Here we go, your impressions for
Metro 2033 (the original
The story: You play Artyom, a 20-year-old Russian in a post-nuclear society that lives in the subway system. Each station is its own society, and each seems to have its own problems (communism and fascism have overtaken some, for example,) and they're all plagued with mutants of various kinds. Your home station's particular problem are known as the Dark Ones, who appear to destroy the minds of their enemies, leaving them insane until it breaks them down into physical death. Your mission is to get help from the Rangers in another station far away. But it's not gonna be easy.
The story itself is great, as is the atmosphere, both underground and on the blasted surface. I only wish that the game didn't make you feel so rushed. (As it turns out, my initial idea to not rush was the correct one because there's a second ending for doing certain out-of-the-way things. Which I didn't do enough of because I was indeed rushing and only got the one option.) It's probably the first game that makes me want to delve into the source material. So big bonus for that. I especially liked how the currency is military-grade ammo, because it's something that's actually useful for survival in a monster-ridden land.
The gameplay: As I said in a previous post, this game isn't exactly sure what it wants to be. Stealth FPS? Action FPS? Both? Neither? You can try to sneak around but if you fuck up, the enemies DO NOT STOP until they've killed you or you've killed them all. None of this "oh, guess it was nothing." Nuh-uh. They went full realist on this one, which...doesn't make for great gameplay, especially since there's no manual saving. You can actually walk into an ambush and trigger the autosave, and the only way out of it is to load a game from a previous chapter.
And that's another thing: the achievements are kind of all over the place. "Kill nobody on this chapter." "Kill EVERYBODY on this chapter." Now, I could forgive this *IF* you were allowed to replay a chapter at will. But you're not. Want to replay chapter 4, then go back to chapter 7? Better be ready to replay chapters 5 and 6, because it basically overwrites your progress. I guess the only way to try for those achievements is to finish the game, then play the chapters in reverse order. Which is silly. This is one of the few games where I finished it, and then just want to say "fuck it" to the other achievements. And that's rare for me.
Finally, the weapon system. You can have five different types of weapon at a time: knives/throwing knives, a revolver, an assault rifle, a shotgun, and grenades/sticky grenades. So far so good, right? When you go to the markets, you only have the vendor to tell you that this gun is better than yours, but it doesn't say HOW. When you find a weapon on a corpse and have the option to switch out, you have to do it by sight. "Does this weapon look better than mine? I dunno." And the only way to really test it is to find some monsters and count bullets or something. Some info would have been useful, like "power, firing rate, reloading time" etc. so I could really tailor it to my playstyle.
The audio and dialogue: Going along with the story, the dialogue is pretty good, even though the soldiers - and the situations - tend to get a bit repetitive. "Shit! It's monsters! Shit! This door won't open! Shit! This machinery doesn't work!" At one point, I actually heard a "Blyat!" for flavour. And you get a few soldier tropes as well - guy who won't stop cracking jokes, optimistic guy who's looking forward to the future so you just KNOW he's gonna bite it near the end, smart guy who's useless in a fight - but, you know, tropes aren't an inherently bad thing. They made it work.
The graphics:I'm not a huge stickler for graphics. They did their job here. I could see the way they were tying the graphics into the feel of an area - the stark white of the snow and the Fallout-like rubble on the surface, the dingy stations compared to the bright lights of Polis station to show the contrast between the "rich" station and the "poor" ones (again, something that was explored in Fallout New Vegas,) and the look of the various mutants was a good mix of "monster" and "was this a human once?" I heard the Redux version was even better, but again, can't speak to that.
The length: Apparently it took me 13 hours to finish. But some of that was going back to avoid inescapable-death checkpoints. So if you play it well, more like 10-12.
The verdict: I liked the story a lot. I liked the atmosphere a lot. If you're willing to overlook irritations in the gameplay to enjoy the game's story, I recommend it. If you're a "gameplay over story" type of person, you might be able to give this a pass or at least check out if Redux is better.
