11 enables.  Impressive graphics alone do not make a great game but they can create an environment that really draws a player in, the excellent graphics in Metro 2033 comfortably achieve this.  The lighting and smoke effects in particular really make you feel like you are underground and the frost effects above ground convey a genuine feeling of cold.

The impressive graphics do come at a cost though, if you want to run this on full settings on a big monitor at full resolution then even the most powerful computers will struggle.  I played using a Radeon 5850 graphics card and an Intel E8400 processor at 1240x1024 resolution with everything on full and there were a few occasions where things slowed down.

On the plus side the game does provide a lot of graphics options that allow you to customise your settings to best suit your system, even allowing you to select DirectX 9, 10 or 11.

Conclusion

Metro 2033 is almost a great game.  It is let down by a couple of game play issues and a failure to make the most of the plot and game world.  If you are looking for a challenging and atmospheric first person shooter to show off what your system can do then you could do a lot worse than Metro 2033.