Again and again
Steam sales! It’s a magical time of the year, the holiday season for PC gamers. We leave it with our wallets empty and more stuff than we ever really needed or even wanted. This morning I bought a Princess simulator. Yeah. No joke, that’s probably going to be the game I play the most out of all of them.
Still, even as I poured my money into a pit, I realised that out of the games in my library, I’ve completed what, maybe half of them? Probably less than that. Hang on, let me count.
Okay, maybe it’s more like a fifth, but factor in all the ones that are a) Not a thing you really “Complete”, but pour a lot of hours into, b) Entirely Multiplayer Experiences or c) Games that I’m sure I didn’t even buy, I’ve probably played about half. Anyway, long story short, I’ve decided that in this looong summer I’m having here, I’m going to catch up. And I figured I may as well do some short reviews as I go along.
So today it’s Metro 2033. I got this in a humble bundle a while ago which I actually bought wanting another game (I think Saints’ Row 2?) and sorta ignored. Somebody asked if I’d played it a while back and when I told them I hadn’t they said “Wait, you love Half-Life, right? It’s kinda like Half-Life.”
And . . . I suppose I can see the comparison there. It’s a linear story-focused first-person-shooter. Your protagonist is silent save for briefly narrating a short paragraph at the beginning of each segment. But if I were asked to pick out of the two, it would have to be Half Life any day.
Metro 2033 is actually based on a novel of the same name. Its sequel, Metro Last Light is being adapted into a novel by the author, rumoured to be entitled “Metro 2035”. I found this out after I googled something like “Why does Metro 2033 have a book of itself scattered everywhere in the game?”. Seriously. One in your room at the beginning of the game, one in the luggage section of the train . . . it’s everywhere. And it makes no sense. Was this book published after the apocalypse and now just . . . everyone has it? Was it a prophetic book? I dunno. It got to me a little is all. Is the book in the book? That’s the meta.
Okay, I don’t really have a format for this review in mind, so I’m just going to go over stuff I liked and didn’t like and try and wrap it up somehow at the end.
There are totally gonna be some spoilers by the way.
So the story: I didn’t actually pick up on what the heck was happening until I was about 3/4 of the way through, partly because I somehow managed to skip the opening cutscene twice, partly because just what is happening here. I spent most of the first few hours scuttling around with random people trying to go . . . somewhere, because I had a token or something. If I hadn’t read part of the wikipedia article, I would have had no idea why we were even in a train station in the first place.
It turns out somebody bombed the heck out of Russia and you, Artyom, live in the Metro stations beneath Moscow. The surface is polluted with deadly gas and everywhere is crawling with mutants. Some new mutants called “The Dark Ones” (Now thassimaginative) are threatening your station and you need to go and get help. In a very Half-Lifey fashion, stuff happens, you get new mini-objectives towards your bigger goal. What annoyed me a lot was the fact that the tutorial mission of the game is a flash-forward to something that happens near the end. I’m . . . not sure why it was necessary to do that. I guess the book probably did it, but in a game it just served to confuse me. Overall? Story, check. There is one. It’s nothing . . . uber special. There are some interesting themes and dalliances over nukes being what caused this in the first place, is it right to nuke the dark ones, et cetera . . . Artyom appears to have some freaky prophetic powers/Creepy hallucinations that are never really explained. Similarly, the presence of mutants and “Anomalies” which roam the tunnels, are never really dwelled upon, they’re just sort of . . . there. I guess, like Half-Life, if you listen to the conversations, you get more out of it. I’m guessing.
The characters . . . didn’t particularly enthrall me. Artyom could really be replaced with a rock with a worried face drawn on it in permanent marker. I remember Uncle Bourbon because he was nuts. I remember Khan showing up and being creepy. That’s . . . about it. Everyone is just sort of, a beardy, bulky Russian bloke. I think I saw maybe two women?
Also, everyone loves Artyom unconditionally. Artyom, my friend! Hello Artyom! Artyom, you made it! Artyom, come here, let me stroke your hair.
So, more importantly, the gameplay. It was marketed to me as survival horror by a couple of people, but no. No, this is action horror at best, but really, it’s just action. Sure, it’s dark and there are monsters, but you have a powerful-ass torch and are packing. It’s mostly your rooty-tooty-point-‘n’-shooty game, but there are a couple of cool extra mechanics to go over.
Firstly, your ammo is also your currency. I was pretty hyped about that, having to make the decision between your ammo or buying an extra medkit, better gun, new filters for your gas mask . . . but actually . . . no. The ammo is separated into “Dirty Rounds” and “Military Grade”. The military grade is the one used as currency. You can also use it as more powerful ammo, but usually your bog standard ammo does fine. And there is just so much of it. Dead bodies carrying ammo, crates of ammo, the stuff is everywhere. Only once did I not have the ammo to buy something I really wanted, but I got on just fine without it anyway. Well, nearly. It didn’t help that I ran into only what, three, four shops during the game?
Secondly, if you go near the surface or, I dunno, just whenever the game feels like it really, you have to put on a gas mask. You need to buy new filters for it and replace it when it gets broken. But . . . I never actually died from not having enough air. I never had my gas mask break on me and needed to scramble for another one. Again, there are dead bodies everywhere and more often than not, they have spare filters for you, or a shiny new gas mask for you to put on.
Thirdly, your torch battery has to be physically charged. When it’s on low charge, it does practically nothing to the gloomy environments, when it’s fully charged, it’s a mini-spotlight. I like this mechanic. You’ve gotta remember to keep it charged for those tense moments when you’re surrounded by hordes of something. It also adds something to the stealth sections of the game.
Oh yeah. The stealth part. So theoretically, you can be a stealth dude at any point you please. But in a lot of areas, it’s not exactly feasible, I mean how many wide-open spaces with dotted cover do you get in a train tunnel. But they find ways to throw in a few – there’s a . . . Communist camp, a Nazi camp and err, that one Bandit camp . . . okay, there’s not much variety there. I’d be all for it if . . . if the stealth mechanics were actually any good. So you have a couple of methods to silently take people down. You can buy throwing knives and a silenced pistol. But as I found many, many times during my playthrough, it’s very rare that these actually . . . work. Usually, I’d find a dude blocking my way to the next section of the game, wait until he’s in the shadows, all sneaky like pop a knife in his spine . . . five seconds later, I’m hightailing it down the corridor with a screaming horde of burly Russians at my back. There’s not room for a single slip-up. Even at times where it’s nearly impossible to avoid killing a dude, you’re done if you make even one noise or one flash of light. At least, that was my experience. Maybe I’m just bad.
The game environments are from the same mold as the enemies and NPCs. Cookie cutter copies. Well, I suppose in a post-apocalyptic train station there isn’t much room for variety, especially when you’re going from a book. From bleak subway tunnel to dirty subway tunnel to bleak and dirty surface . . . I finished the game in eight hours and I suppose for a game of that length, the small variations were just enough to keep me entertained. The library was pretty cool, that final level, whew . . . but my main issue is that they’re all so . . . so dark and full of grey and brown, which is what you’d expect in a post-apocalypic game but you know . . . so are the monsters. Issat a monster over there? I can’t . . . I can see an outline but I’m not suuure?
One thing I do find in favour of this game is that it had some pretty cool set pieces. You’ve got your mine cart chase, that part where you carry the kid on your back, the DAMN AMOEBAS (Gosh dang I hate those things. Miller says “We’ll cover each other” but he doesn’t do Jack all to watch your back, I swear. And they just show up out of nowhere.) and of course, the epic final climb of the tower and short hallucinatory sequence where you run around weird corridors from the dark ones . . . yeah. Okay. It was no Half-life, but it was good enough.
That’s . . . more or less a summary of what I felt about this game. It has successfully staved off my hunger for a new Half-Life game for a little while. It had . . . flaws, sure. But overall, yeah, I enjoyed it just enough. Oh, you’re gonna die though. Quite a lot. There will be bullshit, like a demon swooping down entirely at random and throwing you into a building. Actually, since the checkpoint was right there it was kinda awesome. Never mind. It was just interesting and different enough to make me want to play it through to the end. It felt good, sitting on top of that tower in the end, watching the missiles rain down. Sitting there and wondering what on earth will happen in the sequel.
I’ll see you later for another review, comrades.
Magic and Guesswork 
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