English
Gamereactor
reviews
Metro 2033

Metro 2033

Nuclear war has forced the population of Moscow underground, into the old Metro tunnels. Gamereactor joined their desperate fight for survival.

Subscribe to our newsletter here!

* Required field
HQ

Dear Metro 2033, I believe we need to have a discussion. Or no, maybe not you and me - you're a game, and that'd be silly. But I know that this game will have a tendency to creep into discussions I'll be having with other gamers in the future, as one of those games one will always be accused of "not understanding" when brought up. A bit like me, whenever Final Fantasy X-2 pops up; it's an amazing game, the rest of you uncivilised barbarians just don't get it.

In many ways, Metro 2033 deserves some real kudos; after all, it's a rather niche title, based on a Russian dystopian science fiction novel about a future Moscow where everybody lives underground after a nuclear holocaust turned the surface into a radioactive wasteland. It's cool to see something like that getting turned into a game, proving that we don't only have to pilfer 14th century poets for source material. In a gaming industry that usually lavishes praise on American special forces, it's nice to see THQ pouring some money into a project like this. It's even cooler to see it as an Xbox 360 game, and not only for the PC. I hope it will sell, and sell well.

Yet, my own personal feelings about Metro 2033 are pretty...ambivalent, to say the least. Because hidden beneath a really cool exterior hides some quite glaring gameplay issues and a narrative that has a hard time to live up to the rather high expectations it sets up for itself.

Let's talk atmosphere first because this is where the game truly shines - no wonder, since 4A Games includes a lot of the guys that worked on S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl. That series was high on atmosphere as well; simply by lineage 4A have proven that if there's one thing they know how to create, it's believable Russian wastelands. It's all there; the brown tones, the piles of garbage, the desperation, the mutants that look as if though they have been airlifted in from the Zone. It all comes together, and while the S.T.A.L.K.E.R.-games are all about open areas and exploration, Metro 2033 distils the mood that made them so great into a claustrophobic nightmare in the Metro tunnels beneath Moscow. That's a lot of atmosphere right there.

This is an ad:
Metro 2033Metro 2033
Metro 2033Metro 2033Metro 2033

As one might expect, it seems like the migration below ground has made everyone insane. There are not only mutants lurking outside the stations that humanity now call its home, but trigger-happy Communists, Nazis or bandits. Usually, they have one thing in common - greed - and it's not often you meet someone that is remotely likeable. In some ways, it's the typical slideshow of characters that you'd see in most post-apocalyptic games (or novels, or films), while the politics and the actual setting give it all a refreshing air the genre needs.

The stations are the highlight of the game, walking through the makeshift towns and taking in the sights. The attention to detail is amazing, and I even found myself taking the time to turn off the lights in my small little room before I left it. I'd love to see a more open world game set in the same environment, like a Fallout 3 that have been moved all underground. The times you do head up to the surface is almost as chilling, even though the human factor is gone there and it doesn't get under my skin in the same way as the Metro stations do.

This is an ad:

This is all cool, and let's all salute 4A Games for pulling that off. The sad part is that the game as a game doesn't really deliver the same experience as the atmosphere.

First of all, there's the combat. The guns don't go "BLAM!" or "DAKKA DAKKA DAKKA!" or whatever sound effect you might expect them to do. They all go "PJUFF PJUFF!", which - I think we can all agree - is a pretty lame sound. There's no punch to them, even the pretty powerful revolvers don't feel like they actually have any impact. The more powerful enemies don't even flinch until they actually die, and the human opponents only twitch a bit. And even though I have never been in an actual gunfight, and don't plan on ever being in one, I am quite sure that if I sneak up behind someone with a shotgun and empty both barrels to the back of his head, he will die instantly. Not so in Metro 2033, which really gets in the way of immersion.

Metro 2033Metro 2033

There is also a problem with the storytelling. I'm not going to go after the story itself since I kinda like it and I'm certainly interested in picking up Dmitry Glukhovsky's novel, but the way it is told here lacks forward momentum. There's nothing that drives me forward, the whole idea that I should chase after a character I've only met once seems farfetched to me. I'd rather just sit in my small house and hang out with my friends and step-dad, instead of arming myself and facing almost certain death at the hands of neo-Nazis or ghosts. Artyom, the protagonist, completely lacks a voice as well - except during loading screens between chapters, where he sounds so bored that I can't help wondering if I'm supposed to feel bored too.

Metro 2033 can be unforgiving at times, which sometimes is a good thing and sometimes incredibly frustrating. The level design is a bit off, with hidden ledges and pitfalls in the most annoying places, and the game has a tendency to kill you outright without any proper explanation. Sometimes it does offer you a reason why you did die, but it's not 100% certain that you will get the right reason; at one point, one sudden death was blamed on a so-called anomaly. Just stand still when it comes, the game told me, and wait until it passes and you'll be fine. I went to the same place, stood very still...and died. It turned out that it wasn't an anomaly at all (they had yet to be introduced) - instead, it was a trap; a spiked piece of wood, swinging from the ceiling into my unsuspecting face. Ooops.

Metro 2033 might have been released for the Xbox 360 as well as the PC, but at times it does feel a bit like a glitched PC-game that would do well with either a few more months in development or with a couple of overarching patches. The narrative would do well to get a complete overhaul, it should have been tightened up considerably to be able to give the environments the extra edge they deserve. 4A Games have struck gold in so many places, and the game culture intelligentsia many games journalists (myself included, of course) consider themselves a part of has been screaming for something like this for a long time. A Russian piece of literature, translated to our beloved gaming medium? Genius!

Metro 2033 is an unpolished gem, a piece of fiction whose rich language fail to deliver a story but still stands out in a bookshelf filled with Danielle Steel and bad Tom Clancy (pre-Ubisoft) knockoffs.

HQ
07 Gamereactor UK
7 / 10
+
Incredibly atmospheric, different setting, amazing level of detail
-
Lacking combat, no narrative push, annoying glitches
overall score
is our network score. What's yours? The network score is the average of every country's score

Related texts

0
Metro 2033Score

Metro 2033

REVIEW. Written by Petter Mårtensson

Nuclear war has forced the population of Moscow underground, into the old Metro tunnels. Gamereactor joined their desperate fight for survival.



Loading next content