Metro 2033 Review

By Ned Jordan

Metro 2033 is based on a Russian novel of the same name by Dmitry Glukhovsky that has been an enormous bestseller in its home country and has just recently been translated into English. It is set in a post-apocalyptic Moscow, or rather mostly below it. When the bombs fell, tens of thousands of Russians took refuge in the city's metro system. Twenty years later the former subway stations house city-state communities and the tunnels connecting them are the domain of bandits and mutated animals. The surface above is locked in perpetual winter, overrun with mutated creatures, and the air is too poisoned to breath. It's also home to The Dark Ones, a strange and mysterious race of creatures with psychic abilities that destroy the minds of anyone unlucky enough to encounter them. You play as the novel's hero, Artyom, a young man who has grown up in one of the stations and hasn't seen the surface since he was an infant brought below ground to escape the nuclear apocalypse. Artyom makes a secret promise to a friend to deliver an important message to another station and so he volunteers for guard duty on a diplomatic mission to the neighboring station as an excuse to get out of his home station, and so begins a long and dangerous journey through the subway's tunnels and the ruins of Moscow.

Metro 2033 does a good job of bringing the world of the novel to life. The stations are filled with people actively engaged in conversation, and you can learn a lot about the world of Metro 2033 by simply eavesdropping. The stations are cramped and claustrophobic, and sealed off from the dangers of the tunnels by enormous vault doors. The tunnels are dark and foreboding, and the desolate city above is suitably frozen and forsaken. It's an interesting world to visit, but unfortunately the shooter built around it isn't nearly as interesting and fails to do its setting justice.

Let's start with the weapons, because in Metro 2033's world weapons are not only critical to survival they drive the economy as well. The game uses a "bullet economy" in which everything is bought with bullets, even bullets. In addition to the various calibers, bullets come in two varieties: pre-apocalypse and post-apocalypse. The pre-apocalypse bullets, and weapons as well, are more accurate and deadly, and are correspondingly worth more at the station markets. Because bullets are literally money, each shot that you fire comes straight out of your wallet. An interesting concept, but it just doesn't work in practice. The main problem is that it takes a lot of bullets to take out enemies in this game, especially when it comes to the mutated creatures you'll encounter. You have no option but to rapidly drain your bullet cache in just about every battle. The lack of a melee option for the weapons and a knife that is apparently a rubber butter knife mean that you don't have any other option but to shoot, and to shoot a lot. You never really find yourself with a surplus of bullets and so when you arrive at a station you won't be able to afford any new weapons.

The game's shooter mechanics don't work too well whether you're fighting man or beast. The mutated creatures take so many bullets to be brought down that they just about always end up on top of you before you can stop them. You spend a lot of time spinning around to try and find which side of you the creature has decided to latch onto, and the lack of a melee attack means that you don't have any option to knock the monster off of you. It just not that much fun to be constantly twirling around to look for your attacker and then pump an entire clip of your precious ammo into it before the next creature latches onto you.

Fighting against humans is not that much better. Enemy AI is relatively poor, with enemies constantly popping out of cover or failing to notice that you're standing right next to them. The number of bullets required to take an enemy is inconsistent and seemingly arbitrary, and you're never quite sure if your shots are actually hitting an enemy or not. There's a stealth mechanic to the game in that in theory you can sneak your way through an enemy account and take them out quietly one by one, but the game's stealth aspects are, surprise, pretty inconsistent and wonky. The only effective stealth weapon is the throwing knife, because even if you sneak up behind an enemy and knife him, it can take several stabs to bring him down and by then he will have raised the alarm. If you don't happen to have a throwing knife on you, or fail to find the knives that you toss, stealth is no longer an option for you. You can avoid detection by sticking to the shadows and turning off lights to make things darker (enemies don't seem to notice that all the lights in their base are being turned off), but once the alarm is raised, every single enemy in the entire base will know exactly where you are, and there is no way to hide and wait for the heat to die down – you're locked into a protracted bullet-wasting fight until the end.

The game has a few interesting mechanics, such as with the gas masks that must be worn on the surface. Each filter for the mask has a limited life which you track by checking your wristwatch, and as you take damage in fights with enemies the glass in the mask becomes scratched and cracked. It's also cool how you can get more light out of your headlamp by hand cranking its generator and that your objectives are written in your notebook and to see them in dark areas you'll need to use your lighter for light. But for each of these interesting touches, there are several more annoyances and problems that detract from the experience. The merchant interface is confusing, especially that for the bullet exchange. Cheap deaths abound in the form of holes that are tough to see until you fall into them, booby traps in odd locations, and gaps that are difficult to jump because of finicky edge detection. Every time you feel yourself becoming immersed in Metro 2033's world, something frustrating happens to jerk you back out again. Metro 2033 is one of those game's that you want to like, but just can't quite bring yourself to do so. When you get down to it, Metro 2033 is just not that much fun, and no amount of atmosphere can make up for that shortcoming.

In The End, This Game Hath Been Rated: 67%. If Metro 2033's post-apocalyptic world intrigues you, then just read the book while taking breaks from some other shooter that's actually fun to play.