The richness and concreteness of the game’s story and inhabitants is unquestionable and is easily one of Metro’s strongest assets. The player is taken on a rollercoaster of a story meeting all sorts of characters along the way, most of the game time is spent in the company of at least one fellow traveller with plenty of dialogue and insight into their respective personalities over the course of play. These conversations aren’t meaningless combat chatter but genuine stories, jokes and discussions that engage with the player on a very personal level. Such sections aren’t simple dramatic sequences designed to poke at this emotion or play on that stereotype but are carefully constructed in order to slowly build up the bigger picture as the game progresses. This can manifest itself in various forms such as the gradual unease, building up over several hours as you start to question the motivations and actions of some of your comrades in arms, or the way that some players, upon completion of the game will be left haunted by the words of one underground denizen in particular, unsure whether they themselves are a hero or a monster.
It’s this maturity of the storytelling and the reluctance of the designers to just jump between action scenes that means that when things do kick off they have so much more resonance and gravitas. Whole levels can go by with barely any shooting involved at all, with the developers carefully letting the game build at it’s own pace. Everyone you interact with has their own philosophies and views on life and ultimately it’s left up to the player to decide the validity or not of their actions. There are actually two endings to the title, but which one you get isn’t based on a simple yes or no question, instead determined by all manner of choices the player has made along the length of their quest. Nothing is ever clear cut, you are haunted by ambivalent visions, surrounded by uncertain events and it’s often not until too late that you begin to understand what’s been in front of you the whole time.
The atmosphere and immersion level in Metro 2033 is spot on, making for an utterly engrossing and enthralling experience. The developers have done as much as they can to make you feel like you’re there. There’s all sorts of touches such as the way that when above ground, due to the radiation hazard, players are forced to wear a gas mask. While donning one the player needs to change the filters periodically as they wear out, the cues for this are a wrist mounted watch which can be checked at the press of a button, mounting heavy breathing resonating through your speakers and a gradual misting of the edges of the glass screen with the condensation from Artyom’s breath. Then during one section the player gives a piggy back ride to a young boy and your movement becomes suitably wobbly and imprecise, it’s this kind of attention to detail that really hits home and shows an unprecedented level of consciencousness on the part of the game’s creators. Even when it comes to looting dead bodies the player has to individually target the relevant pockets and bags that they want to rifle through. Crucially, these kind of touches add to the immersion without being clunky or irritating.
On a technical level it all looks and sounds great. The outdoor sections feature large vistas over the broken cityscapes, at one point featuring seemingly scores of rampaging Noctalis (a form of mutated human, akin to a fast moving werewolf) and the ambient sound effects with the howling wind do a great job of highlighting your vulnerability. Even with such large draw distances you‘ll still be treated to little details such as tiny bugs flitting around the place. Then in the underground sections things are kept interesting with multiple dynamic light sources, all keying off the weaponry in your hands as well as the surrounding tunnels. The lights flicker naturally and the colour keys lend the lamps and fires a genuine sense of warmth and safety while the melancholic guitar strings that accompany much of the game are hauntingly simple and moving. v Metro 2033 is not only a game with a great atmosphere and ambience, but it can be quite scary with it at times as well. Throughout it’s duration the player is subjected to numerous visions and hallucinations, usually featuring the blurred shapes of the much feared Dark Ones themselves, disorientating the player with shifting level layouts and visual distortions. The complete ambiguity of these creatures’ intentions coupled with their genuinely chilling appearance is far more unsettling than any explicit horror sequence could achieve. The Noctalis and other overtly hostile denizens of this damaged world can be equally panic inducing thanks in no small part to the gun mechanics. Being generally quite low tech weapons, typically having been constructed decades earlier, the guns can feel relatively inaccurate at mid to long range and thanks to the enemies’ blisteringly fast movement the result is that a lot of times the combat can end up very close ranged. The agility of the Noctalis in particular can make for some quite frenetic firefights with the monsters literally dodging your shots and forcing you to pull back while desperately trying to beat them back.
By far the most standout of the scare factor sequences involves the player’s interactions with spirits. They remain completely invisible until you shine your light on them and even then the player is only able to see their shadows, or the odd parts of them reflected in pools of water, yet they retain the ability to hurt or even kill you should you interfere with them. It’s an incredibly powerful technique, seeing all kinds of phantom humans, objects and other creatures moving about the world as if they were still alive, replaying their last moments, and the accompanying visual effects look incredible. Not that the game resorts to the supernatural every time it wants to raise your hackles, such as when it manages to make even a comparatively plain runaway mine cart set piece truly terrifying thanks to its blistering speed and down to earth delivery.
There are the odd downsides of course such as the somewhat rough fixed vehicle segment that sees the player manning a gun turret. While there’s nothing particularly offensive about this, it is overly drawn out and is the one mediocre moment in an otherwise superb title. Then there’s the novel concept of featuring pre-nuclear military grade ammunition which can be used either as a more effective round in your weaponry or alternatively be traded with the various arms dealers for new weapons and more plentiful supplies of the weaker, modern ammunition created by the Metro dwellers themselves. While great in concept, ammo is so plentiful throughout the game that the balance between using the military rounds or trading them in never really comes into play quite like it should, not that this detracts significantly from the game’s overall enjoyment.
Metro 2033 is the perfect example of what a ‘mature’ shooter can be. It couples a strong horror element with decent gunplay and a plethora of thoroughly immersive mechanics and visual touches. The outstanding plotline has been married with a strong directorial style lending the game’s set pieces an epic feel and the genuinely refreshing dialogue completes the package. What’s more, the ending touches you, it’s a game that leaves you with questions and makes you contemplate far more than simply how cool the explosions were.