Metro 2033 review

Take notes, kids, we're only 13 years away!

It’s amazing what one option can do to change your perception of a game.  For the recently released Metro 2033 from Ukrainian developers 4A Games, that option is a Russian language track.

I should probably explain.  My Metro 2033 review was supposed to be finished last week, and while I undoubtedly enjoyed the game, I’d drafted a whole section around the game’s voice acting and how unimpressed I was with the English dub.  So two playthroughs completed, all in English, and I figure I’m ready to complete my write-up.  Then, thanks to a heads up from several people online, I discover that this whole time the game has had the option for Russian language audio and I’d never seen it, thanks to never staying in the Main Menu and a particularly unhelpful game manual.

And with this one toggle, Metro 2033 has gone from being just alright to atmospheric brilliance in my books.  Why?  Well, let’s elaborate…

Metro 2033, based on the novel of the same name by Russian author Dmitry Glukhovsky, is set in a post-apocalyptic Russia where humanity has been forced to take shelter inside the Moscow train system to protect themselves from the nuclear winter playing out on the surface.  The protagonist is a young man named Artyom, who sets out to save his home station of Exhibition from the attacks of an unknown enemy, referred to only as “the Dark Ones”.  To do so, Artyom must make his way through Moscow’s radiation infested tunnels, fighting to survive against both metro mutants and other survivors alike, decipher the Dark Ones’ goal and cobble together a workable defence.

Nosalises: Hungry man-apes of the Metro

The game is a first-person shooter, with some roleplay and stealth elements added.  The game uses a minimalist HUD system, which works nicely to keep the game world immersive.  Most weapons are made from mix-and-match components that heighten the feeling that everything inside the Metro 2033 world is scraped together with recovered salvage.  Indeed the only properly manufactured weapon component, pre-blast ammunition, is now so valuable that it’s become the metro’s new basic currency.  To survive inside and outside the metro, you’ve also got to be somewhat self-sustaining, which means that you have to carry a gas-mask and spare filters with you at all times, along with a head-lamp and (eventually) night-vision goggles that can be charged with a hand-held charger.  Still, strangely enough, Metro 2033 manages to justify such a loadout without seeming ridiculous.  While you never get to see Artyom’s body outside a few third-person camera angles, observing other metro rangers shows you how everything is strapped to your person.

Although I never did figure out how you could strap your night-vision goggles over the top of your gas mask.

There’s also a decided element of survival horror in Metro 2033, where managing your wallet needs to be carefully balanced with supplying yourself correctly.  It’s almost essential to strip whatever ammo you can find from your victims, and discover as many hidden caches as possible if you don’t want to be fighting enraged mutants with just your knife.  If you do get into deep trouble, then you can use your pre-nuke ammo to defend yourself, but use too much and you won’t be restocking much in the next free station.  Your gas-mask can also crack and break if you wear it during combat, which means that you’ll often have to scavenge a working mask off a corpse right in the middle of a radiation hot-zone.

Nothing like a few dead kids to encourage you to recharge your head lamp

On the horror side, there are also a few brilliant levels where you’re forced to travel through haunted tunnels, which I thought the game could have used much more of.  Spectres of the dead wander certain abandoned areas of the train system, talk through the pipes and can kill any living being they come into contact with.  Metro ghosts appear as simple shadows under your head-lamp, but their presences is extremely unnerving and I really think 4A missed the opportunity to create few levels where they become a seriously threatening presence.  As it stands, the closest the game gets with this mechanic is to make you slowly walk through an entire crowd of the watching silhouettes.

And it’s elements like these that go towards making Metro 2033 such a delight to play.  When you get right down to it, the gameplay is actually fairly generic and certainly linear, but it’s executed in such a wonderful, immersive environment that you won’t really care because you want to see what’s coming around the next corner.  I’d liken it to BioShock, it’s a shooter that has something to say outside it’s core mechanic.  Both games seek to conjure a sense of awe from their environment, although where Bioshock does so with deep, rich colours, Metro 2033 presses on the player with a bleak palette and claustrophobic gas-mask.

Even in post-apocalypse Moscow, you still get to shoot Nazis

Which is where we come back to the voice track.  When I was playing this game in English, I was actually having a difficult time with the game’s atmosphere.  Everything the game does feels great, but to hear these people talk in Russian-accented English was ruining my suspension of disbelief.  The English voice work isn’t exactly Yakov Smirnoff bad, but it approaches it in some points.  The anomalous Dark Ones in particular lose something in the translation, where in the English they speak in a hissy whisper, but in the Russian talk with a deep, resonant and threatening tone.  Even the game’s awful (seriously, even by their own standards) escort mission seems more tolerable when your new charge is talking in his native tongue.

There are a few things about the game that I didn’t think worked quite so well.  Stealth was one.  As a long time fan of Thief I’m always glad to attempt to solve a situation by stealth, but Metro 2033 makes this route almost impossible.  While it does encourage the silent path on occassion, it falls flat in the implementation rather consistently.  To sneak past enemies requires you to move silently and stay away from light sources.  You also have to avoid walking over loud surfaces, and dodge simple noise-making devices like hanging cans to stay anonymous.  However, even if you do all of these things, the post-apocalypse level design seems to include far too many jagged edges that cause the game to think you’re landing a jump, thus triggering a loud footfall that alerts pretty much every enemy inside a tunnel to your presence.  Similarly, some stealth sections asked players to use ladders, even though exiting a ladder auto-triggers the exact same scenario.

Couple this with the fact that Metro 2033 insists upon a high dubious, oddly-selective checkpoint system and you won’t be having much fun sticking to the shadows.  I had to replay one particular section of the game at least twenty times over to remain anonymous, and each time I have to sit through the same five minutes of waiting for guards to move or conversations to end.  Not a great deal of fun.  There were also a couple of points where the game’s checkpoint system managed to kill me outright, saving me at a state where my gas-mask had become cracked and I couldn’t reach a replacement in time.  Highly frustrating.

Many pristine corpses will give you the "just chillin'" stare

Visually the game is quite good, but for a game about a post-apocalyptic, underground society, many parts of the environment seemed a little too clean.  It’s probably the engine’s fault more than the art designer’s, but most equipment looks a little too … shiny. A little too manufactured for a society that apparently smiths all their equipment in workshops.  For such an unforgiving environment, the gore slider is also all the way down here.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m not looking for exploding torsos like Fallout 3, but in such a harsh environment it just seems wrong that all corpses are clean, intact rag-dolls with a somewhat calm look on their face.

In the end, I think Metro 2033 is quite the accomplishment, especially as a debut game from a studio.  It has a well recognised artistic style to it, that helps to encourage the player’s immersion in the game’s narrative.  A narrative, I should mention, that has already inspired me to order a copy of the book that the game was based on.  And while I know that the Russian vocal track might not be everyone’s cup of tea, I can only say that it managed to vastly improve my opinion of the game, so give it a try!

The Verdict:

Pros: Metro 2033 conjures a bleak, dark and unforgiving world that is as impressive as it is depressing.  The game strikes a good balance between survival and action.  Interesting, original storyline that engages well with the player.

Cons: A couple of rough edges with the game mechanics.  Firefights can be a little clanky at points.  English voice work is average and works against the rest of the atmosphere. That. Fucking. Escort. Mission.

Overall: OK, so it’s not exactly perfect, but Metro 2033 is certainly head and shoulders above most other FPS titles, and manages to tell a story worth hearing along the way.  Do yourself a favour, pick this game up.  Switch over to the Russian voice-work, crank up the difficulty level and play this game as it was meant to be played: A lone soldier isolated in a world where the water, the air, even the dark can prove lethal. 4 out of 5 stars.