Metro 2033 is easily one of my favourite FPS games of all time. The gritty, grimy setting, smooth gunplay and beautifully rendered environments had me hooked right from the first chapter. Of course, Metro Last Light was pretty good as well, but didn’t quite live up to the original for me. Naturally when Metro Exodus was announced I was stoked. To me, the issue of Metro Exodus being an Epic store exclusive, and the ensuing cold war between Steam and Epic was only a sideshow – I just couldn’t bring myself to care. Now, having played Metro Exodus, I couldn’t help but feel let down, despite generally enjoying it. It was missing something that was vital to the original game. Despite the obviously superior graphical fidelity and varied, open environments, the world it attempted to construct around me just didn’t feel authentic.
The reason for this lies in the differing way in which they present their environments: specifically, in characters and design choices of the original game.
The story of Metro 2033 plays out in a fairly traditional way, with plenty plot devices and characters that we’re fairly used to seeing, albeit often not in a post-apocalyptic setting. There’s a mysterious existential threat looming over the Metro (the Dark Ones), and accordingly, the protagonist’s much looked up to mentor tasks him with warning the rest of the world about said threat. Along the way, the protagonist meets a variety of more worldly characters that fit neatly into common storytelling tropes, a roguish character familiar with the underbelly of banditry rampant in the metro, a mystic shaman-esque character who guides the protagonist through some of the many haunted tunnels in the metro.
Metro Exodus replaces a lot of these classic adventure tropes with a smorgasbord of post-apocalyptic clichés. Slavers, zombies, bandits, cultists who sacrifice their own people to a giant monster, cannibals, bandits, and more bandits. The significant difference here is that Metro 2033 uses tropes to introduce the unique setting, whereas for Metro Exodus the tropes ARE the setting. If you take away the post-apocalyptic staples, there’s very little of substance left.
Also, what the hell – how are there even so many bandits in the wasteland when there are virtually no normal people around? How do they make a living? How do they even reproduce when there are no women in a five-mile radius? It’s a mystery.
The threat of the Dark Ones is the underpinning narrative of Metro 2033. They are the reason the player sets out into the world in the first place, and the game constantly reminds you of this, as you see the Dark Ones observing you during encounters with some of the more ghostly phenomena in the tunnels. The game communicates their intentions through the story and details in the setting. At the beginning of the game, the player is told that they are hostile and that the rest of the metro must be warned about them, and the hospital in the starting village is full of soldiers left debilitated by their traumatic encounters with the Dark Ones, making it pretty clear that they are indeed a threat to the Metro. However, in the player’s encounters with the Dark Ones, they are shown to be more curious than anything, and sometimes even provide assistance when the player finds themselves in a tight spot. This dilemma is a major source of tension throughout the game, as the player begins to see signs that, despite their sinister appearance and the hostile nature of the rest of the setting, maybe the Dark Ones are not really hostile after all.
Metro Exodus does away with the supernatural undertones and overarching enemy of Metro 2033, instead opting for the vague goal of finding what remains (if anything) of the Russian government. To this end, the player spends most of their time meandering in the wasteland wilderness to get whatever he needs to be able to meander to the next post-apocalyptic set piece so they can be given a new set of objects to clear before they can continue their journey to nowhere. There’s no real continuity between the areas… unless you really care about the characters. Ah yes, the characters.
After long and lonely segments of crawling through mutant infested tunnels of Metro 2033, punctuated by the occasional settlement full of downcast denizens going about their daily life unaware of the threat of the Dark Ones, I really came to appreciate the occasional companion. The tropes that the characters adhere to made their perspectives on the metro make sense and helped make the setting more coherent. Now let’s compare this to Metro Exodus; instead of slowly introducing characters to build up the setting, Exodus throws more characters than the player can possibly keep track of from the start. Most of these characters have a couple of lines in each area to give them a bit of personality, but after clearing several chapters I still couldn’t quite remember most of their names, let alone their personalities.
For the most part, the characters in Metro Exodus are there to provide the player with something to do. Some of the characters give out optional missions, some of them accompany the player on missions, some of them die to make the player feel guilty for not doing all the optional missions in an area. It’s a fairly common (but clumsy) approach to open-world gameplay. The end result is that the characters aren’t memorable and don’t really have anything interesting to tell the player about the world.
The use of ammunition as currency that was an almost iconic feature of Metro 2033 and Last Light has been done away with in Exodus and replaced with a staple of the open world genre – a crafting system. In some ways this is a sensible move, as you’re very unlikely to come across merchants in the open world wastelands, but it was still a distinctive part of the setting and removing it makes the setting feel just that little bit less authentic in comparison to Metro 2033.
Gas mask use was a must when you’re on the toxic surface in 2033, and running out of the fairly rare replacement filters meant certain death if you can’t find a way back to the safety of the tunnels, this too has been mostly made obsolete in Metro Exodus. The surface is for the most part clear of toxic gases now, with gas masks required for only small segments of gameplay. Filters are also nowhere near as rare, as with the crafting system you can build a dozen of them out of materials you can get from a stripping a few guns and finding some cans of baked beans. I don’t dislike the crafting system as it is, but the features that it replaces were an important part of the series and the fact that it makes the scarcity of resources seem like a complete non-issue really made the world less believable for me.
Metro Exodus is a decent game in its own right, and in many ways superior to the original games. For all the issues I had with the story and world-building, it was still fun to play. The gunplay was tight and responsive, the visuals are some of the best I’ve seen in a modern game, and the sound design is excellent. This made it all the more disappointing for me that they opted for a more generic open world setting, forgoing the unique atmosphere and design choices of the original Metro 2033.
Game Architect 