Metro: Full Series Retrospective

hey guys before we get into what is about to be an annoyingly in-depth look at metro 2033 i wanted to make sure you all knew this entire series is on sale right now over at good old games full disclosure i'm in the process of talking them into lowering the normal sale price even more but regardless this is a killer deal and that's me a bit of a kickback so let's call it a win-win and yes maybe recommending you guys play this game before i've even fully covered it might seem like giving the ending away a bit but look at the run time in this video i wouldn't talk this long about something i didn't already love and want you guys to check out anyways so to summarize the metro games are amazing they are on sale and i've got the hook up to the dope stuff with links in the description and i think that's about enough shilling from me so let's get into this bad boy you guys knew i just had to do it after finishing all the stalker titles there's really only one place where you can find something that'll give you those same soviet sci-fi vibes and for reasons we'll talk about later this may as well have been a spiritual successor to that seminal ukrainian nuclear apocalypse tale so i hope you guys have some spare gas mask filters and a few pre-war cartridges jingling in your pocket because we're off to save humanity well what's left of it anyways stalkers welcome to the metro [Music] i got my rights let me out of the station hey what the hell do you care if i live or die i don't care [ __ ] but i got my orders like i said earlier metro and stalker may as well be one in the same and i really do mean that the similarities are all over the place and it goes a lot deeper than surface level visuals and a similar subject matter after the stalker games were finished a lot of employees at ukrainian development house gsc game world felt like they weren't seeing their fair share of the franchise's success and decided it was time to try their hand at this whole game development business on their own which might i add was a pretty ballsy move since at the time gsc was the country's one and only major game studio that coveted title however would not last very long these ex-gsc staffers made good on their dreams and when it came time to release something big well let's just say they knew exactly what process to follow listen there's no getting around it 4a games basically ripped off every single aspect of stalker's development from a design approach and that's not even taken into account the fact that they sort of kind of maybe stole the x-ray engine and possibly some other assets from gsc on the plus side they wrote a ton of new code and made it a lot less buggy than it used to be but in all fairness there are actual insects less buggy than that damned thing and continuing in that tradition they sought out a russian science fiction author to build their world for them in the form of a novel one that spun a tale of soviet nukes radiations mutants and people forming separate ideological groups trying to deal with all the above so i guess the tldr here is a bunch of ex-stalker devs decided they loved their jobs but hated their boss so they started a new company and tried their damnedest to recreate the magic that was the stalker franchise and the most insane part of the story is well they actually pulled it off somehow early demos and footage had the industry paying close attention to foray and a member of thq who previously worked with these guys on the release of shadow of chernobyl was quick to snap the project up and i think a large deal of that initial impression came from the fact that he knew from previous experience the kind of slav magic that can happen when a small ukrainian dev team puts their heads together to develop a video game with a heavy emphasis on atmosphere and world building speaking of that world the licensed dl4a struck was with dimitri gulkovsky an author who had been generating a lot of underground buzz with his unfinished manuscript called metro 2033 at the time they approached him glukovsky hadn't even struck a publishing deal yet but he felt the development team with a similar soviet background but do the ip justice and i think it's about time we found out whether or not dimitri's trust was well placed but before we jump into this game and its subsequent novel story there's one preface typically with these retrospectives i like to have a game's original release serve as a majority of the gameplay footage you guys will see on screen but in this one situation it's a bit more complicated than that metro 2033 was released in 2010 and spoiler warning did well enough to warn a sequel with more time resources and most importantly money the guys at 4a got to work on optimizing their engine and improving their already impressive work after the release of its sequel metro last light some of their previous work did look a little worse by comparison something that's understandable when a team continues to improve their craft but 4a wasn't about to have any of that so they got to work on what they like to call metro redux a sort of remastering of both metro titles using brand new graphical techniques engine improvements and a whole slew of gameplay additions so it seems like an easy enough issue for me to solve right just use the original metro 2033 for all of my capture footage well the problem with that is a good amount of you will never get to play that original release after the redux titles hit shelves they delisted the originals from digital storefronts like steam so with that little complicating factor in mind most of what you'll be seeing here today will be from that redux version but don't you worry you know i love comparing and analyzing ports and there will most definitely be a section of this video covering that exact topic but i think i bored you for about long enough on a subject that most would never even notice anyways so let's find out exactly what happens when you drop a nuclear warhead on a major eastern european metropolis mom i saw the sky right from the very start the team at 4a had a few decisions to make where story was concerned as most of you know their previous work with the stalker trilogy borrowed from an amazingly rich narrative universe but the execution of that narrative depending on who you talked to was a little imperfect stalker specialized in dreaming up an amazing setting for players to explore and dedicating most of their work on the story to that aim the result being a gameplay experience that'll have you visually taking in most of the plot the exclusion zone was a story in and of itself and it is important to say it was an amazingly engaging one but most video games specialize in having the player take part in events that build into a core narrative and that mostly was not the case in stalker so essentially these guys had two paths in front of them they could either use glukovsky's work to forge an amazing backdrop for an open world where players could create hundreds of their own little personal stories or use the events of the book like a road map and have players engage in a much more narrowly focused but well-guided experience remember everything depends on you and you alone and for what seems like the first time in the development process these guys decided to go in the opposite direction that stalker took metro 2033 is a heavily linear story with absolutely no branching paths outside of a secret ending that can be obtained and i want to make it very clear from the start this is not a mark against it i'm not really sure how or when this happened but the word linear seems to translate into bad game design nowadays but i don't think there's anything wrong at all with a heavily curated story experience much like a lot of you i enjoy walking around in a radiated landscape and taking in bits and pieces of story from the background to form my own personal narrative in the foreground but i also enjoy having a writer lead me through a series of events that are just as interesting and captivating but don't really require any input from me i only mention this little fact at the start because i assume there'll be a lot of stalker fans watching and i didn't want anyone to be turned off by seeing something a little different than what they might be used to and that being said maybe we should talk about what makes it so damn different metro 2033 takes place in moscow well to be more precise it takes place just below moscow in the spider's web of tunnels that make up the city's metro system two decades before the events of the game a global nuclear conflict took place that saw russia's capital city hit with more than enough radioactive payload to get a mass barbecue going short moments before the bombs dropped the very small percentage of the city's residents lucky enough to be near one of these things rushed to one of the many entrances to moscow's metro as and this is one hell of an interesting and true factoid russia specifically built this subway system to withstand a nuclear attack as you can imagine this little incident immediately ended any potential issues stemming from the city being overpopulated and the very few who managed to survive that initial apocalypse now have to live out the rest of their existence within the bounds of this system of tunnels almost overnight small train stations became city-states in their own right where people could congregate to raise pigs and mushrooms for food trade items and just do normal people stuff that congregation being necessary not just for social needs but the lingering issue of security thanks to the intense radioactive fallout caused by the nukes nearby animals have been transformed into grotesque monsters and now humans occupy a spot much closer to the bottom of the food chain than any of us would like so now people group up to fight off the mutant horde while simultaneously battling the combined threats of starvation infection and the radiation just above their heads now it has to be said that we as a species can be pretty damn industrious you give two people enough raw materials and it won't be long till one of them uses those materials to make some kind of a weapon and kill the other and in a turn of events no one's going to be surprised by this grouping of people with differing ideological values and needs has turned into a bunch of metro stations waging a series of cold and hot wars against each other given their limited access to firearms the people of the russian metro over the years have hacked together a pretty impressive arsenal of weaponry sure you could always grab a shotgun made out of not much more than some tape and two pieces of pipe but wouldn't you rather shoot a ball bearing from a rifle using air pressure needless to say the residents of the metro aren't hurting for ways to protect themselves from mutant and human threats alike but what they are hurting for is good ammunition being produced in these damp tunnels and not exactly having its pick of the litter as far as gunpowder goes bullets nowadays just aren't what they used to be unshot cartridges from pre-war magazines grew to such a high demand that they eventually became the de facto accepted currency and i don't know about you guys but there's something really cool to me about the concept of people using ammo as currency sure there's commentary to be read into there but there's just something interesting about it past all that oh we're nazis come here to take your station well now that we've appropriately set the scene the game starts by putting us behind the eyes of a resident of exhibition station rtm artem awaken last i see this guy was just a kid when the bombs dropped and he lost both of his parents in the attacks so this metro system is pretty damn close to all he's ever known lately his home station has been under attack by some kind of new mutant threat that people have started calling the dark ones these dark ones rarely leave survivors but when they do the resulting psychological injuries can often be worse than the physical ones on one fateful day a friend of artiums comes to visit this guy hunter belongs to a faction of military peacekeepers called the rangers and after seeing firsthand how close exhibition is to falling to the dark one threat decides to do something about it he tells rtm that if he doesn't come back to take his dog tags and let the other rangers know what's going on which works out pretty well as rtm sort of always dreamed about going and seeing the rest of the world both under and above ground at the very start of his trip rtm finds that he's a little more resilient to the dangers of the metro system than most obviously there are all kinds of threats down here but not all of them are going to be of the corporeal variety there are anomalies floating around frying everything they come close to and psychological dangers stemming from the dark ones and the residual emotional torment felt by the thousands of people who have died in these tunnels since the bombs dropped so rtm continues his journey earning himself a bit of a reputation as a guy who's nearly invincible to the metro's many weapons all right boys let's train to a friend our tomb who goes right through monsters and anomalies alike on his trek he comes across one or two fallen outposts stations ruled by the russian nazi party and the outside world which has been locked in a kind of nuclear winter for a decade or two he also stumbles on some downright interesting characters and through his eyes we get to see a vertical slice of the world that is developed down here under moscow after some dead serious trials and tribulations rtm finally links up with the rangers and they decide it's time to take action against this new threat to the surviving metro citizens the goal now is to take the dangerous trek to a russian missile silo and unleash some of the country's remaining nuclear weaponry on the dark ones and on one hand sure that's a good way to get the job done but you'd figure the survivors of a nuclear armageddon wouldn't be quite so quick to start another one although to be fair this is probably a lot more accurate than we'd all like to admit and i do want to go a little further into this story but that is going to require me to venture into spoiler territory so you guys know the deal make sure to skip past the chapter labeled spoilers click the link in the description or just head to the time stamp on screen this is a really cool story and i want you guys to see it for yourself before i ruin it for you sound good alright let's dive a little further into this underground hurt world swear the entire run time of this game the goal has been to eliminate this brand new threat to the people of the metro and that is a pretty easy goal to get behind but almost from the very start of this journey those black and white lines separating good and evil start to blur a bit throughout the game martian will suffer from what we'll call psychological episodes he'll lose consciousness and have visions of strange phenomena and if you're paying attention you might notice dark ones popping up just out of the corner of your eye almost like they're following rtm and there's definitely one interpretation where that could be seen as a negative and further evidence of the threat these things pose to the remnants of humanity but if you're looking in the right places you might see things a little differently once rtm gets close to achieving his goal you get the impression that the visions you've been having across this adventure may well have been early and primitive attempts at communication these dark ones are said to be an evolved form of humanity that are somehow able to survive topside radiation and climate be damned so on one hand yes it is totally possible they see the remaining humans in the city as a threat to their own existence and naturally want to wipe them out after all they've been really doing a number on the people of exhibition station but there might be another side to this coin maybe the dark ones are so evolved that their form of telepathic communication has the downside of driving normal people insane rtm seems to be one of the only people able to receive these messages from the dark ones and even then they aren't exactly coming through his coherent thoughts this story sets up a really cool seat of doubt just as you send the nukes to destroy these things through both rtm's voice over and the way they only really tried to kill him when they realized he was going to do the same to them [Applause] 2033's book is far less ambiguous with artie mount wright realizing they were only trying to communicate with humanity which sadly resulted in a bunch of stuff that could be misconstrued as attacks he comes to this conclusion just before the missiles drop on the dark ones and i really love this ending it's such a cool commentary on how quick people are to assume mal intent when there might be a million other explanations the game on the other hand ends things with more of a soft question mark while rtm wonders if he really did the right thing here which i think works just as well in a lot of ways there's a secret ending in the game if you've done enough good deeds which can actually be easy to miss and i think that's really cool for your first playthrough you probably didn't even know this system was running in the background you're only ever made aware of these moments by a brief flash of light after completing one of these humanitarian acts and as far as i've seen there is no in-game flavor text letting you know about all this then again i do play this game without any of the heads up display turned on so i could be wrong about that well anyways if you've done enough good for humanity on your travels through the metro you're given a choice without really realizing it you wrestle with a dark one's mental attacks as you set up the machine needed to guide the nukes to their destination and at this point instead of blowing him away you can shoot the guidance system instead this sequence ends with the dark ones reasoning humans may actually want peace and artiem gives a really cheesy quote from h.g wells of course this is a great choice to have especially since most of you would never even know it's there but realistically the canon ending is the one where rtm realizes seconds too late that these things might just want to coexist with humanity this secret good ending is great to have in the game especially when it's pretty hard to access but i can't deny that the bad one has a much greater narrative effect or at least it did on me and having said all that let's bring back the rest of the survivors to put a bow on this little package okay settle so without spoiling what i think is a really good ending i'll say that things at the end of metro 2033 mirror things at the start it can be seen as a commentary on the nature of man but pragmatists may likely see a story written about the way people are and not so much a condemnation of that fact no matter how you interpret it though i think it's a killer way to send things off and a great little ending to an awesome and interesting story before the game wraps up you'll have several smaller and in my opinion just as interesting side stories come your way for just a few examples there's all this amazingly deep inter metro politics going on all around you the nazis are warring with the communists each one taking control of key stations in the metro and then of course there's han who chooses to walk the tunnels no one else will this guy knows full well how the death and suffering seen inside these tunnels can seep into the very walls and embed itself there he's seen firsthand the kind of scars that can be left here and there's this feeling that he kind of has one foot in our world and another there with the silhouettes which are shadows of human suffering looking to drag the unfortunate down with them the metro is filled with pocket stories like this and that's what i love about this ip it is very much the story of artium and his quest to save everyone in the metro but it's also a story of the metro itself this location just screams perfection to me a lot like stalker's exclusion zone the metro is a setting where the everyday and sci-fi can rub elbows without stretching suspension of disbelief too much sure it's weird there are psychic mutants giant insects and balls of electricity down here but then again we are living in a post-apocalypse world here if you ask me the extreme amounts of radiation topside perfectly explain all this away like i said in my stalker retrospective radiation has always seemed like a modern day source of magic to me i mean we all have at least a base level knowledge of what it is and how it works roughly speaking but there's still this air of mystery and wonder about it thanks to that one element the sci-fi in this story seems so much easier to swallow compared to others the librarians and nosolysis should seem like aliens to me but instead they look like two branches of an evolutionary tree i just wasn't aware of till now listen maybe i'm dragging this out a bit but the point is metro 2033 is the perfect combination of action sci-fi human drama and mystery and i think the reason this game world feels so real to me is because its literary inspiration is likely one of my absolute favorite books right behind roadside picnic metro 2033's book is an incredible read and while i'd love to turn this into a book review right here and now the good news is i don't really have to unlike stalker's approach having the game set in a world inspired by a combination book movie and whatever they came up with during development 4a flat out transcribed the books events into the game as they existed and the result is something amazing i mean sure you're always going to have more time to describe things in a book and the world seems so much more rich and realistic because you basically modeled it in your own head but in the very small realm of book to video game adaptations i have no doubt in my mind this is the most accurate in existence sure there's going to be some elements missing here and there but it feels like all the books high points at least get touched on in the game and in some ways not having all that room for descriptive language can help the game have even more mystery and intrigue than the book does trust me if you're even the least bit interested in this game properties like stalker or just the idea of nuclear driven apocalypses metro 2033 will be an amazing read for you for those of you who aren't down with doing a little bit of reading which i totally understand the good news is the game is close enough to the source material that you're not going to miss out on so much alright so i'll go ahead and wrap this up because i could talk about metro's rich world and interesting characters forever the takeaway here should be that this game has an amazingly fun and meaningful story it resonates with me i think because of how much it shares with books like a roadside picnic and the road and now that i say that out loud it seems like i really get into some depressing ass media maybe there's something to that oh well anyways there's just the right amount of fantastical sci-fi and down-to-earth human drama here it is as much of a story of humans struggling to live through the end of the world as it is one about psychic evolved humanoids and the possible threat they may pose once again though it's not so much the story that deserves all the praise here but the world it takes place in there's just so much detail dripping from every brick of this thing each human outpost feels like a real place people would live and it seems like everything's been thought of from what these people eat down here to how they go about waging war people have old wives tales about not listening to the sound the pipes make for too long lest you hear the sound of people faintly singing and be lost to the metro forever this is just an incredible place to set a story in even if this weren't a great tale although it very much is it wouldn't even matter the world of the metro feels real intangible and if you haven't noticed yet that's exactly what i look for in video games immersive universe is far from my own but close enough that i can still feel at home there and if that's what you look for as well then well you need to look no further this is the proverbial last stop on the train that is the search for a convincing narrative setting metro 2033 both the book and the game get a massive thumbs up from me and that comes with a heavy recommendation to you guys you really do have to see all this for yourself just make sure to stay on your toes and don't turn your back on a librarian trust me on that when it actually comes down to playing metro things aren't quite so cut and dry that i could just call it one genre or another there's a lot to do down here in the metro but before we cover all that we have to talk about some prerequisites and since i'm not really sure where to put this i'll go ahead and get out of the way early i ran into an incredibly nasty issue running 2033 redux on my gaming pc at random points the game would just crash to my desktop mostly would just happen is the game would load the next level but i had plenty that took place during actual gameplay as well the shitty thing being metro redux saves your progress as you load into a new level meaning if the game crashed before that level loads well as far as it's concerned you never got there so you're gonna have to replay that entire section again and get back to that loading screen which may or may not crash again on you guys believe me when i say i racked my brain trying to figure this issue out i downloaded fan made patches from dubious sources disabled applications running in the background the works nothing i came across seemed to do the trick until i stumbled upon a very very small threat on steam it turns out the crashes i was experiencing were caused by two graphic settings and yes i know that sounds ridiculous but here we are truth be told i never had this problem with redux before i got an rtx gpu so maybe that's the culprit but either way if you guys find yourself with the same issue just turn tessellation to normal in the video tab and then head to the gameplay options and turn advanced physics off now that physics setting is a bit of a loss since it makes stuff like fog more volumetric looking and causes a lot more debris to be thrown around during fire fights but trust me when i say it is not worth the frustration it might cause you and with that very very weird problem out of the way before you even start a new game you're gonna need to pick from a good slew of difficulties and sub difficulties i guess you start by selecting an overall gameplay mode since this is the redux version of 2033 aka the one 99.9 percent of you will be able to get your hands on they include an option to play this game sort of like its less punishing sequel last light and i'm gonna be straight up honest with you guys i have never even tried this option out before i prefer the survival method for a few reasons first i feel like this was the idea behind 2033 when it launched i know it's kind of stupid but there's just something nice about experiencing a game the way the developers intended but more importantly this is the option that plays more to my taste in these kind of games everything you're going to need to play this game will be in short supply and while it sounds a little masochistic to purposely seek out stress in my escapist media i think there's some amazing moments to be found when you're down to your last 30 seconds of filtered air on the surface and you're frantically searching corpses to see who died with a few extra filters on them the same rationale goes for ammo just like everything else it can be really hard to come by on survival mode and this gives a lot of weight to which gun you're gonna use and when so naturally a mode tuned more in this direction is going to be my favorite but really i don't think there's anything wrong with coming into this game and playing it the way you want to i just have to be very clear from the start of this little gameplay analysis that my experience with 2033 will be coming from a survival playthrough and that means everything i say from here on out may never translate over to your playthrough so keep that in mind sure i do think survival is how the game was meant to be played but that's for me hopefully by the end of this section you'll agree but if not play this and really any other game however you want don't let internet [ __ ] like me tell you how to have fun once you've actually decided on your play style you'll get a more traditional difficulty selection and again this is going to require some explanation the game's normal mode is well exactly what you would expect pretty run-of-the-mill yeah the base game is a little more difficult than your average console fps so expect a challenge but i doubt it'll have anyone beating their heads against the wall aside from your normal tweaks to hp and damage values you'll also have less of a chance of getting caught in the stealth modes which might be preferable to some people but the real key point here is that this game or at least this game on survival mode is already relatively hard keeping that in mind each step you take away from normal you sacrifice a bit of sanity and it sounds weird but i sort of recommend you do that hardcore is pretty rough and a solid challenge but i always stick with the ranger difficulties and the reason for that is a little less gameplay oriented than you might think ranger and ranger hardcore are the only true ways you can actively disable this game's heads up display and if you know me you know that's kinda my thing so i guess it's a good thing that i also enjoy a game that can beat my ass in a fistfight because that is exactly what you get with these modes nearly every single element you could think of gets tweaked into tough as nails territory enemies are now way more likely to spot you in stealth areas and every noise you make could be giving your position away items in ammo like you would expect are even more rare in these modes but to be honest i still finish the game with full healing items and ammo for each gun so take that for what it's worth with all that being said you'd figure the difficulty i reach for most would be my recommendation to everyone else and it is but only if you've already played through this game turning off the heads-up display in a video game is all well and good i'm always for it but in this specific case it means you'll be missing out on a lot of key elements the game was sort of built around for example if you hadn't played this game already would you have known light sources like lanterns can be turned off so you can sneak by unnoticed with no indicator besides good old-fashioned intuition there's no real way for you to know you can knock people out with the use key if you're behind them sure you could figure this stuff out beforehand or just play it and learn it as you go but even then you won't know what can and can't be interacted with and on these two difficulties a good portion of your time will be spent looking for hidden resources so if you're a new resident to the metro maybe don't handicap yourself from the start and just go with hardcore believe me this game is unforgiving enough as it is and it doesn't need your help getting any harder okay so now that we've spent nearly an entire page of this script talking about the two menus you'll see just after clicking that new game button how does this all work together well at its heart metro is a first person shooter obviously but instead of your average focus on combat seen in other fps titles this game has you engaging in exploration scavenging and stealth a lot more than you'll be in any shootouts and before we go on we do have to address one pretty major factor in metro's equation this game is about as linear as the tunnels it takes place in so the story is going to be leading you by the nose through its events with little to no deviation to be found every single set piece is heavily scripted and you'll almost never be doing something the developers didn't account for now that may sound like a complaint but i assure you it is not open world hijinks can be very fun with all of its randomness but there is just as much fun to be found in a heavily curated and directed experience i know a lot of reviews for this game really nail on the point that it's linear but it kind of feels like the difference between taking a guided tour of a museum versus just showing up and walking around sure it can be great following your own path and figuring things out for yourself but there's also value in letting someone calculate the optimal route for you to see and do all the cool stuff there is the game starts off with what should be a relatively straight line get your ass to pull a station and let the rangers know what's been happening at exhibition but your literal first step out of your home station will have that straight line looking more like a modern gorslam logo every new destination you mark on your map turns into you getting chased through abandoned tunnel ways by some ungodly horror or stations in the middle of a mutant takeover and in that sense i would say the game does an awesome job at making progression feel frantic and organic at the same time sure the game is programmed in one and only one way but if you're following the story and getting immersed into the game world these won't feel like scripted moments but instead the random events that can take place in a setting where something like this is flying around unchecked you also get the added bonus of seeing a great variety of locations i mean yeah most of them are going to be in a metro station but you'd be surprised how many cool spots there are down here to explore progression seems to be broken up into two parts there's the trek that'll get you to your destination which either takes place in the tunnels between points a and b or the streets above and once you've arrived there's the business of making your way through and out of said station in my opinion the walks around the tunnels are actually really great but people more focused on gameplay than atmosphere and world building might get annoyed at the amount of time they'll be following an npc around while expository conversations take place personally this never bothered me too much because i really like this world and want to see more of it but really there's another reason these moments in between destinations will always be filled with tons of potentially hidden loot so while i sit here and try to look all cool and narratively involved realistically my npc partner will just start talking my ear off while i typically disappear down some dark sub-tunnel hoping to find a dead body stuffed to the brim with shells and throwing knives here in the redux version they've added keys that can be found which will unlock safes that are scattered everywhere both the safes and the keys can be easy to miss if you're not really paying attention and i feel like this is a great way to reward the kind of exploration i was going to be doing anyways after the tunnels or moscow streets have been thoroughly explored and looted you have one of three possible outcomes this new location could be a place meant to move the story along meaning you can find a few secrets refill your ammo pools and customize your weapons before you're off to the next place typically there's not a whole lot of exploration to be done in these sequences that is when you actually have control of your character but it never hurts to venture off the beaten path for a few cartridges in a med pack after these sections you have the next possible outcome which is the stealth encounter and that is exactly what it sounds like stealth in this game falls under the modern mainstream approach to stealth mechanics which i'm definitely not complaining about because the added difficulty of ranger mode can make these trials pretty damn tough depending on your loadout you can have a lot of potential tools in your arsenal to get through a stealth mission but for those of you planning a first-time playthrough just to be safe always have a silenced weapon on you of some kind throwing knives and takedowns are definitely great and all but nothing beats compressed air launching a ball bearing straight into some nazi's brain pan at subsonic speeds from across the room in these sections you'll find homemade traps of every kind debris which can make noise bringing unwanted heat down on your head and a tense soundtrack that heightens that nervous feeling to an insane degree enemy ai isn't the smartest thing ever programmed but it puts up one hell of a fight regardless mostly i found your best bet is to stick near big groups of bad guys and wait for their conversations to finish times that'll have each of them going their own way and you can pick off the stragglers as they venture outside of earshot from the group the autosave feature here is checkpoint base so you're not going to be safe scumming your way through these stealth areas which can be a blessing and a curse like i said it's good to stop and slowly stalk your prey staying crouched and hidden while two bandits talk about who they're gonna rob next is fun for a first or second time playthrough but i managed to get caught for really stupid stuff a lot in this game and having to set up all of those stealth kills over and over again can be a real pain overall though i would say and trust me i get how weird this is gonna sound the stealth in this first person shooter might be my favorite element for one it's tense as all hell and the great dynamic lighting mixed with the stress-induced panic attack of the soundtrack makes for some real fun and second if i'm tired of sneaking around like a wuss i can just stand up and start spitting lead which i think brings us into the third category of location in this game and the main pillar on which it was built shooting so is the shooting good or not well i wish i could give you a simple yes or no answer on this one i mean it should be easy but there's really two answers to give yes and no when you're popping up from cover and trading fire with the metro's many surviving humans things run perfectly each firearm in the game has very clear positives and trade-offs so you might switch from one to the other based on all kinds of factors but most importantly of all they just feel great to shoot there's a nearly haptic feedback to the shooting in this game with stuff like screen shake gun kick muzzle flash and sound effects all coming together into a gunshot you can almost feel through your keyboard and mouse further adding to that plus our enemy reactions to those shots on the harder difficulties most people in the metro only need a shot or two to permanently end on ranger difficulty with only heavily armored foes requiring more than a single trigger pull but more than that i think it's their animations that sell the effect they're very fluid and expressive and they help sell each shot like it has weight and consequence and i wish that's where i could stop but sadly it's not in exploring the moscow metro you might on occasion have to plug a few post-war mutants and this is where the shooting in this first-person shooter really falters on the harder difficulties i was just praising for their added benefit to the shooting mechanics mutants can take way more punishment and deal out even more of it themselves but there are two factors working in tandem with the added toughness to make for a less than fun time first off the additional strain these things cause on your ammo supply in a difficulty that's already keeping resources from you can be staggering like i said they can take a butt load of lead to take down and in a range or play through you may not be able to afford that kind of encounter and yeah i do know what you're thinking no you cannot avoid these fights sure most of them do go down with one or maybe two headshots but that process is made incredibly difficult by the second element at play here they're amazingly fluid and dynamic animations an element you'd figure someone like me would be praising and most of the time you would be right but in this one scenario it's not so much the case most mutants are fast as hell and have some kind of exaggerated movement going on in nearly every inch of their body and if you thought hitting a moving target was hard before well maybe try doing it while wearing a fogged up gas mask during an ice storm while every single limb on that target's body is vibrating the way these things animate is just too chaotic to predict so you might be watching their death animation where they roll to the ground which is good but you might also be seeing their pain state that also has them rolling to the ground which is bad i genuinely feel like nearly half the hits i took in this game came from mutants i shot as they jumped at me and assumed were dead some of their death animations can last a very long time as well so i wasted a crazy amount of bullets on dead mutants whose tumbling forward animation looked an awful lot like their charging forward one head shots are just an absolute ass to get in the heat of what will often be incredibly close quarters fighting and when you do get them at a distance you often have to wait till a long animation finishes so you can take your eyes off them and realistically by the time you've confirmed they're actually dead and not just in a hit stun the rest of the fight has likely made its way right to you nearly every death i had in this run came from the few sections where i had no choice but to shoot it out with these things and that really sucks because the human on human firefights were so damn enjoyable maybe if the mutants didn't hit like mack trucks or move faster than cheetahs they'd be a little easier bullet sponges to shoot at but as it is a playthrough on harder difficulties can feel almost broken thanks to one or maybe two scenes in the game the good news being the positives here far outweigh the negatives you will almost always be able to persevere through these fights using either skill dumb luck or both in my case and your reward will be continuing to engage with all the things metro gets so right for example it's interactivity now i know when i just said that you automatically assumed that meant being able to interact with your environment and well yeah that is a thing i was more talking about interacting with your gear the battery for your flashlight and other electronics needs to be manually charged every so often your air pressure based weapons will need to be pumped up blood can be wiped off your mask spider webs will need to be burned with a lighter which by the way can act as a separate light source did your gas mask take a little too much damage during a fight well better find one off a dead body to swap with speaking of which you have to actively change filters in that gas mask there's even a key map specifically to checking how much breathable air you have left there's just a lot you can do in this game once you get your hands on a few items reload animations also play into that same role really making each gun feel tangible and weighty and the same thing goes for the animation that plays when using a healing item all of these actions that could have easily been handled inside of a menu or with a single button press instead have these incredibly expressive mechanics attached to them and it all sells this world as being a place you can actually feel around you in that same vein ammunition isn't represented by a flat 2d object on a corpse each shell or magazine actually occupy space on their body and you'll see them shift and move as you remove them individual rounds can be seen inside magazines which will let you know at a glance who's got what you want and who doesn't there's so many small elements here combining together to form this massively immersive gameplay experience there are just a million tiny areas of the game that require your input to function and that really sells the effect of this game world being real and tangible continuing with that idea weapons can be customized to an awesome degree or at least they can in redux but we'll talk about that later truth be told i'm a bit of a sucker for weapon customization of any kind in a game and being given all of these equally viable options for specific approaches is just icing on a very radioactive cake from what it seems to me there are no bad options in this game as far as the arsenal goes just bad scenarios to use them in for example installing a suppressor on your revolver can help you get through a stealth section without turning it into a john woo movie but the loss in penetration might make you a walking snack for any mutants you may have to fight later if you're like me the laser sight will be a must since i'm an idiot and handicapped myself by getting rid of the on-screen aiming reticle on purpose in the name of more immersion but there are all kinds of other options for you for example scopes can be great for those long off shots but how are you gonna aim up close then there's really a lot you can do with the comparatively light arsenal on offer in metro and sometimes most of the thrill of starting a new playthrough is trying a different loadout and seeing how much it changes the game it's not all good though on the opposite end of things there's this one area that mutants have recently infested and you want to get through there are these holes all over the place that these little shits use to get around meaning there's almost never a time when you can damage them until they're right on top of you they're also quiet as all hell so they always got in a few hits on me before i even knew they were there and i'm pretty sure they respawn infinitely because i've killed what seems like a million of them before so instead of the well-designed and tightly constructed nature of the game we're used to it sort of becomes a choice of do i make this an ammo dump or a healing item dump and no matter which one you decided on one of them was going the way of the buffalo by the end of that section and i feel like this could have been better tuned for harder difficulties which i know is a sentiment you've probably gotten by now but it really was an issue for me a blight on what was otherwise a great difficulty mode the stealth ammo scarcity and danger of taking any damage is all perfect in my opinion on ranger and ranger hardcore mode but for me at least the mutant encounters seem to break the game trust me i am perfectly willing to accept i might just suck at video games but i imagine there's more than a few metro vets in the audience that have had the same experience and by the way i better not hear one single word in the comment section about blowing those holes up with pipe bombs i tried that it does nothing i assure you back on the positive side of things though i really really enjoyed sneaking around in the shadows looking for spare ammo and trinkets like i said these tunnels are definitely linear but that doesn't mean there aren't about a million hidden items all around you at any one time so you're always being rewarded for getting curious enough to look around and that in turn makes you want to do it even more plus scavenging all your stuff from dead bodies plays really well into this narrative universe where resources are stretched so thin not even a single usable item can be passed up even if it's currently in the clutches of a corpse so scavenging from the dead is not only a common practice in this world but an encouraged one not just by the game itself but by the residents of the metro and i think that's a big reason this game resonated with so many of us stalker fans right off the bat every mechanic in metro every design choice and every decision made during development seems to have been done with the expressed purpose of further immersing you into its world like you might have noticed by this point i tend to gravitate towards games that have very strong well-established game worlds worlds i can fall into while playing that game for me gameplay in terms of sheer mechanical ease of use is nowhere near as important as the developers putting me into the place they're showing me on my display my obsession with immersive living breathing settings certainly colors my taste in games and hopefully explains why i'm able to recommend you guys try out video games that may fall into that not quite good category technically speaking and i say that because this is not one of those scenarios certainly metro focuses on immersion way harder than most games out there but what i'm trying to say is that this is not a stalker situation where you actively have to get over major and real gameplay flaws in order to enjoy it on normal difficulty metro is incredibly playable and just about every flight listed is non-existent no joke most of my complaints so far have been caused by my own obsession with the ranger level difficulties as an example it can be an absolute pain in the ass throwing a knife without having an on-screen reticle to show where the hell it's going to go so you may need to improvise by using a gun that has a scope or look down something's iron sights then throw the knife but i can't exactly complain about that when i willingly got rid of that feature myself and no no i do not know why i always do this to myself but clear signs of mental illness aside i can say with certainty that metro 2033 redux is not lacking in the gameplay department it genuinely drips attention to detail and while some may criticize its linearity i see it as a plus in this scenario the developers were able to meticulously handcraft every tunnel you trek through and every fight you get in while in those tunnels and the result is a game that feels like much more of a high quality package than the fps games it shared shelf space with back in its day and speaking of back in its day we should probably take a look at 2033's first iteration shouldn't we i mean realistically yes redux added a [ __ ] ton of awesome improvements and is the version i would recommend everyone play anyways on top of the fact that you can't really get your hands on it through official channels anymore but all that being said it really wouldn't be an avalanche reviews video if we didn't do a little digging into previous versions and ports of a game right well too bad we're doing it anyways metro 2033 getting a redux version released might lead you to believe that the original was flawed in some way that needed to be fixed but honestly getting back into it for this video i was surprised to see how well it still holds up today i mean i definitely miss small things like being able to use a lighter to burn spider webs wipe my mask off or do stealth take but all things considered this original release still impresses i'll tell you one thing though if you thought the difficulty in redux was tough don't get anywhere near the higher difficulties in the original in just the regular hardcore mode i found i was getting spotted a lot in stealth sections and when i did fire fights were a death sentence so i can tell you one thing without a doubt in my mind if you're looking for a brutal challenge and redux just doesn't hold up you have to try the original it is insane also weapons can no longer be customized freely so if you want a silencer for your revolver you're going to need to buy a whole new revolver with one already attached which can definitely make getting a good loadout pretty damn tough in the early hours of the game when you've got next to no cartridges on you other than that the redux version adds a few extra secrets here or there and make slight expansions on some select maps but overall like i already said the original release of the game still holds up surprisingly well in fact i'd say it sort of acts like a metro 2033 hard mode for those of us that like a game that kicks our teeth in so if you end up picking redux up after this video but find it to be a little too accessible well 4a's got you covered sadly though the only legal way to have this game in your digital library is to have already bought it when it came out because it has since been delisted but you're an enterprising crowd and i'm pretty sure you'll figure something out ah [ __ ] as you guys may have noticed by now i've been comparing this game to stalker a lot and that's not just because these guys also made stalker it's because both games follow in that same spirit of making slight tweaks to the first person shooter formula with the result being a game that on the surface looks pretty boilerplate but operates on a much more technically impressive level than any of its peers so what does that translate into in plain understandable english this game is an incredible time every single time i install it i always end up getting re-impressed with how much it's able to wow me truthfully i'm not really a big stealth guy or for that matter a massive fps fan but there's just something here that hits different than anything i've ever played before as a warning some of you newcomers may want to try the normal difficulty first before banging your head against the brick wall that is ranger but no matter which option you choose you will have in front of you a title that is more revolutionary than i think most people are willing to admit it blends perfectly the quiet contemplative diy nature of stalker with the heavily curated balls to the wall action of a modern call of duty title and that is a pretty damn hard task to pull off so hats off to 4a for landing an absolute knockout with metro this is one of the most fun and viscerally immersive titles i've ever laid my hands on and if we're going on gameplay alone it is massively impressive but you guys know me actually interacting with the game tends to be pretty low on my list of priorities how it looks though that gets me a little more interested the original release of metro 2033 was a marvel in its day helped by what seems to be a massive focus on impressive dynamic lighting shadows and reflections much like the game you're probably all tired of hearing me compare things to stalker it seems like all of 4a's attention went into the world around the player and maybe not as much filtered into smaller things like facial animations or skin that doesn't look like melted wax a compromise that makes a lot of sense when you consider the fact that a majority of your time will either be spent in gloomy tunnels only lit by bioluminescent mushrooms or sneaking around a room with no lights on hoping to god no one sees you i'd love to tell you how this game performed compared to others in its class back in the day but i was running some pretty lackluster hardware back then and i could rarely get the game running the way i would like now that i'm rocking gear that could run several simultaneous instances of this game plus more and not even break a sweat the only thing i can tell you for sure is yes there is a market improvement in frames per second when you upgrade from a gtx 770 to an rtx 3080 ti getting back on track though when i reinstalled the first release of this game for this video i was actually pretty blown away minus some of the plasticky uncanny valley faces i bet you could pass this off as a modern release with no issues whatsoever mostly thanks to a heavy use of environmental and post-processing effects like the particles that could float in light shafts the moisture droplets and blood that can collect on your mask and of course the nearly looking fog of course all of these things would be great to have on their own but each of these individual elements interacts with the lighting in one way or another and it makes for a much more dynamic and visually interesting picture even in areas that may have slightly less good lighting or a less intricate design and there's examples of this all over the place you could take a boring room with some chairs and a single corpse in it and just drop a lantern in the middle all of a sudden you have one hell of a scene of course metro did come from the leftover genetic material from stalker's development so i sure hope you weren't expecting a flawless visual experience because you will not be getting that you'll see odd stuff going on all over the place in the metro and only some of it can be explained by radiation or anomalies people will phase through objects or you might suddenly find that items lag behind animations but i think the worst defender in that department for me was the odd stuff going on with the animations applied to mutants it's something i would imagine most people wouldn't quite notice or care much about even if they did but there's this full model motion blur that's happening when mutants move around and it's really off-putting i'm not really sure if this was a stylistic choice or maybe some way to interpolate frames when there's a lot of other mutants on screen but it really messed with me tracking them as targets i missed a lot of shots because the microsecond it takes my brain to send out the press mouse button signal the mutant i was aiming at turns into a blurry mess and at that point where this thing's head is is anyone's guess and this next one is a real oddity to me i'm not really sure what's going on but it seems to me the picture here is being stretched on the vertical axis it's not by a whole lot but character models seem unnaturally tall and thin while things like the disc representing when the game's auto saving appears oval shaped instead of circular and yes i certainly made sure that my settings hadn't somehow switched to some other aspect ratio without me knowing and yeah it's just 2560x1440 i feel like this might be a just me thing though i do use an ultrawide monitor to game on and edit but i have it set not to scale anything that's lower than its native resolution and i have a similar setting for my gpu and if this does turn out to be a scaling issue with my monitor it would be really weird for that to also show up in my shadowplay recordings which is coming straight from my gpu i got pretty curious after noticing this and compared it to console recorded footage and there does seem to be some kind of stretching going on here that i can't really account for if anyone else has noticed some kind of issue like this with metro 2033 or redux on pc let me know because i would love not to feel like the only sane man in a world gone crazy speaking of noticing things it looks to me like they avoided drawing really big dynamic shadows from sources like flashlights by having 3d models project these very small artificial looking shaded halos when hit from any angle with a dynamic light source a move that was probably a good idea in a game that's primarily lit by a single dim flashlight and was already sort of lacking in the performance department anyways now you know i love lighting but for me the real star of the show are the segments that take place on the surface they did a great job of making the streets of moscow resemble an icy hell on earth weather effects are great and the particles of snow flying around really seal the deal the only downside being very simple ice and snow textures making up the ground you're walking on but i think that's just another feather in 4a's cap they may not have had the most detail rich high poly count models and textures you could think of but they lit them in a way that really masked a lot of their shortcomings the only reason i took note of this outside is because everything out there is flooded with down firing light when the sun's out so the great looking shadows that usually mask a lot of this stuff couldn't really come into play the effect applied to your gas mask after it's seen some use is perfect in the sense that it's just a small element that helps further your immersion into the game world and walks that razor thin line between cool effect applied to most of the screen and getting in the way of actual gameplay it would have been real easy for these condensation and cracked glass effects to get in between me and some good first person shooting but just enough of the center of my view was free of distortion so it never became an issue what does tend to have that effect though are the screen blurs and red mesh that comes with taking damage not only is it a real pain in the ass to capture good looking footage for a video when a good portion of your playthrough was spent looking through a jar of strawberry jelly but when you get swarmed with no solaces this can really obscure your view of an already hectic situation these are very very small gripes though overall metro 2033 is still an incredibly impressive visual package even in modern terms for me style is always going to trump sheer graphical horsepower and luckily metro has both on its side the general design of the world feels appropriately dirty in slapdash everything from the guns you use to the shantytowns erected in what used to be a subway station look like they were put together with just the right combination of duct tape and good old-fashioned necessity-based innovation this is a world that has lost most of its ability to manufacture new things so everything you see around you was likely hacked together out of some kind of recycled material and i just love that and hey if you liked all that stuff the good news is that most of it made its way over to the redux version yeah i said most of it talk about one hell of an ominous lead-in doctor could you check my prostate while you're at it i'm pissing kind of funny it's glowing must be the radiation before getting into the stuff that was left behind i think note one on the redux side of things should be how much more efficient it is to run than vanilla 2033 like i said before i always had issues running metro when fights got tense and several environmental effects combined with dynamic lighting and a whole lot of on-screen mutants and on nearly that same exact pc i was able to get a more steady frame rate without sacrificing a whole lot of graphical settings here with redux obviously it's always good to have something run better but i don't think they did this for pc players this was clearly a move for getting these games running on consoles which is also okay but there were a few sacrifices made in order to get to that goal one of those sacrifices being something i may not have noticed myself if it weren't for a comment on a recent stream here on youtube i had it in my head these two games were basically the same aside from a few improvements on the redux side of things but that turns out not to be the case after going back and comparing with the original the lighting and redux has been taken down several notches and as a result well remember that analogy i made earlier about a boring room being brought to life with convincing shadows and colors coming from light sources well now you just kind of have that boring room a lot of the time to be clear though i'm not saying redux's lighting looks bad because it most certainly doesn't it still does an admirable job at setting tone and providing semi-realistic visuals it's just that the lighting in the original was so much more impressive by comparison okay so i'm not exactly an expert with a lot of this stuff and i don't know the terminology very well so i'll try to explain things in terms that make sense to me in my opinion the og release of 2033 has a lot more contrasting visuals than redux what i mean by that is dark scenes are much darker and light sources light up that dark space much better causing a lot of hardline separation between the two even when you get a scene in redux that's darker than one in 2033 it isn't dark in the same way and the original darkness came from the absence of light and the contrasting nature of the few light sources in some areas in redux the dark parts are just greyscale lacking any kind of shadows which has a lot of scenes looking flat and lifeless by comparison light shafts in the original seem more defined and the boundaries between them and the dark parts of the screen seem very distinct and separate leading to 2033 having what i like to call classic pc game lighting see back when i was coming up games like doom 3 represented the pinnacle of video game lighting dark velvety inky black levels split by equally bright dynamic lights of course if we're speaking realistically the more blended soft nature of the light sources and redux are more true to life but the 2000s pc gamer in me just prefers the more harsh defined nature of 2033's approach but lest you think i'm just here to insult redux the issue is actually the inverse as far as facial and skin lighting which looks much better in redux of course we could lie to ourselves and pretend like this was a stylistic choice made to keep last light and 2033 in parity with each other visually speaking but we both know this was a move made to make sure the series could continue running better and more smoothly on home consoles and that really sucks because there is a bit of the visual mood that just isn't present when you remove the amazingly dynamic colored lights from the original and again this doesn't necessarily equate to an overall worse look it's just not as pleasing to my eye and i think a lot of people would agree keeping with redux despite where it falters a little there are aspects here that make up for some of my complaints with the original textures are now much more high-res looking and some of the more bland sections have been beefed up a good bit cut scenes from 2033 original that used third-person camera angles were cut replaced with ones using a first person view which is actually really cool and further adds to the immersion factor the only issue being they left the ending cut scene untouched which feels really lazy to me not only does this cg have a different look from redux visually speaking but it's a pretty low res video file compared to what we've seen so far in the game so it really stands out and lastly one complaint i've had from the get-go with this remaster is just how soft the picture is og 2033 had so much of a sharp almost alias look to its visuals while redux is just a tad muddy looking to me okay so i know this hasn't exactly been an overly positive comparison so far but i don't want to give you guys the wrong idea there are definitely aspects of redux that are very clear improvements on the original and thanks to that in some scenarios one may look better while in others the roles may be reversed so it's not like you're going to be missing out on the objectively better looking game if you go with redux but instead after you've played one version maybe give the other one a look and trip out on the subtle differences it's actually really cool but hey you guys know what i love and that's a game with an ass load of ports luckily that's exactly what's going on here metro 2033 and redux were collectively released on eight platforms and i just so happen to have access to most of those releases so let's check them out let's move our asses or would you like to enjoy their company a little more hey what's your tone and you know what hell was saving the best for last let's cover my biggest surprise out of this list right up front now it's no secret that i've been known to talk a whole mountain of [ __ ] about the nintendo switch and most of that animosity comes from how underpowered it is and how many ports it keeps receiving and it doesn't help that what i'm about to say are hard facts and not my opinion but everything from ports to first party titles on switch are known to routinely underperform and struggle to even run in diminished resolutions below 60 fps so imagine my absolute surprise when the switchboard of 2033 redux maintained its hard 30fps target the entire time i played it i was genuinely blown away when i realized i was playing a switch game and it wasn't dropping tons of frames during gameplay apparently this port makes use of some new tech that'll let the game dynamically lower and raise its internal render resolution as needed and i can confirm it definitely gets the job done i truly didn't notice a single instance where the frame rate in game dropped at all but of course there is a downside to this sorcery the result of a lower render resolution even if your switch is set to 1080p output means you'll effectively be getting a 720p pitcher scaled to 1080p and that's at the best of times when the switch starts to struggle you can definitely expect that resolution to dip even further something that's incredibly noticeable on a big tv but actually not much of an issue in handheld mode on the switch's own screen from what i can tell lighting and shadows haven't been scaled back noticeably compared to other console ports although i'm sure in some areas they have but overall the trade-offs seem to have reached an equilibrium with the upside so if you are planning on playing a little metro redux on a console and this does feel log coming out of my mouth but yeah the switchboard is a great option sure 30 frames per second and a softer pitcher is not ideal for a shooter but you really can't do any better than this on a handheld platform i can get my hands on and the concept of exploring the moscow metro system on the go is inherently pleasing plus there's motion aiming which lets you continue moving your view with the right analog stick but allows for more fine movements to be done by actually moving your controller or console around i've been interested in this feature for a long while thanks to the youtuber narrow not shutting the hell up about it and after getting my hands on it i can say maybe it's not for me it may be something i end up getting used to but the idea of using two separate but simultaneous input methods to accomplish a single goal is kind of stupid and i really don't like my camera bobbing all over the place when i'm running around and my controller isn't perfectly still i have a naturally shaky hand and i don't stay still while i'm gaming so i feel like this probably just isn't the kind of feature for me that being said it's always great to have more options as far as controls go and it might be something that'll help out someone watching this now so overall it's pretty cool i was able to get a physical copy of redux from a local gamestop for like 20 bucks on sale and it includes both remastered versions of 2033 and last light that's a whole lot of positives for anyone to turn their nose up at so if you're in the market for something good to play on the switch you really can't do much better than a little metro a case i can't quite make for the port more dangerous even better right should next the original non-redux version of 2033 was released on the two hd consoles of its day the ps3 and 360. and after putting in a little time with the latter i can safely say it's not great the frame rate is all over the place depending on the scene and the frame timing can be inconsistent as well which led to me having issues hitting targets of course it needs to be said i've always been [ __ ] at playing shooters with a controller but this was something different i just was not able to accurately hit my targets when they were moving even a little bit because they could be totally still one second and the next they've seemingly teleported out of the way of my bullets some pretty nasty screen tearing definitely doesn't help this issue and it's most likely to happen when there are a few mutants in your face aka most of the time you're fighting mutants also the console ports of 2033 were widely known for nerfing their lighting effects and i'd say this is definitely noticeable but not what i would call a massive downgrade to be honest even with the lighting effects turned down they still look a little more impressive than the console version of redux to me of course i don't exactly expect anyone to go out and purposely buy an out of date version of a game that's available on new more accessible consoles but if you do fall into that group please consider getting the switch version instead as far as i go well i find these parts inherently interesting so i couldn't pass up the chance to indulge my nerdy obsession here for this video even though i know there's statistically zero people out there questioning if they should pull the trigger on that old 360 game nowadays yes it's definitely cool to see from an analytical point of view but that doesn't do much to cover the sting of spending more than 15 on a port of a game i'll never play just for less than a minute or two of footage in a video i'm working on one of the lesser talked about side effects of running one of these channels i would love to see if the ps3 version does any better or any worse but honestly i really don't think that information would do anyone any good today if you have tested them side by side feel free to let me know how they differ because i am honestly curious just not curious enough to buy one more superfluous port of a game i already own five copies of it's got poor accuracy and overheats like hell that's why they call it a bester gun and next up is the last gen release of the redux collection we'll be looking at the ps4 port here but i don't suspect there's going to be a lot of variance between the two so this should be conclusive enough for the time being and right from the start i was really impressed with this port's ability to keep a fairly steady 60 fps frame rate sadly even now finding a nearly current gen title that runs at a consistently high frame rate can be a little hard but metro seems to handle most scenarios perfectly i did notice a bit of slowdown but it was only in parts of the game where it wouldn't really matter much like the station sections with a lot of npcs showing up on screen in combat i found this version to play so much better than any of the console ports i've tried so far which duh of course it would be shooting is nice and easy though when i was able to reliably hit my targets which is all i ask for compared to the switch version this is so much more smooth and easy to play of course that is to be expected with an extra 30 frames per second to mess around with and like i said the switch port is still a great choice if you're looking to play on the go but there's really no contest between the two as far as on the couch gaming goes as you might expect some of the lighting effects have been significantly toned down in order to ensure that 60fps lock and looking at pc and ps4 back to back it's pretty egregious but in game i don't think it's going to turn anyone off too much the overall picture here is surprisingly smooth too which means they've got some form of anti-aliasing running in the background something that's pretty impressive for a game that looks and runs this well when i started a new game i found the default stick sensitivity to be a little too low for my liking but other than that it was a nearly perfect time everything feels like it should and plays just like it does on the pc in fact if i were going to sit down for a little metro in the living room this is without a doubt the port i would reach for so it seems to me this ps4 release is the way to go not only is it impressively good looking even for a ps4 title but it runs well enough that those good looks don't get in the way of some smooth gameplay prepare for a surprise big boy i can definitely say that metro 2033 has one of the most interesting port catalogs i've ever seen before it's not often you see a game ported to so many consoles with so many different variations and honestly nearly all of them are viable depending on your taste or situation but if we're grading it on presentation we're gonna need to break it up into two categories one for 2033 and one for redux and as far as 2033 goes it is still one of the more impressive games released in recent memory as far as my eyes go not only did i think a massive development team and mountains of cash were necessary for this kind of a look but i really didn't expect to like something looking to compete with my darling the stalker series going off of sheer hardware stressing presentation 2033 deserves appreciation for all the complex effects they were able to not only implement but also include in console versions something not all that common back in the 360 era the case for redux however is perplexingly less impressive of course some elements of the game have been nerfed for what i think is an obvious try at console optimization and that does suck but i would be much more upset if they hadn't traded that off by making so many improvements elsewhere so there's definitely a lot of good to consider here but there's still an issue this isn't some standalone game that we can judge in a vacuum it's a re-release or remaster of a game that was previously out and i don't think it's possible to measure up one without looking at the other if you are however judging it on its own as if 2033 never existed yes it is incredibly impressive that being said as the only version of the game most people will see bearing the metro 2033 title it does its job remarkably well in fact if you're like me and haven't played the original release in a long time you might be forgiven for thinking not much has changed here at all and really the most important takeaway here is that no version of metro 2033 i've tested is a bad way to play the game i mean yeah the 360 version is pretty shitty but in the context of other pc to console ports at the time it's a lot better trust me this is on its own a great gameplay experience and that experience remains roughly unchanged across all of its ports so i can't really say which one you should go for since each one kind of serves a slightly different purpose but regardless let's get all of the contenders in here for a little side by side action as you would expect the pc ports of 2033 and redux are best in class for their respective releases but really the console ports are nothing to scoff at the switch version may immediately jump out as being softer and more smudgy looking but i can personally confirm this picture looks much better on the switch's screen in portable mode which is likely the way you'll be playing it obviously though the ps4 port is the king of the console releases it's amazing performance and sheer parody with the pc version is genuinely praiseworthy it may suck 4a took a bit of a hacksaw to their original vision so they could make a console version of that vision but they deserve a little recognition for actually making that approach work as well as it does and it would be a little dishonest if i didn't also mention the stretching issue i have on pc again i'm not sure why it's going on or if it's limited to my setup but go in knowing you might have a slightly thinner picture than normal regardless of which port you choose though you are guaranteed an amazing visual experience with a guy like me it can be very easy to get lost in engine specs fancy lighting techniques and post-processing effects all things by the way you can find in spades here but i also have to stand in awe of the sheer artistry on display once you strip away all the fancy graphics you still have a solid core of well thought out and visually interesting ideas the russian metro looks so damn convincing with its decades of piled up trash and human remains and the look of the nuclear winter ravaged moscow streets are just to die for all over the place you'll find interesting design choices that help give metro a look and feel really all of its own okay so i know i've talked a lot about stalker in this video that's supposed to be about metro but allow me one more comparison because these two are so similar in the way that they represent real life elements in their own stylized way metro has that same stalker approach to creating its own personalized visual fingerprint and it's a style that i'm glad stays with the series as it evolves so if there were some kind of a grading system i went by metro 2033 in either of its forms would be a perfect score trust me you can worry about anything else when trying metro 2033 out for the first time but a subpar presentation need not be one of them all right well that was a lot to go over and you might be asking yourself after all that what's the conclusion here what's the big takeaway well that's an easy one metro 2033 is one of the most impressive games i've ever seen not just based on its looks its gameplay or its pedigree but a combination of all of those factors following up the barrier breaking success of stalker is a task i wouldn't wish on any developer but somehow these guys pulled it off they put together a property that felt so similar to the ukrainian powerhouse trilogy while still maintaining its own separately unique identity and i say this a lot but that's something you don't see too often anymore they came from a renowned game series and made something that directly competes with it and even achieved the mainstream success docker never could if you ask me this whole story is a sign that there's still that spark of creativity and experimentation in this industry that drive to produce art not just for money or fame but the sheer will to bring something from the back of your imagination into the real world in short 4a games gives me hope that people still want to innovate in mainstream gaming that not only something new and interesting can come into existence but be accepted and even excel in a section of the industry that's no longer well known for doing its own thing so yes you absolutely should check out this first entry in what would be an incredible series i'll go ahead and include a link in the description to a sale over at good old games that on top of saving you a bunch of coin on the metro series kicks a little bit back to me oh and i appreciate you guys putting up with this long as hell affair i think i might have got a little lost in the details on this one well the good news is coming up next we'll be checking out 2033 sequel a game that tends to draw a little more higher than its predecessor hopefully i'll see you all then but no matter what happens stay safe and happy hunting stalkers i know this tunnel and it knows me let's move metro 2033's release was a pretty special event in mainstream gaming we had a crew of guys who had previously cut their teeth on the stalker franchise looking to create roughly the same experience except totally different a description that would sound really stupid until you consider the fact that they accomplished that goal with flying colors 4a games effectively put the immersive atmospheric and well-slavic nature of eastern european first-person shooters in front of an audience that may have otherwise never been exposed to stuff like this but that first successful entry is one thing i mean it certainly could have been a right time right place type of scenario or just a really rare run of consecutively good luck but now that the time has come to follow up the incredibly impressive metro 2033 the question is can these guys stick to their roots and give the world another look at the russian nuclear apocalypse or would we see the prospect of even more success lead these guys into streamlining their initial approach in service of dumbing it down to a level of your typical shooter of the era the answer to that question being well i guess it depends on who you're talking to but luckily you were talking to me at least for the next hour or so so what do you say we get right into it stalkers welcome to the metro [Music] it's no secret metro 2033 did incredibly well for itself even more so when you factor in the relatively small size of 4a games at the time and the fact that this was their first public project but at the time of metro last light's development the small motley crew that was 4a grew to a team of 80 plus members and while i don't have any hard numbers based on previous performance i don't think it's too big of a stretch to assume they were now working with a lot more money from the game's publisher deep silver and at this point those of us who played and loved 2033 at launch found ourselves with some conflicting feelings because on one hand a small development house made up of x stalker devs had just won the slob jank lottery with a big mainstream hit however on the other hand the pressure for these guys to conform to what you could call the standard shooter template at the time must have been pretty strong after all the more you spend on developing a video game the more it has to make back in order for that work to have been considered a success so it's not an exaggeration to say that a lot of us were either expecting to love this sequel or absolutely hate it one clear sign early on that things might be shifting more towards that latter option was the fact that foray had declared this entry would deviate from the first game story approach instead of following the literary events of dmitry glukovsky's own metro 2034 4a decided to create their own storyline that would act more as a continuation of the first game story and from afar this does seem like a pretty bad move a lot of us thought that original story from glukovsky is one of the bigger factors that made 2033's game adaptation so unique and interesting the idea of giving up on that model just one entry in can seem like a pretty big leap and a possible step towards the streamlining i was talking about earlier after reading 2034 for myself though i can say this was probably a solid idea not to insult the book or anything i mean it was an amazing read but there's just a lot about metro 2034 that could not have made a successful transition into the medium of video games or at the very least first-person shooters not only was rtm no longer the main character but it has a split cast that sort of shared the narrative on top of that it deals more with philosophical issues and the concept of preserving history in a world that's close to losing it than it does firefights with hordes of mutants and i'm definitely not saying a video game can't successfully tackle more deep and important subject matter than a firefight between two opposing forces but maybe a linear action-packed first-person shooter would be a bad fit trust me the concept of exploring the morality of calling a large amount of people in a world where people are a rarity to save others from an infectious disease is not only well eerily poignant right now but also would make for an incredible video game story i just don't think metro as we knew it at the time was the right canvas to paint that picture on so foray decided instead to follow up on the bad ending of their adaptation of 2033 creating sort of a split in the fan base some were really excited to see they would have another chance to take up the role of rtm and see what further nonsense could go down in a world where giant alien looking creatures could mind kill people just by talking to them at the same time others feared that glukovsky's creative storytelling not being present might be like removing a core pillar from the metro experience and maybe the whole damn thing become crumbling down and if we're being totally honest both sides may have been half right on that one so with that i would love to start talking story but before we do i have to address something mostly the stretched picture you're looking at right now a whole lot of you noticed this in the last video and were not shy about letting me know about it now i do address that issue in the video but i wouldn't blame any of you for not making it 40 minutes into content that seems like it was rendered out at a weird aspect ratio and in the spirit of not making the same mistake twice i'll go ahead and cover it in the beginning of this video because the problem still persists so if aspect ratios and resolutions don't really interest you too much i'll have the chapters set up in the play bar there or you could click the link in the description to skip past this stuff got the slot for those so the basic summary is the metro series on pc seems to act very weird when you have an ultra wide monitor plugged in oh and for those of you who hilariously thought a guy who is obsessed with video output somehow accidentally recorded analyzed edited and rendered out a video made up of ultra wide resolution footage without knowing it obviously no that did not happen across my recording sessions with 2033 last light and both their redux iterations i had the in-game resolution set to 2560 by 1440 a proper 16 by 9 aspect ratio but for some reason they seem to display at a 21 by 9 image smashed into a 16x9 frame now i know what you're thinking and yes i made sure i set my graphics card not to scale any images it outputs and unrelated but i did have my monitor set up in a similar pixel by pixel display mode but for some reason i really can't explain the game just really wants to render out at the native aspect ratio of my monitor no matter what i tell it i've tried setting my desktop resolution to 1440p in windows and the game still stretches itself vertically so consider this me throwing in the towel i've tried every in-game resolution patch and i and i edit i could get my hands on and i just could not find a solution so most of the footage you'll see here today will look sort of off as a result i apologize for that but there doesn't seem to be much i can do i will talk about this problem later when we cover the presentation side of things but for the time being one yes i know it looks bad two no i can't do anything to fix it without losing visual information on the sides and three if you know anything that might shed some light on this issue please feel free to clue me in hey guys future jared here so about 85 of the way through with the editing process i decided to stretch my captured footage instead of just leaving it squished like this luckily last light doesn't seem to keep its hud elements or subtitles close to the sides of the screen like 2033 did so it looks like i should be able to get away with messing with the picture without losing any important details i am still going to talk about this problem further on in the timeline and i will provide examples then but other than that this video should be a lot easier on the eyes now okay back to past jared ah okay that went a little longer than planned but we are finished with all the prerequisites so how about that story metro 2034 sees you back in the shoes of the metro savior and owner of one hell of a guilty conscience artium one year has passed since the end of 2033 and thanks to his heroism in the face of the dark ones rtm has been accepted into the rangers a neutral peacekeeping force dedicated to keeping the residents of the metro from killing each other oh and here's something interesting to probably me and me alone from the start foray either due to some translation or creative decision changed the book spartans to the rangers and that always kind of bothered me not enough to really get upset about but enough for it to nag at me well in last light they sort of broached that subject by making the rangers be short for the rangers of the sparta order now i'm not sure if that was something that was explained in the first game and i just missed it but either way i thought it was cool so in the last year the rangers or spartans or whatever you want to call them have made a nice little base of operations out of the d6 military facility we cleared out in the last game this base was filled with all kinds of weapons and gear and thanks to that the rangers have become a much more imposing threat to the communist and nazi forces of the metro the game proper starts with rtm being awakened by his old pal khan and before we go forward for those of you who haven't played 2033 yet i'm just gonna be really honest vaguely talking about this game's story is going to totally spoil the ending of the last one and i really don't want to do that to you so either click the next chapter in the youtube play bar or skip this section with one of the time stamps in the description because just about everything i say from here on out should be considered a spoiler for the first metro cool all right let's get our asses out of this place then we'll go our separate ways [Music] so khan comes to rtm with the news that he spotted a dark one on the surface something that wouldn't be quite so interesting if we hadn't personally witnessed several nukes rain hot radiation down on them in the last game going off the bad ending and said previous game rtm for the last year has felt a deep guilt for what he did that day and often considers the possibility that these things were only looking to communicate with humanity and not destroy it khan is a firm believer in this line of reasoning and figures this one being left alive might be some kind of cosmic last chance at salvation it's your last chance for forgiveness for getting rid of the nightmares basically this thing is humankind's best shot at any kind of a long-term future as far as he sees it so he and rtm let the rangers commander know what's up and he makes the pretty predictable move of ordering them to kill it to make sure the job gets done he sends his daughter anna to accompany you and she is just a real [ __ ] peach i wish i had been up in that tower myself to see the missiles fall and watch them burn in their nests out on the surface i was happy to find the seemingly eternal blizzard has subsided a bit and in some spots you can even see the sun oh also the last loving dark one is a cute little kid i wanna try smoking this thing but misses leading to a chase and eventual capture both rtm and the dark one by nazis who treat both of them about as well as you would expect nazis to treat anyone ah congratulations you're a [Music] so you and a captured soldier from the communist red line joined forces and orchestrated an escape our new stalin loving friend pavel says he'll use his connections to get a safe passage through the red line so we can get back to the d6 and i'll say this right now it is going to be incredibly hard for me to continue talking about the rest of this game's story without spoiling a pretty big twist that happens early on in the game any sort of critique or praise after this point has a good chance of involving this twist and the nature of it sort of colors literally everything that happens in the story from here on out so going forward instead of marking one section of this discussion as spoilers and then dancing around those spoilers afterwards like i normally do i'm just gonna ask first timers to skip the entire story section by heading to the time stamp on screen or using the youtube chapters down in the play bar i really do hate to gate so much of this part of the video behind a spoiler warning but i'm not sure i'd be able to say anything meaningful about this story without really messing things up for people looking to play last life for the first time so if that's you do me a favor and skip this part and we'll all meet back up with each other in the gameplay section all right so we finally make our way to a red station and pavel reveals that he's actually a high-ranking officer in the red army he says his higher-ups are interested in rtm since he could give them vital info on how the reds could get their hands on the d6 facility and the baby dark one and these guys go about getting that information from him in a way very befitting of a bunch of communists but their leader's edgy teenage son lets you escape in defiance of his dad's cruelty as artium sneaks out of the base he's able to catch a few candid conversations it seems like the guy in charge of the reds got his seat by assassinating his brother and it was his head of intelligence that got the job done so now this greasy general corbett acts as a sort of shadow leader of the red line by manipulating the real one i typically love me a good military intrigue type of story and this one section showing the corrupt underbelly of the red line's leadership really got me excited for what was to come and that's not even taken into account how much i enjoyed the direction they were taking with pavel as the story continues and you progress even closer to linking up with the rangers pavel becomes your sort of de facto antagonist you're always looking to head him off at the pass and personal encounters with the guy have a very arch nemesis feel to them even when we're shooting at each other he'll still share little inside jokes and seems to be generally happy to be around you hey hey hey steady steady steady all right all right you're on top there daniel you are on top he's just also totally willing to put a bullet in your head for the advancement of this new branch of communism come on get your ass out here you [ __ ] come here many ways we find out that corbett's looking to take the d6 for the reds so they can rule the metro and rtm starts the process of getting to them first which he does eventually accomplish and what comes next was a cool little surprise rtm links back up with the rangers and anna seems to have really warmed up to him in his absence but i well i felt it was you but before anyone gets a chance to formulate a plan there's this big explosion and well to explain this we're going to need to go back to the start as you're walking around d6 and the very beginning of the game you keep hearing about this los nitsuki guy who up and left his post without a word have you heard about listening what are you talking about everyone seems to be talking about it but it's in a way that feels sort of natural and subtle not too on the nose then when rtm gets captured by the reds we see the missing ranger was actually a red spy who left with valuable knowledge on how the rangers operate and stole some kind of bioweapon on his way out now the surprise wasn't that lesnitsky was a spy that gets said out loud in a cut scene but after that i sort of figured that they were through with the guy when he showed back up it dawned on me that the potential knowledge of his betrayal probably hadn't even left the room that cutscene took place in yet wait a minute could it be so listening was able to worm his way into a role kind of competing with babel as the guy you love to hate in this story after surviving the surprise attack and seeing anna captured we catch wind of a back-up plan in the works it seems like corbett is looking to use a stolen modified ebola virus as a sort of nuclear deterrent once they've taken the d6 now this was a great little nod to the book which had a very similar threat to viral outbreak kind of storyline what really sold me was this one cool scene where rtm just happens upon an entire ass station that the red line purposely infects with their virus so they could come in and quote unquote cleanse the outbreak which amounts to killing everyone in the station and burning them all to ash again a cool nod to the book after making it through that literal hell with anna in hand the two make it to hanza station where they link up with khan who says now more than ever the dark one is their last chance he leads us to a body of water that i assume is some kind of anomaly he says that if we get in with the dark one on our mind we'll be able to see where he is and well that's exactly what goes down along with the dark one's location we get this cool little chunk of added clarification on a plot point from the first game in 2033 rtm's targeted by the dark ones because for some reason he's the most responsive to their specific type of communication and that's always kind of left as a chosen one plot line which isn't really a bad thing narratively speaking but it was left relatively open-ended we never really got an answer for why well after taking a dip in this magical pool artium finds out there's a pretty good reason for that it turns out a very young artie and his friends sort of set into motion the events of 2033 when they snuck out of the metro and accidentally ran into a pack of mutants and were subsequently saved by a dark one that interaction apparently making rtm able to hear them in his head [Music] now i don't know about you but personally i would have been fine if this was never explained and it was just sort of left open-ended but now that we have an answer for it i kind of appreciate it nowadays retconning does have a very bad name attached to it but when used right like this it can really help retroactively improve a story and i think that's exactly what we're looking at here i'm all alone now you're not alone you're the first so anyways this river of truth dumps us out pretty close to a big train being used by the reds to transport the dark one after a cool little on rails section artie makes his way onto the train absolutely obliterates it and rescues the little baby dark one who then decides to find some human clothes because he wants to look like you which is just i want to like you too damn adorable to even address rtm and the dark one form this cute bond and from here on out work is a precious little buddy cop team so russian murton rigs over here eventually make their way to a peace agreement taking place in polis all of the metro's major players are present including the reich and the red line just before getting there the dark one uses his telepathic abilities on pavel and lesnitsky discovering a plan to use the peace talks as a distraction to mask their campaign to take over d6 the little guy forces moskvin the leader of the red line to publicly admit to not only the dirty deed that saw him rise to power but the whole taken over the rangers base plan he's storming the d6 now and there's that virus and if that falls into corbett's hands it's the end this finally gets everyone up to speed and the rangers rally together for one last stand against the reds and this is one hell of a climax the fight feels desperate and chaotic and by the end the communists seem to have the upper hand which is where the hidden morality system from 2033 comes into play there are two possible endings to get here one where rtm sees that the reds will soon have control of d6 and mass amounts of the virus they're looking to unleash on the metro and decides to kill everyone to keep the rest of humanity from blinking out of existence this segment ends with anna explaining to your children how brave you were and how much good you did and i guess it's a good thing i really like this conclusion because it's the only ending i can seem to get every time i replay this game i do all the good deeds i could think of and spare both pavel and lesnisky but for some reason i always get the bad ending but i guess if you have to get a bad ending this is a really cool one to end up with i love the idea that rtm and desperation decided to take out both sides to make sure this kind of power doesn't fall into the wrong hands it doesn't exactly jive with canon as there is a sequel to this game where you play as rtm again but not a bad ending to get if you ask me if you've managed to rack up a whole lot of points with a morality system basically those same events play out but just before you're able to activate the self-destruct system a group of dark ones show up with your little buddy apparently they came from a secret chamber within d6 confirming rumors in the first game that the dark ones were either a creation of the russian government or something they were experimenting on just before the bombs dropped this group of evolved beings leave the metro in the final scene but promised to come back one day and help humanity rebuild a pretty damn inspiring end sequence when you take into account how drab things have been so far so i'd say no matter what ending you get you'll have a damn awesome resolution to what was in my opinion a great story last light deals with a lot of the aspects of 2033 that i really wanted to see expanded on i mean sure it's awesome just to mention that there are nazis and communists warring deep underground in moscow's metro system but i wanted to see that in action i wanted to see how the politics of all of this would play out and that's exactly what last light gave me i'm from the red light our superiors are not on the best of them but i say [ __ ] that unlike a lot of people i really really enjoyed metro 2033 as a book but i totally get why the developers feared they wouldn't be able to squeeze a video game story out of it given that they deviated really hard from the source material that was at least in part responsible for their initial success it's easy to be a little apprehensive about last light's story experience but i really think they managed to write something that was not only fun and interesting but fit in with the metro universe really well honestly if i never knew this game wrote its own narrative i would have assumed this was also based directly on a book like its predecessor which is a big compliment considering how good that book series is going back to the comments in my first video in the series it seems like a lot of franchise vets aren't fond of the dark one plots found in both the books and the games saying they added a little too much sci-fi to what was otherwise relatively believable and i do see where you guys are coming from there but at least to me they feel right for this world after all we have trained tunnels here infested with poltergeist and mutants running around that somehow rapidly evolved faster than anything that has ever existed on this planet so it's not too far of a stretch to think evolved humans with psychic abilities or aliens for that matter or also out there somewhere that being said there are a few issues i noticed here first off the love interest plot with anna feels like we skipped a bunch of development and ended up at the end of its arc the literal next time we see her after the game's opening she hated rtm when the game first started and didn't let a single solitary second go by without letting him know that but after finding out he survived being captured see all the sudden develops this magnetic attraction to the guy i don't know it just felt very rushed for me and i'm not saying this plotline can't be done well i just don't think they did it particularly well if you ask me the team handled this way better in the next game in the series but as far as this title goes they could have used a few extra scenes in between i hate rtm anna and i can't wait to jump rtm's heavily radioactive bones anna so what are you waiting for come along rabbit and my second and well last complaint is the story's progression in 2033 you had a relatively simple goal get to the rangers and let them know what's happening in exhibition after that gets settled the last leg of the game is spent completing yet another singular goal one that was still poignant to the previous one in last light there are all these side narratives to follow the corruption in the upper ranks of the reds the nazis purging mutations on an rtm's romance lesnicki's betrayal and the rivalry between pavel now i'm not complaining about there being a wealth of story content i really get into every plot point i just listed but they feel too rapid fire to me i mean think about it this way last light only takes maybe half an hour longer on average to complete than the last game but somehow includes more than three times the story and i guess i just find myself wishing i could have had a significantly larger package to fit all these cool ideas into or at the very least they could have focused on maybe one or two of these plot points now this isn't something that's going to ruin your playthrough they are still cool ideas and nearly each one gets resolved to a satisfying degree but no one plot element gets the attention it deserves in my opinion either a longer game or cutting out some story beats for a future entry would have been nice but as far as complaints go you gotta admit this one is pretty mild yes i definitely think it could have been handled more optimally but for a situation like this i think it's a lot better than anyone could have hoped for i mean these guys went in and made changes to a pretty core pillar in the metro experience and somehow didn't bring the whole house of cards down around their heads something that deserves a lot of praise there were dlc campaigns released afterwards and the redux version comes with all of them for free the story based stuff was actually pretty cool especially khan's little side story but overall i wouldn't say these short tales are a significant portion of metro last light's narrative experience a nice extra though it seems clear to me these guys loved this world and aimed to write something that respected the source material and if my only complaint is that they added too many details i think we're off to a good start with this one as far as stories go you really couldn't ask for a better follow-up to 2033 something that's made evident when a lot of the fan base actually prefer this game's events to what was actually written in glukovsky's own literary sequel to that original showing and as you know it is very rare for a video game adaptation to supplant its own source material in the fan's eyes so yeah overall last light is a great ramping up of the stakes set by 2033. it's action-packed and maybe a little too fast for its own good but it's an amazing time regardless besides it perfectly serves its chief purpose in the eyes of metro fans and that's just given us a little more time in the dingy depressing and enthralling world of the russian metro like i mentioned before the heat was most certainly on for last light's development investors were expecting return on their financial backing and fans were expecting something true to the brand that metro had earned itself in its first showing of course it didn't help that this game was being worked on during one of the most prolific times this industry has ever seen regarding first-person shooters yes including the whole doom phase and sadly the accepted method of the day was for developers to increasingly copy each other's work till a good number of releases in the genre morphed into this large nondescript blob and in the spirit of not stringing you guys along yes i do think some call of duty dna worked its way into the design of metro last light now it wasn't in a gratuitous type of way i mean the shooting mechanics stealth focus and heavy emphasis on meaningful storytelling were still very much metro but elements like pacing and set pieces seemed to really borrow from the general fps zeitgeist of the day or at least it seems that way to me and subsequently a lot of metro fans but here's where i fall out of favor with those fans see i'm not necessarily against that idea i know i know what a filthy casual but before we get into that let's go over the basics stay down or your brain goes splat metro last light the og non-redux release in the more meaningful way still operates just like you're used to if you're coming straight from its prequel the game still leads you around by the nose in a linear fashion while you spend your time either exploring your environment sneaking around guards in stealth sections or shooting hot lead in the general direction of your enemy once again you're going to spend a good chunk of your time following behind an npc while they speak that oh so familiar language expository flavor text and i'm gonna say just like last time even though i know this is not something traditionally that's very well regarded in the gaming industry i kind of like it here sure it's a relatively lazy if not well-worn path to getting some world building done without treating the player like an idiot or breaking the fourth wall but i don't know it kind of works here just like before interactivity with your gear is a major player in my enjoyment and even some of the features i loved about 2033 redux ended up coming from this release for example using a lighter to burn spider webs or wiping your gas mask to clear it of gunk two elements that are absolutely 100 percent not necessary for anyone to utilize while playing the game but still i can't stop myself from doing both i said it in my last video and i'll say it again stuff like this is always a welcome sight for me i mean i love the idea of increasing my ability to meaningfully engage with the game world around me vis-a-vis the environment but letting me manipulate the gear that's in my possession in new and interesting ways is always going to get a thumbs up for me for example needing to exchange gas masks with corpses if yours gets damaged in a fight needing to recharge your batteries for a flashlight or pumping pneumatic weapons all of these things really do a lot to immerse me into a game most developers would have a lot of these processes handled through simple commands or menus but here in metro these things are handled manually by the player i know it sounds like such a small artifact buried under a mountain of more obvious details to talk about as far as this game goes but for some reason this has always been an obsession of mine ideally all of us are just looking for our own subjective combination of realism versus fantasy elements and for me i don't know why but something like manually selecting a fire mode on a gun in game or cleaning something to make it work just really helps immerse me into an environment continuing with the additions last light added a nearly limitless number of quality of life changes over its vanilla 2033 counterpart features that would be a lot more impressive if most of us hadn't already played 2033 redux which was basically all of last light's innovations inside of its predecessor's shell throwing knives can now be used alongside your normal weapons as a throwable instead of having to equip them in them alone and artium's watch that lets him know if he's visible or not was changed from a very messy three light system to a simple light on if you can be seen and off if you can't one one great addition was that unarmed takedowns are now performable and really there's an entire video's worth of other changes to cover here like i said i don't need to talk about them in depth since the redux games would see them become the standard and basically everything i said in my last video still applies but suffice it to say metro last light was nothing but an improvement over the pure mechanical aspects of 2033's gameplay how it handled other aspects though well that's a different less positive story one thing that was an absolute gut punch to see was that the ranger and ranger hardcore difficulties were now locked behind a paywall something that nearly the entire fan base was up in arms about even people not interested in using those difficulties were upset something that used to be free was now being leveraged as an extra cost needless to say this was a [ __ ] moronic move but sadly not one that would look out of place in the generation last light was released in as i remember it 2013 was roundabout when devs figured out how much extra money they could make if they chopped up their once whole content and served it up to gamer's piecemeal at a small price per transaction now given hindsight in the average human ability to use common sense we can see the clear and obvious fact that this method while incredibly profitable in the short term overall lowers customer brand loyalty ensuring that you would spend all of those ill-begotten gains on surviving the nuclear winter that would be your sales further on down the line luckily a lot of us voted with our wallets during this period and recently we've seen bad dlc practices like this kept in far greater check than before something made very evident when the ranger difficulties were added back in free of charge for the redux release if i had to put a bow on it i would say last light feels much more forgiving and maybe accommodating than 2033 did which is sort of a lot of people's issue i think given the time we were living in and past experience with developers dumbing down their products for the lowest common denominator it would be kind of easy to see the general gameplay evolutions and tweaks gained from having a full release under foray's belt as an attempt at getting more customers at the cost of sacrificing the experience fans already loved and if it's not clear i don't necessarily think that's what's happening here now sure this most definitely does happen in the industry and often i mean look at the ff7 remake you could love that game hate it or fall in the middle but i don't think you could point to a single aspect of it which expanded on something introduced in the original but i truly don't think that's what we're looking at with last light i get the genuine feeling these moves were made to refine the product in a way which would still be true to that metro feeling they cultivated with their first project at least in my eye 99 of the changes here were made to mechanics or features that might have worked before but maybe in a diminished capacity there were definitely tweaks made that you could argue were intended to dumb the game down but each one of those few times it seems like something was added to compensate for that for example to me it feels like it's a little harder to get caught in stealth sections i can stand right up in front of enemies and the time it takes for them to yell out or sound an alarm seems to have increased pretty substantially and yeah that does sound like a cop-out if you look at it in a vacuum but i think there's more to consider here mostly the fact that stealth sections in this game are much much longer than those seen in 2033. these stealth missions can take place over an entire building with each room offering a nuanced twist to the challenge and yeah you could point to areas in 2033 that shared at least a similar size but you gotta keep in mind those were end game challenges designed to test all you've learned over the course of the campaign in last light your first non-tutorial stealth mission takes place in four or five massive rooms stuffed to the brim with patrolling guards and the amount of light flooding in makes it hard to find a good hiding spot without making a first pass and snuffing out any of the light sources you can get too honestly the only balance adjustment i can think of that isn't accompanied by some kind of counterbalance is the fact that mutants now take far less damage to put down on higher difficulties they can still spawn in directly behind you and lock you into a four hit combo which will likely kill you before you've even seen them but now you can create some distance and drop a few without using a quarter of your ammunition and if you'll remember this was a specific gripe of mine with both 2033 and redux see i'm fine with dying to just a few hits but you gotta at least put me on somewhat of an even playing ground so i guess cheers to foray even if you guys were looking to dumb the game down it ended up working out in my favor at least of course we absolutely have to talk about the one issue most people had when this game launched and the one you've likely wondered why i haven't covered yet it's more set piece driven action-packed nature like i said before a lot of us were worried that 4a would cave to the temptation of making truckloads of money by transforming the slow-paced atmospheric shooter they were working with before into a clone of the single-player call of duty craze and after having played this game all the way through at least five times i can confirm we were right or at least half right there's no doubt the general pace of this game was dramatically increased with more atmospheric world building sections getting less and less screen time to make way for the metro equivalent of a turret section and on top of that some actual turret sections there's the shootout with the guards on a moving train desperately holding out against no solace's while a boat slowly comes to rescue you the big chase and subsequent escape from the reich there are a lot of action-packed pulse pounding and sort of contrived set pieces in this game and it's hard to finish playing it without getting the impression that this was what they focused on most during development and if we're being honest it would be naive to not assume some of that was due to wanting at least a portion of that cod pie but i have two things to say about that first and most subjectively it's not so much of an issue for me because i actually enjoyed these high octane set pieces but more importantly i think there might be an alternative explanation that we're not really thinking about the last game in the franchise and chief frame of reference when criticizing last light had the benefit of using the book metro 2033 has a road map for how the game should flow events were pretty true to the source material when going from game to book and maybe that helped control the pace of the game and if that is indeed the case maybe now that 4a didn't have a book to map out its progression we're just seeing the kind of game the developers wanted to make in the first place sure some of this may have been inspired by what was popular at the time but instead of being profit driven perhaps these guys made a game like this because those were the games they and really all of us were playing at the time it is certainly possible that i'm wrong here or that the real answer lies somewhere in between these two options but i'd like to at least give a team who's wowed me before the benefit of the doubt and now that all my goodwill's been used up one thing i can definitely say was a clear downgrade from 2033 as last light's new insistence on including boss fights sure 2033 did have a few big bad mutants you could theoretically tangle with but the cool part about the demons or librarians is that they were essentially invincible as far as you were concerned in last light that is very much not the case and even though these fights can be pretty fun and can be cheesed with the right combination of luck and strategy they just feel out of place in this world metro 2033 set up this idea that there are some post-apocalyptic threats that are so dangerous not even russians drunk on mushroom vodka and armed to the teeth would mess with them and that felt right for the type of game that it was with last light playing so much like its predecessor moments like this just don't fit in the right way like i said they are mechanically well done and serve their pulse increasing purpose well but maybe they just don't fit into a metro game quite as well as the devs would have liked this is sort of an issue but it does get evened out by the fact that the game focuses way harder on stealth sections this time around in the original gameplay was almost evenly broken up between station top side and stealth sections but here in last light that balance is way off in a good way though you don't really go to the surface all that often and while the big shootouts are still here most of your interactions with the game will be with the crouch button pressed down and in my opinion that's awesome because for whatever reason i've always really enjoyed metro's specific brand of more forgiving stealth mechanics sure can feel a little limited without being able to hide or move bodies and enemy ai isn't all that bright but it works really well and made me feel a lot more skilled than i actually am so if you ask me they did a great job of evening things out here i mean sure they do have a lot more action but it's balanced against a lot more slow-moving stealth which to me is a nice trade-off to have which is exactly why i think last light is a very clear improvement over the systems and mechanics that 2033 introduced and as a sequel you really can't hope for anything better than that you could most definitely make an argument for things feeling very different in terms of the game's events and how they're paced but all of the mechanical elements in play in 2033 are here and polished really well which is exactly why it's crazy we would eventually get an improved version of this phenomena in the form of a redux release of last light what you got a better idea you brought this ape here last light redux goes in and makes just a few small tweaks to the base game and in my opinion these are all great additions for example the keys that could be found in each area which unlocks a safe that's also hidden somewhere in that zone this was a great little adjustment to make for people like me who love exploring these gorgeous environments but are also looking for some kind of reward for my time invested on top of that there were purely graphical changes made like rtm's watch for example another move that i think was for the better don't get me wrong this thing looks dope as hell in a steampunk sort of way but it can be hard to read at a glance where the new one doesn't give me as many issues to be honest there are far few alterations or additions to node compared to 2033 redux and the difficulty hasn't had any kind of tweaks from what i can tell on a real big plus though new more awesome weapons are now available and you can try them out in the very first area so you don't have to wait till the end game to find out what a belt-fed shotgun feels like to shoot and just in case you had any questions it is [ __ ] awesome it feels like last light required a lot less work to remaster than 2033 since a lot of the changes made in that game were inspired by last light itself there are some small parts that might have been touched up here there but overall this is far less of a radical change from its original form than what you'll find when playing 2033 and redux back to back and since they're so similar let's go ahead and just talk about their gameplay as a package deal which will be a very short conversation because it's really good it is of course true that you're going to lose at least a small portion of that dark slow paced interesting subdued feeling that 2033 was so good at radiating which i think is unavoidable in a situation like this now that the studio had solid financial backing and a dedicated group of fans behind it they would of course look to blow every player's mind as often as possible essentially these guys just wanted to give us 2033 but better and sure profit was definitely a factor in that decision but i get the feeling this was done in a look at all the cool stuff we can do now kind of way and not a please god buy this video game one it is noticeably different than its predecessor when you get really deep into analyzing it but i don't necessarily think that's a bad thing it is still very undoubtedly a metro game and the world and mechanics you loved before are all still here there may be different portions of all those elements than you're used to but the ingredients are all present really the general mechanics here are amazing the movement combat sneaking and exploration are all top-notch polished and engaging you might be understandably worried about its fast pace and overall formatting but i assure you the glue that holds this thing together is just as strong as ever it's an incredibly fun play through one that should not only enter all past fans but people a little more used to your more traditional mainstream fps experience it may seem almost significantly different at first but as we'll see as the series continues each entry seems to have its own feel meaning no single metro game is going to play exactly like another as far as specifics go but the good news is no matter how similar or different one entry in the series may feel from the other all three metro games are well worth playing and last light is very much included graphically last light's in a weird position as far as i'm concerned i mean it's definitely a more refined look than what we saw in 2033 and benefits from a much bigger group of people working on it this time around everywhere you look there's a lot more detail to look at even if it's just trash piled up in a corner or a few more shanties erected in some dark station somewhere there are signs everywhere that foray had a lot more resources at their disposal for this game's development and i know this is gonna sound crazy but it just does not impress me quite as much as 2033 did at launch and i think there might be a few reasons for that on one end we've all been looking at the redux version of both games for years which sort of equalizes the visual experience between the two but on a more pretentious level part of what impressed me so much with 2033 was how much they accomplished with so little backing 4a was a small developer after all who had just got done giving their old bosses the finger that first showing really made an impact and i think a bit of that comes from their humble beginnings by the time last light was released they were pretty comparable to your average aaa dev house and for the most insane reason i think that takes away a tiny bit of the charm for me plus 2033 cemented the look and feel of this world while last light just sort of refined it of course these are just small observations so buried in the realm of subjectivity that it's not really worth considering so don't take this as a negative but more like a dumb observation on the plus side though there is a lot to love about last light's look mostly the fact that so much of 2033's visual identity is present here with the added benefit of small aesthetic changes the lighting is nowhere near that hard-line dynamic early pc look that was such a big feather in 2033's cap but smaller effects like light halos chromatic aberrations and faux refractions from condensation and water droplets on your mask are very nice to see like i said in my last video from the first game to the second 4a had adopted a newer more console-centric approach to lighting which does leave a lot of areas a little more flatly lit than comparable spots in its predecessor the good news being this is far less of an issue than it was in 2033 redux mostly since that was a result of implementing a new lighting system into a game that already existed where last light was built from the ground up around it the sections that take place on the surface are much better looking now and even though they're still very linear there's a little more room to play around with which leads me to feeling like i stumbled on the right way to go instead of the game just outright leading me there fire seems to be a new tool in 4a's belt and you get the feeling that they really like the way their specific brand of video game fire looks because it's in use all over the place in last light and it is actually really impressive at one point when i was fighting powell i tossed a grenade and i knocked over some kind of a table that had a candle on it and it lit the table on fire now i'm not sure if the rest of the game has a dynamic flammable system going on or if it was just this one scene but either way it was really cool the rubbery sort of funny looking lifeless facial animations that could be found in 2033 have been further worked on and while they still don't look amazing it's a definite improvement in my eyes one thing that really stood out to me a few hours in is the emphasis on showing a lot of npcs on screen whenever possible something that is still very impressive today at the time this game first launched i was rocking hardware nowhere near what was needed to max any settings out and even then i was surprised at how well the game ran in those scenes of course the frame rate would definitely dip but i would get similar dips in a single empty tunnel with some dynamic light sources in 2033 now that i have a pc that can run circles around this game i can't really say how well or poorly optimized last light is but i have to imagine even lower end current gen cards will be able to get a locked 60fps at 1080p animations are just as stunning here as they were in the last game and it looks like there are a few more pre-baked death animations which is always good the mutants you run into still flow and move in the most fluid way and the odd blurred interpolated frames i found in 2033 seem to have been dealt with as well really if you were to call last light just a better looking 2033 you would mostly be right but exactly like 2033 this game has its fair share of visual problems of course the largest of which being the stretched ass picture you've had to look at this whole time i really have looked everywhere for some kind of fix for this thing but if anyone other than me suffers from this specific issue they really aren't talking about it much on the internet like i said at the start of the video i have to assume the game is just trying to stretch itself to my ultra wide panel's native resolution of 3440x1440 instead of the resolution i set the game to which is 2560x1440 and then for some reason the game tries to keep the viewable real estate of 1440p so the picture looks like it's been squished horizontally and believe me i am just as unhappy with that as you are and the worst part is it's not even consistently squished the 2d overlays and transparent meshes that are used a few times throughout the game to simulate a full screen sort of in your face effect are pinched even further than 3d assets making their borders visible along the edge of the screen this totally killed any effect they may have had before and it really bothered me the good news is you likely will never have to worry about this problem if you use a traditional 16x9 monitor and that is if it's not just localized my setup other than that i noticed a lot of texture pop in and weird issues where sometimes the game would forget to load in high-res versions of a texture and i'd be stuck looking at a blurry wall or something plus this lighting issue that was not only present in 2033 but stalker as well i'm not really sure what to call this maybe banding and shadows but i figure it has to do with shadow map resolution issues or something like that i also noticed that at certain distances animated objects get way fewer frames of animation the first time i was ever really aware of this trick was the release of re2 and re3 remake but it's kind of cool seeing it here if you're a dork like me even though performance was really consistent for me i did have a few stutters where i'd lose a good 20 of my frame rate for seemingly no reason the strange thing being it wouldn't occur in the obvious spots like a huge room filled with npcs but in smaller less impressive areas like the one in this cutscene sadly the problem i had with 2033 crashing to the desktop randomly persisted with last light although to a much less severe degree this time and just like the last game changing the tessellation setting to normal and unchecking advanced physics gets rid of it almost completely and of course the addition of the redux version of last light introduced some changes to the look but it's nowhere near as big of a leap as it was for the previous game which makes sense it was last light's development that made up the foundation for the changes that would come with redux anyways and speaking of changes i think it's about time to jump into some ports last light saw release on one more platform than 2033 did and i feel like that's probably a good place to start i'm gonna count to three vong glory to the red line long live comrade musk finn three the og non-redux release of last light dropped on the ps3 the same day as its 360 and pc counterparts it outputs a 720p picture no matter what resolution you set the console to and targets a 30 frame per second frame rate a target that it does not achieve very often let me assure you it was not uncommon for me to see dips below 20 frames per second when things got even remotely busy on screen and yes that can have a major effect on how smooth the game feels luckily the auto aim seems fairly strong which can make up for that but even the mutants in the first encounter were really kicking my ass on the plus side the video output is overly soft which is normally a bad thing but it also results in no noticeable aliasing which also means the pre-rendered cutscenes look a little more appealing here than they do being stretched to 1440p on pc once again i very much doubt anyone out there is going to use this video to decide whether or not to buy an outdated version of a game that's more readily available on more modern hardware but at the very least all of this dumb knowledge is now in your head too that's impressive up next we have a much better fairing with the ps4 port of last light redux which was released just a year after the ps3 version we just covered and manages to perform so much better this version outputs a native 1080p picture and targets 60 frames per second i hear the xbox one version can only upscale an internal 900p but i can't really test that right now so i just have to assume the internet's right on that one and i am very pleased to say this game runs almost exactly as smooth as the same ps4 port of 2033 redux with a mostly unwavering 60fps you're definitely going to see drops here there and there were more of them than 2033's ps4 port but this was still a 99.9 smooth experience there are less flashing lighting effects in some scenarios but you really have to strain your eyes to spot them fog effects also got dialed back just a bit but for both scenarios the bulk of the effects are still there most of the time so there's no need worrying you'll be playing a noticeably inferior port of the game and speaking of playing as you'd expect that 60 frame per second lock makes for some amazingly solid shooting i had no issues hitting my targets and the entire game just seemed to flow so damn well after coming from that ps3 port during gameplay i did notice some texture pop in but no more than i think you'd find in the pc release so we'll cut it slack on that one just like on ps3 the cg cutscenes look a little smoother here with a lower resolution but for some weird reason they have letterboxing at the top and bottom i went back and checked and that is definitely not a thing on any of the other ports i tested i really couldn't say why they would letterbox a video file that was already 16x9 and ran without letterboxing on every other release but i don't think anyone could call that a downside interesting to note sure but definitely not anything to get annoyed with as far as i see it this is the one to grab today if you don't have a pc up to running last light it plays so damn well and runs smoother than a lot of games being released today of course the xbox one port is a fine choice too but if you can go for the version with 180 extra vertical pixels of resolution with looking at my ass it's way out of your reach up next we have the most recent release of last light its 2020 switch port this version outputs at an internal rendered resolution of 720p no matter what you set the console to output but much like 2033 makes use of dynamic resolution changing to keep it performing at its 30fps target once again when this technique is being viewed on a big tv while the switch is docked it is very noticeable when the game reduces the internal render resolution you can get these blurry soft looking pixels on the borders of 3d objects which normally would be a huge red flag for me but there are two things keeping me from caring this time number one this is 100 worth putting up with for the chance to play one of the rare nintendo switch releases that can actually hold a steady frame rate and two you're not going to really be able to spot this on the switch's screen in portable mode when you're looking at it at a normal distance away from your face and really i think the portable aspect plays the biggest role of all load times here are definitely going to be worse than any other version of the game but really they're nowhere near bad enough to count against it just something you'll notice on an interesting note i found that the outdoor section seemed to limit the game's draw distance when the hardware starts to get stressed a little too much but i really had to look for that one oh and here's something really odd i noticed our team's watch and redux looks like this right well for some reason none of the console ports used that one both redux versions on ps4 and switch use the original design for his watch that can be found in the og release of last light and i can't for the life of me figure out why watches aside though this is a much more complete version of last light than anyone could have ever expected on a mobile platform like the switch hell even the jiggle physics made it into this port and at the end of the day isn't that what really matters [Music] well it's safe to say last light has seen its fair share of really great ports aside from the ps3 and 360 versions which to be fair are essentially obsolete at this point i would definitely say stick to the last gen releases for the best experience but i find myself being drawn in more and more to the idea of a portable metro playthrough regardless of the platform though this is one hell of a looker i may not have been quite so impressed with this release thanks to factors far outside of its control but it's still an amazing looking game for something that's nearing its eighth birthday in fact minus the facial animations looking a little behind the times i think you could put this in front of someone and convince them it's a modern title with no problem whatsoever in a lot of ways it is a massive improvement over its predecessor and sure maybe i would have liked to have seen that old 2033 lighting engine at work here but i don't think you could rightly call what's on offer here a downgrade because of that metro last light has an astonishing level of visual fidelity for something as old as it is and also continues that unique look that 2033 brought into existence really it's a total win there are no downsides i can think of here minus the squished aspect ratio that i'm not even sure exist outside of my own computer but hey you know what they say there's no power without blood well it's probably not hard to tell but i really love metro last light it brings back so much of what i enjoyed about 2033 and the increased emphasis on stealth just puts an extra cherry on top that being said i can't deny at least some portion of the game's detractors might have a point there is a lot here that does seem to flirt with those call of duty vibes and that might be a deal breaker for someone looking for a game that's going to buck that trend instead of playing into it like i already said it could go either way for me you could convince me these changes and additional set pieces were put in place specifically to court a larger section of the gaming population but i feel like there's an even chance that they just did that because they genuinely wanted to make their video game more fun in my opinion the larger action focus and increased pace doesn't hurt the game necessarily but as a fan of the resident evil series i can totally sympathize with the fear that your favorite franchise is losing some of what made you fall in love with it in the first place and if we continue that analogy i would say metro last light would be the re3 of the series it still stays true to the backbone of the experience established in the games before but does so while throwing a bunch of explosions and [ __ ] at you contrived analogies aside last light is a very definite recommendation from me it gives you yet another chance to explore more of this dingy just barely hanging on by a thread world and that's always going to be the biggest draw for me so yeah a big thumbs up to foray second shot at the triple a sector it is one hell of a time and more than deserving of a spot on your shelf next up on the list is a game that strays so far from the metro formula that it retroactively makes last light look like a remake of the first game will that finally be the straw that breaks the camel's back and forces me to get mad at this series well i guess we'll find out soon but until then stay safe stalkers at this point in the metro timeline we fans thought we had this all figured out sure metro last light may have made some small tweaks to the formula and added some more action-heavy elements to that core experience but it was still very much a recognizable entry in the series you could conceivably take gameplay snippets from both games in the franchise so far and most people would likely have issues pointing out which was which so when whispers about a third metro title hit the internet most of us thought we had a pretty solid idea of what we might get and well we were all dead wrong i hope you guys have an open mind because things this time around will be drastically different from what you might have been used to but don't worry underneath what is seemingly a brand new exterior beats the heart of a very familiar formula stalkers welcome to the metro the only thing i can hear is that geiger counter ticking after two well-received releases the team at 4a games was riding pretty high and deservably so fans across the globe were enthralled with the world these guys had made real and to be totally honest most of us had expected them to return to that well-worn ground for the next release in the series after all their work had already proven itself in the eyes of the fan base and financial backers alike we metro fans were getting exactly what we wanted up until this point and i doubt anyone would have complained if they would have given us just a little more of that same familiar gameplay but guaranteed financial gains be damned 4a had no intentions of manufacturing a cookie-cutter experience from the outset exodus was planned to be a pretty radical departure the original idea was to finally open up the entire moscow metro system to players in a more open world type of scenario but it wasn't long till that setting started to feel a little cramped for the team instead of re-rendering old locations which by the way would have been amazing to see foray decided to take this thing on the road or my guess on the rails would be more fitting and as you would expect a radical shift from a strictly linear experience to a wide open one meant a whole lot of metro mainstays would need to be reworked and ironically speaking of things being reworked this game pulled a resident evil 1.5 and scrapped a nearly complete build of the game after going a bit too far with the whole open world thing the original idea was to have the player lead a massive amount of people through the irradiated russian wasteland in an attempt at having rtm basically take his entire home station with him when he left the metro the game's main mode of transportation the aurora instead of being a home to the few spartans who were smart enough to leave moscow would house a hundred or so people and their well-being would be a reflection on how well the player was doing now this lost build of the game sounds like it would have been killer to actually play but it's not like the exodus we got our hands on would be devoid of that same ambitious zeal anyways in order to accommodate all these changes the original 4a engine that powered 2033 and last light would be heavily modified and to be honest this was the most interesting factoid i came across while doing research we'll definitely get into specifics a bit later when we cover the game's presentation but suffice it to say exodus is almost unrecognizable when you compare to the other games in the series of course there are some very familiar visual quirks like throwing knives having to spawn into reality after the animation is completed but aside from a few things only hardcore fans would notice this game is a massive leap forward and if you would have told me this was a totally new engine built from the ground up to support all these innovations i would have totally bought it but hey game engines and development are fun as hell to talk about but the core of the metro experience has always been its story so how does that aspect hold up metro exodus is a lot like last light in the sense that it takes cues from its literary counterpart metro 2035 but is mostly its own separate story when the franchise's first entry metro 2033 first came out i found myself in love with its story and decided to read the book it was based on and i have no problems admitting by the time i got to the last page i developed even more respect for the game it was crazy to me just how faithful they had been when adapting that story into a video game nearly every major plot point was at least touched on and i'd hoped that would be the case moving forward i will admit i was a bit disappointed when last light straight from the metro 2034 story but i understood why that might have been a necessary move here with metro exodus foray took a similar approach only using big plot points from the book and taking a sort of similar but mostly different direction from the one glukovsky originally wrote which is a damn shame since 2035 is one hell of a story but i gotta say i may actually like exodus take on things a little more the book keeping with metro tradition is much darker with an entire long section being dedicated to the enslavement of a main character now that's not to say exodus is all sunshine and rainbows because it's definitely not but it is much less bleak by comparison i think we might be getting ahead of ourselves though so let's get down to business [Music] exodus starts out as usual by putting us in the shoes of our favorite russian mute artium in the time between last light's good ending and now it seems like our guy has been obsessed with the idea of getting out of the metro and trying to get in contact with possible survivors he goes to the surface as much as he can and that means putting himself in harm's way pretty damn often after taking some serious damage and having countless blood transfusions due to the surface's intense radiation commander miller who's rocking a cool set of bionic legs after last night's ending by the way gets on rtm's ass about being more responsible and letting his dream of a world outside the metro go in the interim artium and anna have gotten hitched and while she does support her husband and wants him to find what he's looking for she's not exactly confident he ever will oh and sort of unrelated but in this entry rtm's fellow spartans are given way more screen time and this was a great move in my opinion as the game goes on each of these elite fighters gets at least a bit of character development and overall they're just really cool characters to have around anyways like i said commander miller isn't exactly happy about artium's trips to the surface and sternly suggests that he puts a stop to them in order he almost immediately disobeys when him and anna head to the streets of moscow once again about a week later to see if he can get any hits on his radio as they head back to the metro they notice a working train just riding the rails as if the world hadn't ended which is something obviously neither of them have seen running on the surface oh and by the way what comes next is a bit of a revelation i mean it does happen in the first 15 minutes of the game but you could call it a spoiler for the beginning of this game and the middle of the book metro 2035 so if that is an issue for you i'll have links in the description along with the youtube chapters that should help you skip past it alright so moving on artie and manana stumble across what might as well be a relic from another time and in an attempt to getting a closer look run into some hanza troops who seem to want to help they're taken into a car where they find a couple who claim they came from somewhere outside of moscow something that as far as they're concerned shouldn't even be possible since anyone with even the slightest modicum of power in the metro had been telling everyone that the whole of russia and maybe even the world had been wiped out in the nuclear war 20 some odd years ago a story that might i add mostly everyone believes in but before our lovebirds could get any more info from the two the hanza soldiers stopped the car and proceeded to plug the two travelers right there on the spot so artium in his typical fashion tries to intervene and takes a round of 762 to the face for his trouble [Music] lucky for us he somehow survives the shot but these dummies don't know that so they leave him for dead in a ditch that has clearly been used for this exact purpose many times in the past rtm having escaped death for the 30th time in the last two or three years makes his way to hanza's outpost which is also where the train from before was headed after sneaking in he gets a little assistance from the train's conductor who's sick and tired of hansa's idea of hospitality thanks to his new friend's help rtm's able to rescue anna but the trio get into a bit of a scuffle with the commander of the outpost where it's revealed that not only are there survivors out there beyond the moscow metro system but hanza has been actively using radio jammers to keep that fact a secret whatever's left of the russian command structure seems to think that any contact with the outside world might let their enemies know that there are still people in moscow and thus might provoke another even deadlier nuclear bombardment so now equal parts excited and disappointed by the news they just heard our trio decide the only way out of here is to snag that train for themselves and that's exactly what they do which obviously draws just a bit of attention and ironically results in rtm's own spartan unit joining the hansa forces and trying to subdue them as soon as the spartans realize who they've caught up with they refuse orders to execute them and we find out that ana's dad and our commanding officer miller knew about this plot twist from the start rtm takes care of their pursuers with a little sabotage and the group finally gets to drill miller on his involvement in this cover-up he reveals that every major group in the metro including the nazis and communist red line are under the control of the remnants of the russian government this shadow organization apparently approached miller after the battle for d6 at the end of last light and clued him into the fact that what's left of the country's high command are hiding in russia's oral mountain range god i hope i said that right and that if any of this goes out it would mean a death sentence for anyone who found out including himself which perfectly explains why hanza were picking up travelers coming into moscow and plugging them before they got a chance to tell anyone that the war kind of ended 20 years ago for the rest of the world now finally having your lifelong dream of seeing the outside world come to fruition is nice and haul but our little ranger crew just placed the sword of damocles over their heads meaning none of them can ever return to moscow and if they try they'll be facing the business end of a firing squad so with no other option commander miller decides to take a chance by heading to the secret bunker that's supposed to be housing the government or i guess what's left of it so our motley crew sets off on the most epic road trip ever planned and as you would expect run into more than a few roadblocks along the way both figuratively and literally on their travels they come across a few more passengers to add to their growing convoy and something about this just feels so appropriate for metro at this point in the series i mean don't get me wrong the small confined nature of the moscow metro and its claustrophobia-inducing tunnels were an amazing place to tell a dark and desolate story but actually showing the outside world that may or may not have existed as far as we were concerned at the time feels like a proper payoff for everything we went through kind of like metro 2033 and last light while being their own stories were actually just steps leading to this point all of this sort of puts a bow on the series and i just really appreciate it now it certainly could be argued that metro started out in the tunnels and that's how it developed its fan base so that's how it should stay but things do evolve and believe me the last guy who wants to admit that is the dummy who spent a decade on youtube talking about how resident evil sold out by doing something kind of similar to this an opinion i very much still have by the way now for those of you who think the series should have continued how it started i do understand where you're coming from i promise but i still think this was the right move i mean sure there's definitely untread ground to cover in that original setting i mean they never even touched on the existence of metro 2 or at least not significantly and that's something that plays a big role in the books which would be amazing to see up close but to be honest the move to the world that exists above ground isn't as radical as you might think at first much like the first two metro titles the story in exodus will have you occupying gated off sections of the map where you will either have to make your way to some objective on your own or follow behind an npc while they divulge expository dialogue the only real difference being these gated off sections are much much larger and often contain a bunch of side objectives that can be completed if you feel like exploring something that existed in the first games albeit on a much smaller scale honestly despite the dimensions of the area the story takes place in being orders of magnitude larger the pace and method metro uses for storytelling is almost unaltered so if you're a fan of the metro series but are a little hesitant to play exodus based solely on its radically different look on the surface trust me when i say the guts underneath that are almost exactly the same that being said if you do fall into that category you may want to skip out on the next few bits of this video since i'll be spoiling events that take place after the game's first major area which will definitely dip into spoiler territory so if you don't want some really great story beats ruined for you make sure to skip to the time stamp on screen use the chapters or click the link in the description early on in exodus rtm's wife anna falls into an old repository or maybe a disposal facility for radioactive material an easy enough rescue for someone who's taken on an entire army of communists by himself but the lingering effects of this situation will last for the entire game and if you ask me this is handled really well anna apparently contracted some kind of illness from her time in that old cave and it's eating away at her lungs pretty rapidly there are clues dropped here and there that her condition isn't the greatest and maybe it'll be pretty obvious to some but i was wrapped up in the other events of the story and didn't really see this one coming still this place is too hot i feel i'm coming down soon like step on now this wouldn't have been quite so impactful if we were dealing with the anna we knew in last light who could be summed up as well a [ __ ] [ __ ] but in exodus she's a much more likable character she's still got her edge and is more than willing to run into a situation guns blazing but this time around she feels a little more human and relatable and the same thing goes for her dad commander miller was a badass in the previous games but he was relatively simple as far as characters go in exodus the guy goes through an actual arc at first he feels justified and keeping his secret knowledge to himself since he thought it was his patriotic duty but as the game goes on he realizes what a fool he was in fact it was directly by his hand that the entire ranger platoon was lured into a mountain base filled to the brim of the cannibals because he believed the russian government was actually hiding out there women and children good haven't had those in the water other members of the rangers are given their own short development and it really does round them out as characters not the entire squad gets this treatment but they're all pretty likable for the lucky ones who get a majority of the screen time you can get more or less development from them based on the decisions you made in one area or another just like the two previous games a morality system is always running in the background and the points where your decisions matter won't exactly be outlined by a simple binary dialogue option like it's often handled in games instead it runs off of your actual in-game actions well i'll be he doesn't turn his satanic light on us his gun is holstered he's a human after all even though he is a heretic for example you could easily kill your captors in the taiga valley i mean they have no problems killing you but then again they're just kids who never got a chance to grow up emotionally and there's a similar conundrum in the desert surrounding the caspian sea some of the people looking to mess up your stealthing are just slaves following orders all throughout the game it keeps track of who you kill and don't and how you go about doing that and i've always really appreciated morality systems like this when a moral decision comes down to a binary dialogue choice it's really easy to just look up each one's consequence but when these decisions are constantly being delivered to you through actual game play it's way more fun to engage with them the ending of the game or at least the good ending to me feels a little too and everyone lived happily ever after but just before you get to that point the game delivers a massive gut punch by having miller use the last of an experimental anti-drug on rtm instead of himself for some reason i took this way harder than the possibility of ana dying and i'm not really sure why maybe it's because he sacrificed himself for me or maybe it's because miller's been in every entry in the series so far but either way this one really got to me but we shouldn't dwell on the depressing stuff too long so let's get the rest of the crew back in here and talk this thing out i just just have to say you were right ortim so metro exodus in my opinion offers the best most engaging story in the series so far and yes that is a pretty bold claim of course it would have never been able to accomplish that feat if the last two titles hadn't set up an amazing world and some truly memorable characters but i think this is the most grand and unironically epic story to come out of the series there are a few new characters introduced here but most of the time is spent really working on the ones you already know everyone here is likable or at least gets that way eventually and the events of the game span a long swath of time and miles and miles of territory the moscow metro was an amazing place to set a story but if you're like me spent a whole lot of time wondering what the rest of the world might look like after this nuclear apocalypse and it's really satisfying finally getting to see it for yourself i found it amazingly interesting how each member of the metro adapted to life underground their routines how they ate and the inventions created to better suit these people to life in the tunnels and that very same ingenuity is present across all of russia and exodus religious cults have sprung up decrying the technology that led us all into wiping each other out vicious warlords have risen to power enslaving people far too weak to fight back and small pockets of children have been forced to grow up into adults using only the lessons from their teacher as a guide for how they should behave and even more interestingly other cities followed moscow's example by slinking into the underground metro systems and just for your information these people were just as prone to acts of barbarism as anyone else after the bombs dropped without a doubt all of these small self-contained stories would have been enough to base a full game around but we get these really interesting vertical slices of them in exodus then of course you have the adorable camaraderie that develops between a paramilitary unit all stuffed in what might be the last working locomotive in russia all of these singular elements come together into what is an amazingly enjoyable and one that'll stick with you for a while this time around it'll take you more than twice the amount of time to get through compared to last lighter 2033 and if you're not the most elite gamer out there 4a includes a reader mode which significantly tones down the game's difficulty so you have less obstacles in between you and the game's story a really cool idea if you ask me this was one hell of a story and represents a trend that seems to be dying lately usually when a franchise blows up in popularity like this you can expect a noticeable drop in quality in the name of getting more people on board but this truly feels like a metro story for metro fans not some cheap cash grab but a tale someone truly wanted to tell i guess to sum all of this up i'll say this as far as we know exodus won't be the last entry in the metro series but to be honest i'd be fine if it was okay so here comes the controversial stuff metro as a series kind of had its little niche carved out already punishing shooting mechanics coupled with even more punishing stealth mechanics all taking place inside a very small very linear space and this is going to sound absolutely insane but even though exodus made the transition into a more open world style of gameplay i'd say it retains nearly all of what i just described i know that sounds crazy but genuinely the amount changed in the move from closed off linear progression to open world is next to none in the original metro games you'd find yourself led by the nose through the russian subway system and each station or tunnel you'd come across would act as one of three archetypes you could either rub elbows with other citizens of the metro spending pre-war cartridges to upgrade your gear engage in a stealth system where the odds are so stacked against you that your only option is staying hidden or find yourself in heated open air fire fights with commies nazis mutants or sometimes all of the above and lastly there are the locations that are merely there for exposition's sake and world building so you'll just basically be following an npc who's talking about something that adds to the overall lore of the metro in a few instances you may have found a combination of these three approaches together but really in the old metro games this was just about all you could expect and that's exactly what's going on here in exodus the scenery might be much more open but the options remain roughly the same the only problem is it'll be a bit hard to lay all this out in a way that makes sense or at least one that makes sense to me since this game is very segmented so i guess let's break down those individual segments and see what they have to offer [Music] the first real area once you leave moscow is a stretch of quasi marshlands by the vulgar river this is your first introduction to the game's new more open world approach and plays out a bit like a tutorial level once you leave the aurora you're stuck on a set course with anna which will lead you to your first stealth section which is surprisingly difficult if you're playing on anything above normal after that most of the map is explorable and you get a lot of the game's new mechanics introduced in a more or less organic sort of way as you explore you discover all kinds of out of the way landmarks and as you come across these places rtm is going to mark him down on his map which maintains the game's immersive feel by existing inside the game world and not being relegated to a menu something i always appreciate from time to time your fellow spartans are going to get in touch to offer suggestions on where to go but at this point the order in which you do things is basically up to you dotting the map are mutant nests camps buildings strongholds or other things occupied by bandits or other human enemies and things here just like they were in the metro you can most definitely approach any situation with guns blazing but often times doing this risk collateral damage which will really mess things up if you're looking to get the good ending but on top of that gunshots in this game really hurt and on any difficulty one or two will be more than enough to put you in the ground stealth this time around will be very familiar to metro vets with the only real addition being a new throwable trash item that can act as a distraction on my first playthrough of this game i neglected these old cans and now that i've made proper use of them i can say that was a massive mistake trust me these things are useful as hell no matter what difficulty you're on but especially if you're going for a less lethal approach speaking of additions the old method of upgrading equipment isn't exactly going to work outside of moscow since pre-war cartridges only work as a currency in the metro's tunnels where everyone sort of agreed on that standard here on the surface things take on a more scavenging craft type of approach supplies in exodus come in two varieties chemical and material they can be found all over the place and provide a great reward for venturing off the beaten path once you've gotten your hands on some crafting supplies you can pull out your bag which lets you craft tools ammo and alter your loadout on the fly something i really love in the early metro titles i always enjoy tinkering with my firearms to make the best gun for a specific situation and that's more present than ever here instead of diversifying your arsenal best for a variety of scenarios like you had to do in the last two games metro lets you tweak your guns whenever you want so walking around with a silenced weapon that won't do much in a mutant fight is no longer an issue you can swap out different types of barrels scopes suppressors magazines and butt stocks whenever you want so you should never find yourself in an unwinnable situation or at least not because of the guns you have on you for those of you that never played them the original metro titles were great in letting you customize your gear but you sort of had to know what situation you would be running into next or else you could find yourself with a really bad loadout so you either had to prepare a gun for every single scenario be it stealth or outright action or you had to have basic knowledge of what missions were coming next here in exodus let's say you're worried about running into mutants while exploring well go ahead and gear up with the loudest most powerful stuff you have but if you happen to come across a bandit camp and they haven't spotted you yet maybe take a second and apply some silencers or craft a few throwable knives for the situation for me the ability to customize my gear as the situation evolves is the absolute best thing exodus brought to the series i have always enjoyed when a shooting game lets me tinker with my arsenal but the fact that i can do it on the fly and have so many options available really improves on what i used to think was perfection new add-ons can be picked up out in the wild whether that be some abandoned shotgun lying empty in a derelict camp or one currently held in the death grip of some [ __ ] you just plugged when you come across a weapon a little graphic shows up with a pickup prompt that'll highlight parts of the weapon that have been customized past the stock configuration giving you a clear idea of what you'll get from either equipping it there on the spot or breaking it down for parts ammo and materials damn that ended up being a bit of an out of the way tangent i just want to talk about weapons and customization anyways the starting area is a great easy win to things sort of intro to both the new and old metro mechanics on offer here but i think it's the next major section that's my favorite [Music] after leaving the volga river the seasons change and the spartan troop comes across a massive desert that has sprung up off the shores of the caspian sea and to me this feels like the part of the game that got the most attention and subsequently gives you the most freedom this arid plot of land is really damn big and offers something to explore or examine for nearly every square inch of it here the goal is to get water for both the aurora and your team who are mostly all being ravaged by the effects of exhaustion dehydration and heat stroke sadly a local warlord known only as the baron has developed a monopoly on the water supply here and as such runs a type of brutal slave-based raider kingdom and maybe an amateur radio broadcasting system listen up everyone the baron is speaking because this section is so much larger than the last early on you come across a godsend in the form of a post-apocalyptic mad max style automobile using this thing to crisscross the map is fun as hell and it handles in a way that feels really true to life i mean it's not racing sim levels of realism but it bumps around and sways pretty convincingly but best of all you can use it to run over the local mutant population which is a 10 out of 10 experience you can come across some of the barren strongholds aka slave camps and free their captives there are random sandstorms that can come and go forcing you to find shelter and i guess we should probably talk about the day-to-night cycle dotted throughout the map are little safe houses you can find with work benches allowing you to customize and more importantly clean your weapons but you can also get a little shut-eye here as well the reason being you may not want to attempt a stealth raid on an enemy camp under the blinding light of the desert sun there is a catch though if you happen to be out there on foot in the pitch black night you'll notice mutants are way more active and it's not exactly uncommon to find yourself getting picked up by a flying demon you didn't know was overhead this threw in a nice bit of added complexity to these sections as i would notice the sun going down and sort of instinctively checked my map for the nearest safe house to hold up in for the night there are scripted story missions to be done here which will get you into one small section of the map for their duration and these are a great little return to metro orthodoxy when the whole open world thing starts to wear on you but sadly all good things must come to an end and after toppling the barren slave-based empire the crew heads on to the taiga valley which acts as a kind of return to the more linear and curated style metro was known for not wanting another scenario like they ran into in the desert miller sends artium and aliosha ahead to scout the area before they commit to driving several tons of train through it and that turned out to be a pretty smart move since the two almost immediately fall prey to some kind of landslide and are rescued by a woman belonging to a cool little group who have carved out a primitive life for themselves here in the valley before the bombs drop these guys were attending a children's summer camp in the area and for whatever reason ended up being nearly the only people left they were raised and topped by one of the camp's teachers and have taken to treating their dead teacher as a bit of a deity this part of the game is a mostly linear stealth section offering only a few instances where you can venture off and explore some side areas aka exactly what you would find in metro 2033 or last light there's also a group of bandits who have recently set up camp 2 but mostly you'll be sneaking around and knocking out guards as opposed to getting into open-air gun fights which is good because the game takes away all your guns this part of the game has a persistent boss fight in the form of a massive mutated bear which is fun enough but ends up being more of an ammo dump than anything since this part of the game is much shorter than the two previous open world maps the amount of detail you'll find in every square inch of the valley is staggering and even though it's short and not as engaging from a gameplay sense as the stuff that came before it this valley is pretty damn memorable regardless i'm sure series vets have noticed by now that we've omitted one section of the game and that's because it contains story spoilers but just to condense things down it's a really fun linear action section that requires you to shoot a lot and it's really well made i just don't have a lot to say about it anyways once they've made it out of the valley the crew ends up in oh god here's hoping i'm saying this right novosibirsk hopefully that's right or as the game calls it the dead city let's stick with that this section of exodus is a bit of an homage to the style of gameplay and setting that metro fans cut their teeth on the city for some reason is flooded with much higher levels of radiation than what the crew was used to in moscow forcing you to limit the amount of time you spend topside but overall the way you traverse this area will be very familiar to veteran metro players which means you'll be mostly progressing through claustrophobic trained tunnels listening to an npc deliver exposition and taking part in heavily scripted set-piece style events you're not going to have to worry about any human threats as nearly all of this metro's inhabitants died in some kind of internal conflict so it's back to taking shots at mutants which in this part of russia sort of resembles that long-nosed mole looking nosalis from the very first release of 2033 towards the end you get to take part in a small stealth section where you try to avoid being caught by this abomination which looks a lot like the librarians from moscow only blind and maybe psychic and really that's the totality of what exodus has to offer so maybe now you're getting an idea why i was saying it might be a little hard to succinctly summarize all of this while you could technically say metro exodus is a far cry from your average metro experience thanks to its big open world maps you'd be just as correct in saying this game stays mostly true to the original style of gameplay seen in the previous entries half of the game's four major sections are large open world maps and the other half are linear callbacks to 2033 and last light and you know what i love them both equally when this game first started making the pre-release media rounds i was very apprehensive to see the series i love turned into something different i've never really been a big fan of open world games in general to be honest but outside of that i just didn't want to see a franchise i already got into making sweeping changes to a style i was already fond of hell even if i loved open world titles i would still be worried that implementing a curated linear experience into that kind of a framework would result in an unrecognizable mess i really can't overstate how worried i was about this new move into uncharted territory and admittedly i went into this game with a lot of doubt in fact i was so worried that i didn't want to risk spending a good 60 bucks on the thing thank god for good friends willing to give out their epic game store login but by the time i had seen the closing credits i was blown away at how engrossed i was exodus really pulled off something impressive here the game plays exactly like the last games did despite being designed in a way you'd assume would make that impossible shooting feels tight and impactful just like i remembered and getting into a real deal fire fight was a butt tightening experience with only a few hits standing between me and an early grave oh and speaking of early graves unlike the last games exodus lets you quick save and for most of the game this won't be the biggest addition but once you've messed up a small portion of a very long stealth section you'll come to appreciate just how big of an improvement it was continuing with the compliments the mutants i had such a hard time downing in 2033 are now a perfect combination of hard-hitting and killable the stealth felt so much more polished and challenging and the weapon customization was on a whole new level of satisfying this game truly perfected the elements that i first fell in love with with metro's first entries and because of that i think it might be my absolute favorite in the series now does that have anything to do with the fact that it's basically a mashup of stalker and metro well i'm gonna say no but just know that i'm nodding my head yes that being said there are most definitely a few flaws to so let's start with the most petty and least impactful so this is weird but i sort of hate how much exodus makes you hold down the interact button in the first two games interacting with nearly anything can be done with a single quick press of the e key but during scenes like opening a stuck door or turning a crank you might have to hold it down or maybe mash it sometimes and i think that was a perfect way to handle stuff but here in exodus most of the things you interact with require that button to stay held down for an arbitrary amount of time now i could understand this coming into play when coming across a weapon because you have a few options there but realistically this is another aspect of the game that was perfected in the previous releases back in those titles you could either press the interact key once to take ammo from a weapon or hold it down to swap your current gun with it in exodus though you either hold interact to take the weapon or hold reload to break it down for parts and honestly i just don't get it why make us sit here for an extra second holding down a button that used to work perfectly as a single quick press this doesn't add anything to the game and during shootouts it can get you killed this one small mechanic actively works against the flow of the game which otherwise is really smooth now this obviously isn't a reason to put the game down or anything but it really stands out since most other decisions in exodus were clearly made with the intention of improving things but this one little interact button seems to almost always be a net negative for an example of something on the opposite end of that spectrum the throwing knife no longer kills when it hits an extremity like an arm or a leg now at first that may sound like a downgrade and i understand why but it actually adds another notch of satisfying difficulty and admittedly it was always a little funny seeing a guy slump over dead because i managed to jam a knife into his calf another pet peeve of mine that didn't exist in 2033 or last light is the invisible stamina gauge in exodus you can only run for a very short burst of time in this game and going over that will have you unable to sprint for a bit and more annoyingly it blurs your vision until you recover now had this have existed in the narrow tunnels of the originals it would make more sense in those games you were rarely ever more than two or three feet away from the nearest wall so a short sprint distance while being unneeded would be a little more understandable but taking away the player's ability to sprint for long distances in a game where the devs significantly increased the distance they'll have to cover on foot i don't know it seems like an open act of aggression to me for me this limitation never played into the difficulty or how i approached the game and it only ever served as an annoyance until i got my vehicle in the desert i truly can't think of a reason they would have included this other than the fact that it was just what other shooters were doing at the time and that really sucks and finally the absolute biggest issue here is one that unlike the previous two might noticeably and significantly affect your average playthrough now this is going to sound very crazy at first but i swear it's true enemies in exodus on very rare occasions will turn incorporeal and become essentially immune to gunfire you might have your sights directly lined up with the dead center of your enemy's chest and when you hit that fire button you may notice that they didn't take even the smallest amount of damage in fact you may have noticed that i have hit markers on which is a little odd for me because i always turn off hud elements and other stuff that'll take me out of the experience but i keep them on for this exact reason on my first playthrough a significant amount of damage i took was from enemies i had just scored a dead center headshot on now i assume this isn't as simple as just making the enemies not take damage for difficulty's sake by my best guess this is caused by the way the engine tracks animation kind of like once an animation triggers while the enemy may still be visually in a certain position they are counted as being somewhere else by the engine which i think translates into the engine is too far ahead of the video output or maybe vice versa this one small issue can really creep into your playthrough and start bothering you but mostly because otherwise this is some of the best shooting i've ever done in a video game guns kick with almost haptic feedback and the sound design makes each shot feel and sound really powerful [Applause] add that together with some really convincing dynamic animations based on where you shoot the enemy and you have some incredibly satisfying shooting mechanics you just might have to deal with some real jank for maybe five percent of the time other than those three issues though this may as well be a perfect game even when i discount how surprised i was that this format worked in a metro game everything here just seems really well thought out and intentionally designed it's also a much longer playthrough than the games that came before it and somehow pacing seems to be unaffected an average run of exodus might take you a good 15 to 18 hours to complete but speaking from experience it's not hard to get caught up with exploration and side content stretching that out to nearly twice as long to date i've put nearly a hundred hours into this thing and i don't foresee something keeping me from starting a new game again at some point this year and further contributing to that if you're a die-hard fan with the first two metro games believe me i can understand if you're feeling apprehensive of the big changes that come with this newer entry but believe me when i say that same irradiated heart beats inside of this thing it is without a doubt a classic metro experience through and through and if you're having trouble translating that it means this game is amazing while 2033 and last light were titles that sort of fit into a more niche genre i think foray brought that into a more accessible sector of games and somehow managed to have it stay faithful to those original entries but regardless of whether or not you're a fan of those titles this is a game you need to check out if not for the incredible gameplay than for the absolute adorableness of the humanables when they think they're hiding from you by pressing themselves flat against a wall in broad daylight from its earliest inception metro was known for pushing the envelope in terms of presentation foray showed a massive love for realistic and impressive real-time dynamic light sources and a staggering attention to detail that was as praiseworthy as it was rare so it's no surprise that metro exodus follows that trend perfectly since the release of the redux versions of 2033 and last light 4a have made some dead serious tweaks to their in-house game engine to the point that it's nearly unrecognizable now that you'll find yourself in more biomes than just snowy post apocalypse all kinds of new effects are possible and each of them show that signature foray obsessive charm the harsh desert sun has a blinding brightness to it and when going from shaded areas to well-lit ones you'll see a kind of faux hdr effect come into play there are noticeable god rays when bright light sources get broken up by objects in the foreground and as usual this effect always has me stopping in my tracks to appreciate it the individual light shafts themselves have this sort of blurring effect on the things that gets cast on and man this looks really believable other than the lighting though which is honestly to die for character models are much much more detailed with all kinds of little accessories wrinkles and other decals being very realistic looking okay so this next thing is going to be a very odd thing to focus on which shouldn't surprise anyone who's been around this channel for a while but i actually sort of got a kick out of how soft and realistic colonel miller's hair and beard looked seriously it looks like you could just reach out and feel his thin ass old man here i love it getting off of the fetishistic stuff your weapons look amazingly high resolution and make sure to keep that same metro visual design basically meaning they look like much better looking versions of their old 2033 and last light iterations plus there are new add-ons that can be found for each gun and these follow that same basic design language there's a lot of exposed electronics and signs that things were soldered or welded together right there on the spot very metro looking all over exodus but specifically with the firearms there are signs that these guys really paid attention to every minute detail you could think of how your gun barrels even glow white hot when you've been firing them for prolonged periods speaking of details facial animations are so much better looking than what we previously seen with the series characters have these very believable expressions and this really helped sell the more emotional scenes what really impressed me though was the fact that the draw distance is so vast you can basically see from one end of the map to the other with little to no issue as long as the weather is clear although i should mention you are gonna pay a price for this in scenes where a lot of the map is visible you'll see frame rates tank pretty noticeably which is never fun but a real kick in the gut is the fact that the place where this is most prevalent is the very first open map you get to in the volga you can see the frame rate drop by as much as 20 just because you're looking in the direction of the aurora similarly in the desert looking at enemy outposts with a lot of people in them can lead to a noticeable drop as well maybe not as severe as in the volga but it'll still mess with that smooth experience you'll get the other 99 of the time really i could go on and on about how good this game looks but i don't think i should have to if you could see all the footage i put in the video so far you should be able to tell that without my help honestly this may be one of the most impressive visual packages i've seen since the refinement of capcom's re engine in re2 and 3 remake of course i am a picky little [ __ ] and i absolutely will not pass up an opportunity to complain so here's some of the stuff i didn't like so much number one on that list with a massive circle around it being the inclusion of screen space reflections an effect that can look okay maybe 20 percent of the time when lighting and angles are all perfectly aligned but most the time looks like a speckled grainy mess i've never been a fan of these fake reflections because of how much worse scenes can look when in motion and just like the two capcom titles i mentioned before you can really mess with how bad they look by seeing them at weird angles for instance see the reflection there in the water well look what happens when i have the absolute gall to walk up these stairs and see it from a different angle sadly this game doesn't give me any control over turning these on or off which isn't the worst thing in the world like i said they can look good sometimes but i'd say most of the time you might as well not have them around if given the choice in some scenarios you might see the same shadow banding issue from the first two games at work only this time they're vertically oriented and i'm not really sure if that counts as an improvement or not i also had a problem with some shadows sort of dancing around off in the distance and i'm not really sure what causes this in fact getting close up and looking at it now it might actually be screen space reflections messing up but again i'm not really sure some 2d textures can have a sort of z fighting type effect where they disappear depending on how close you are to them but that's relatively rare and since i spent so much time talking [ __ ] about screen space reflections we should probably talk about the most recent version of metro exodus released which sort of answers that problem the enhanced edition is a brand new reworking of the game's lighting system that strips out all the old lighting tech and replaces it with a brand new ray tracing implementation a very cool move by foray in my opinion this new tech is really interesting right now and it's awesome to see its implementation and a free update that doesn't replace the original at least on steam anyways so that should be it right company does right by the fans by including new tech free of charge and yes that's awesome to see but my real issue is with ray tracing itself specifically ray tracing as it exists right now for those of you out of the loop ray tracing is a brand new method developers can use to imitate realistic lighting conditions and light behavior given the right use case ray tracing can look stunning but here's where things start to stick it is incredibly taxing on current gen hardware so why is that well to simplify things to an insulting degree raytracing basically needs to be applied to every single on-screen pixel that can interact with light and sure that makes total sense why it'd be such a drain on resources i mean it is still a relatively new phenomenon and i don't expect hardware developers to constantly be caught up with the software side of things besides applying literally anything to every single on-screen pixel in a game that might be running at 1440p or 4k it's gonna tax anything so when you break this all down other than looking lighting ray tracing essentially means to an end user trading massive levels of performance for and here's the real kicker what can often be barely noticeable visual games don't believe me well here's exodus both regular and rtx enhanced edition side by side now i'm not going to label which one is which and i want you to tell me can you tell a considerable difference between the two other than very slight shifts in brightness how about here for those of you paying attention yes the only real tangible difference between these two images is the huge hit to frame rate when using ray tracing of course the enhanced edition does include dlss a type of smart tech that can dynamically lower or raise the internal operating resolution on the fly as performance dictates and that's awesome especially for lower end systems and console hardware really revolutionary [ __ ] without a doubt i mean truly but this stuff is even necessary on my gaming pc which is rocking a ryzen 9 3900 and an rtx 3080 ti and call me crazy but i don't think one of if not the absolute most powerful gpu that any human being can physically get their hands on should be struggling with your four-year-old video game it's the crisis effect all over again where software developers are so far ahead of the hardware they're releasing games that aren't supposed to run well on the stuff that exists today but on theoretical tech that may or may not be invented but let's word this a little differently if you've created an awesome new lighting method but it requires you to noticeably lower the resolution you enjoy your games at can we really call that a benefit and listen it's not like this is one of those only jared would known as things you can really tell when the game starts manipulating resolution and sometimes even the most mundane scenes will be looking blurry as hell a few times while playing enhanced edition i felt like there was something in my eyes and then i'd realize it's because everything on screen looks like it's been smeared with vaseline and look at that i'm a poet and don't know it make a rhyme every time so i guess here's what i'm trying to say ray tracing as a concept is very fun very interesting and even more exciting but having to use dlss and rt ready games just to get playable frame rates is the opposite of all that it's not bad or bad looking it's just not there yet in my opinion and really the point of all this was to explain why i wouldn't be using footage from the enhanced edition in this video very much which means you'll primarily be seeing and have seen footage of the good old regular release of exodus here and until new technology learns how to play nice with top of the line hardware and very meager video settings that's going to be an attitude that follows me into any new game release although i will be honest the enhanced edition including an fov slider is nearly enough of a reason for me to jump [ __ ] but after every scripted scene the field of view has to adjust itself so maybe i'm better off sticking to my guns but i guess getting back to the actual point of this section metro exodus is drop dead gorgeous despite any of my complaints getting back into the game for this video i found myself remembering just how impressive it all is and sure maybe looking better than 2033 or last light isn't too hard those are old games at this point but doing so while rendering out miles of in-game real estate and including dynamic lights that'll make you moist in any pair of pants you might be wearing well that is without a doubt worthy of praise in their next usage of this engine i hope foray iron out some of the performance issues that can creep up in select scenarios but all of that aside this is easily one of the best looking video games i've seen in years those of you who have been around for a while know i can be very hard to please with stuff like this and well you can officially consider me very pleased here but we've only covered one possible aspect of this visual package metro exodus made it to all the big boy consoles of its day and even the current gen offerings got its enhanced edition and i just so happen to have finally joined that party by getting myself a ps5 earlier in the week so i feel like a little christening is in order all right so i am pretty stoked to have finally joined the modern gaming landscape now that i own a ps5 but there's still a tiny issue gumming up the works see i got all excited about having a brand new console at the house but i sort of forgot i don't own any 4k displays i kind of stuck with the middle ground in the resolution wars aka 1440p and unlike the series x the ps5 just doesn't support that on top of that the fastest display i have only hits a meager hundred hertz so i won't be able to test any higher frame rates as well which means we're gonna have to look at this port at a mere 1080p 60. now for all i know this may positively affect performance or negatively affect the game's visuals but i really won't be able to confirm that until i get a better monitor so just be aware that going forward alright so with the boring stuff out of the way the first thing i was interested in checking with this port was performance and while there were some notable areas of slowdown i can't exactly be upset since they were all taking place in the very same areas i would see them in in the pc port and to be honest during gameplay they felt way less severe mostly because i was running such a higher frame rate on pc if that sounds unintuitive believe me a jump from 100 frames per second to 50 will be almost game breaking but from 60 to 50 really not that big of a deal all that aside though this version of the game looks amazing and almost always runs at a perceivably smooth frame rate since the exodus enhanced edition was developed specifically to take advantage of newer consoles ray tracing ready hardware this ps5 port includes all of the great looking raytraced light sources you could ever want and just to reiterate my comments about ray tracing from before it looks amazing it just doesn't look that much more amazing than how the game already looked that being said i almost did a double take while capturing this footage see i had been under the impression that this release was built from the ground up around rage racing but here i was seeing obvious signs of screen space reflections and for those of you that don't know raytraced reflections look incredible the difference between the two methods for real-time reflections are very obvious when you know what to look for so i did some digging and everything i found kept pointing towards the same talking points this version of exodus is going to be revolutionary full support for ray tracing and all the usual clueless console fanboy nonsense which if anything should really open your eyes to the non-tech savvy journalist to get your gaming news from this is a major component of ray tracing and the only people who seem to notice that it wasn't present during game play were regular people who had similar questions to me after playing it themselves so i kept digging until i found a press release directly from foray and even then it was sort of a fluke somehow i had accidentally clicked on google's image search instead of a web search and right there was an image macro letting me know that exodus on ps5 and xbox did not support ray traced reflections or dlss now that's no wonder handed dig at the console versions of exodus like i said these are brand new graphical tricks and they can have a noticeable impact on frame rate but i'm more amazed at how long it took me to find this among the ocean of news articles talking about this very subject i know this is not going to be a new concept for a lot of you but for the rest maybe think about keeping a modicum of skepticism about yourself when getting information from games journalists if this situation has taught me anything it's that a lot of them are just repeating to you stuff that they've heard and their sources are often equally uninformed games journalists on the plus side though they are still a great source of information regarding which grand theft auto games are the most sexist so it's not all bad news moving on i found the new options included in the enhanced edition made me wish i'd put a little more time into its pc counterpart specifically the option to increase the in-game field of view in vanilla i wouldn't exactly say it was a claustrophobic fov but any control over that setting at all is always going to be a win in my book and with that in mind the wider fov here is absolutely gorgeous you can see so much more of the environment around you and it's even a little better for gameplay as your watch containing your visibility meter and waypoint guide is visible even when you have your weapon at the low ready for most people i would say an fov change isn't going to be something that's immediately noticeable but trust me when you see the two options back to back it is pretty radical besides all the technical stuff though the game played well enough for me i did have some issues hitting targets while shooting but then again i am famously bad at playing shooters with a controller so you could probably chalk that up to me just being a keyboard and mouse guy all in all this was a pretty amazing time or at least it was up to the very first section of the volga where i found i absolutely could not get the boat i was supposed to take to break away from where it was docked i tried jumping into it shooting it or just brute forcing the damn thing but for all intents and purposes i was soft blocked this is a necessary part of the game's progression and until i trigger the next scene i can't continue the game's story meaning i'm stuck here so i ran around what was accessible to me and got some footage but i found that none of the boats here seemed to want to cooperate as well so i googled the problem and found a lot of people saying that quitting to the main menu and reloading your save should fix it but i had no luck with that either i even power cycled my console and to my surprise when i loaded that save up it was still stuck right there at the pier i've got to assume that starting a new game on a new save will solve this issue but i'm not about to play through the beginning of this game again to test that and it's already burned me once and i'm not coming back for seconds so while i can't definitively say this will also happen to you just know it's a possibility on a brand new ps5 with an up-to-date version of metro exodus on it and that's a damn shame because i was massively impressed with how well this game ran and handled up to that point i was right off the bat ready to name this the best console port i could test but i really can't make that claim now it certainly is a sad state of affairs but let's look at the ps4 version and see if we can actually progress past the start of the game man talk about a low bar to clear stop putting delusions into his head i don't want him going crazy like you the standard non-rtx non-enhanced edition of exodus on ps4 outputs 1080p and targets 30 frames per second and i've got to say from the start i was really feeling that frame rate maybe it has something to do with this port or me just going straight from two releases that stay at or above 60fps but either way this was really hard for me to play i was missing shots all over the place and with the slower frame rate i think the issue with enemies allowing bullets to pass right through them is much worse so i know i should probably talk about this port more before i say this but without a doubt this should not be your first choice if you have any other method for playing exodus moving on from that damning start i was actually pretty surprised to see that the lighting and overall visual fidelity didn't receive any kind of a noticeable bump down in quality with the last two games in the series the console versions had pretty noticeable portions of their presentations dialed back to accommodate slightly lower end hardware but here i couldn't see a single thing other than the frame rate that was altered speaking of that nasty frame rate again i found the weird animation ghosting issue i originally talked about in 2033 as present here too and if you don't feel like watching an entire video to figure out what the hell i'm talking about it's this weird street fighter alpha style shadow that this needle leaves behind when it moves imagine this but apply to everything that physically moves within the game from what i can tell exodus will run at 1440p within a 4k window on the ps4 pro but i am pretty sure it retains the 30fps lock so i wouldn't assume you would get a better experience with the more powerful hardware continuing with the beating here i found a good deal of screen tearing in busy scenes something that honestly is a little worse feeling than a slow frame rate on that same note this port seemed to stutter a lot with some frames seeming to hang around for a lot longer than they should it being so close to parity with the pc release the ps4 version shares screen space reflections and if you thought them being a little less clear was going to help them look better you are dead wrong and last of my complaints the load times here can be just annoyingly long i am almost positive that one load screen lasted more than five minutes while i was getting this footage now realistically long load times aren't the worst thing in the world as long as that loading happens on its own screen and doesn't take resources from gameplay which luckily is the case here but i imagine people quick saving and loading a lot to deal with the poor performance's effect on gameplay will really feel the effects of this sadly though the game struggling with low times is going to seem like a fun little feature when i tell you i ran into the same exact problem i had on ps5 yep the first boat in the volga did not move from the shore when i tried to take it making this game at least for me uncompletable on both platforms i tested outside of sequence breaking tech that'll have you getting near the church falling in the water and spawning inside of it and i truly don't understand what's causing this i mean both versions were bought and downloaded straight from the playstation store like any of the other games i have stored digitally but for some reason this game breaking problem persists across two console generations for me of course i can't confirm that this isn't just something odd going on on my end only but a quick twitter poll tells me at least some of you guys have seen the same issue and because of that i can't in good conscience recommend anyone get any digital sony port of metro exodus this of course may just be a fluke but the last thing i want is for one of you to see this video and purchase something you can't play for reasons outside of your control but besides game breaking jank i really wasn't impressed with exodus on ps4 the switch versions of both previous games had a similar frame rate and for whatever reason i found them to be infinitely more playable so i guess take that for what it is i can't exactly rule out me sucking at video games as a possible explanation but i think something else might be going on here regardless of what's at fault though i really can't recommend this port of exodus if you can help it i know not everyone has access to a decent gaming pc and the newer consoles are still an absolute ass to get a hold of but even with that in mind this does not feel like a good enough experience to warrant a play through the entire time i was getting footage it felt like an uphill struggle and everything was kicking my ass despite the fact that i had it set to normal so again if you can help it maybe stay away from the xbox one slash ps4 generation for this one and unless you like rolling the dice maybe just stick with a pc for exodus like i said you may be able to discount my experience as being anecdotal but until i see otherwise i have to assume at least a portion of you will have the same struggle and to be honest i can't really recommend a game port that won't let you play it man that was a bit weird but port issues aside this game was really something like i already mentioned i was not confident exodus would capture me the same way its predecessors did but holy hell am i glad i was wrong exodus really grabbed a hold of me and offered what i might call a better more robust experience than the titles that came before it and believe me to someone like me who's already prone to becoming a fanboy and not being too accepting of change the concept of saying something like that is crazy but i swear it's true of course i most definitely loved exploring the narrow tunnels of the metro before but exodus gives me that same exact feeling when snooping around a map that's nearly 100 times larger if you ask me the fact that so much of the metro fanbase seems to align with me on that idea makes for one hell of a sales pitch it's like hey do you want to try a brand new first person shooter no well what if it somehow convinced a large portion of its unpleasable fan base to be down with it majorly changing the series blueprints now all of a sudden it sounded a lot better but regardless of who you are old vet or prospective fan exodus is well worth a play but even more than that i think it's earned a place in the series it deserves to have the title of metro on its box and man talk about a great game to end on well of course the series doesn't seem to be showing any signs of stopping but until a new entry hits the scene this will have to be it for this retrospective and with that in mind i am very thankful you guys followed me into this one i know i've been going through a bit of a first person shooter phase lately and a lot of you understandably came here for my coverage of polar opposite series like resident evil and silent hill i truly appreciate you guys still enjoying my content even when i'm not covering survival horror titles although you definitely haven't seen the last of that on the channel but i think that's about all i have to say for now so until next time stay safe and happy hunting stalkers now hello friends thanks so much for making it to the end on this one if you like this video or you're looking to support more projects like the metro retrospective i'll have my patreon linked on screen and getting any of the games from my good old games link so kick a little bit back to me as well if you're looking for a little less commitment a liking a comment will do just fine but besides that i'm just glad you guys are here i've been getting a lot of love lately and i want you all to know that the support does not go unappreciated i hope all of you have as good of a day as you've given me and i will most definitely see you guys again next time

Channel: Avalanche Reviews

Views: 648,460

Keywords:

Id: XQgGFG7LzeM

Length: 204min 20sec (12260 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 19 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/crocdadon]

His stalker series reviews are incredible. Definitely an underrated channel.

[u/zamolxescelbarbos]

For those having 3 years and a half at their disposal. Dunno how to feel about videos that are this long, but there are some that enjoy these.

[u/Chi_Rho_Invicta]

They're all great games.