Sigh. Metro 2033. What a disappointment it turned out to be. At the time of the trailer’s release there was, from certain quarters, such as these, a huge amount of hope and expectation. With the already-classic Fallout 3 finally running out of steam as its last downloadable content was offered, up pops a suspiciously yet excitingly similar quasi-follow-up, due to be released before the post-Fallout depression kicked-in. The trailer brought connotations of a similar concept, of the human race once again being driven underground following the aftermath of a catastrophic war. Granted, not entirely original for a game (in fairness, it is based on a novel) yet nevertheless an ideal stop-gap between one end of the world, Fallout 3, to the next, Fallout New Vegas. No sooner than the menacing words of ‘Metro 2033′ popped up once the trailer was done with giving us a jolly good whetting, the ‘anticipation-o-meter’ sprang into overdrive.
Then it was revealed it was a first-person shooter. Another one. No majestic role-playing elements as found in its aesthetically comparable adversary. Just guns, greedy humans and monsters in dark corridors for around six hours, minus the other six hours of painful trial and error that the game’s impossibly steep learning curve insists you grapple with.
Before diving into the cheap tactics 4A Games used to bleed more life from the shuddering corpse of Metro 2033, the good parts of its anatomy will be dissected first. Most strikingly are, of course, its visuals. Perhaps that should be expected of any game this generation, but Metro 2033, truly excels regarding matters of depicting the troubled, disease-ridden nature its corresponding novel once conveyed. Everything looks convincingly filthy (no, not like that), particularly the meat stalls in marketplaces. You wouldn’t touch it with a barge pole attached to the Burj Khalifa. As the burning embers and weak electric lights dance around the flea-ridden corpses of poorly maturing meat, you experience an almost life-like sense of how testing a post-nuclear world might be for the human race, much like Fallout 3 did. It’s dripping with atmosphere throughout.
The accompanying sounds the game emits as you navigate the metro’s maze are great too, minus a few short sound samples that loop with shameless conspicuousness. Once again, the marketplaces thrive as the chattering of their Russian inhabitants bounce and collide from the metro tunnels’ walls. It’s a surreal as it is believable. From the shrieks of playful kids (minus their hideously synthetic laughter, as found in Diddy Kong Racing’s start-up sequence) to the final screams of dying soldiers and the grunting creatures that now roam the nuclear winter enveloping the earth’s surface.
This kid wants you to help him find his mum. 'Sod off!', is the correct answer
It all goes so well until you actually play the bloody thing. Once through the deceitfully easy tutorial, arrives a game with little other than the intention to piss you off to the point your wireless controller leaves your hands and finds itself etched into your television’s façade. Time and again, until your TV’s in bits.
Light’s heavily rationed as it is, with often the only source coming from unfortunate protagonist Artyem’s torch (flashlight to the Yanks), resulting in the constant careful treading in order to avoid cloaked ‘holes of death’, traps or enemies. However, one section at the game’s midpoint insists you rescue and deliver a little Russian boy who finds himself separated from his family after a heavily-scripted action sequence. Rather than precariously holding his hand (what are the rules with coming into contact with children these days, again?) and walking him back to his folks; for some stupid reason Artyem hoists the little sod on his shoulders! Naturally, your movement is now ‘realistically’ restricted, and where you ‘probably maybe’ expected to die before you now fully expected to. And you did. Again and again, falling into traps, down concealed holes and, what with the inability to run, receiving a battering from the sewers’ wandering foes.
Another section, once again shrouded in darkness sees our ‘hero’ penetrate a human enemy’s (‘the Facists’, or something, stopped paying attention at this point) base. ‘Use stealth etc’ suggests the rather unhelpful and patronising wordage every time you die, ‘I AM USING BASTARD STEALTH!!’, replies frustrated gamer. While crouching and slowly moving forward through the shadows enemies would still hear you, turn and mercilessly blast you to bits. ‘Ok, try taking them out with throwing knives, instead’, reads the loading screen; ‘Great idea!’, replies gamer. The slightly resurgent player then attempts to learn from previous mistakes, this time armed with a clutch of throwing knives and a smidgeon of adrenaline. SPLAT! Right in the sod’s temple goes the knife, followed by a mini-celebration. ‘Nobody heard that, surely?’. Silence ensues. You slowly creep around a couple of crates, but take one step too far, ‘получите его!’, yells a presumably ex-Soviet, before hails of bullets cascade upon your sorry corpse for the seventeenth time. ‘Sorry’, pleads the loading screen, ‘I’m, er, out of ideas… Try using stealth again.’
If those two previous scenarios haven’t tipped you to breaking point and you’ve struggled towards the latter trials of the ‘game’, then prepare to embrace the wonderful presence of these absurd blobs of fart gas somewhere near the end; not once, but twice. For some detached reason our ‘hero’ Artyem and his accompanier Miller must wander through a corridor inhabited by the most irrelevant enemies ever found in a first-person shooter, the amoebas. Yep, giant balls of exploding bacteria are now your enemies. Those mutants in the Russian wasteland truly have nothing on these.
Having appropriate weaponry equipped should result in having to endure this painful sequence on a mere four thousand occasions, but if you find yourself with the wrong gun the game sees fit to punish you for your previously well-calculated decisions. A scoped automatic was an excellent idea earlier on, but there was little warning that it’d become utterly useless at this juncture. ‘Unlucky, son’, says the game, as it forces you to use a shotgun with worse accuracy than Dick Cheney in 2006. The phrase ‘survival horror’ could not be any more an oxymoron as it is exactly the truth, ‘survival’ is off the menu, ‘horror’ most certainly isn’t as you inevitably smash the Metro disc to bits, because if isn’t you that’s died for the Nth time, it’s your clumsy, all-of-a-sudden-not-invulnerable, mate. Go on, try protecting him, no matter how close you get to the end of the section one singular blob is going to take rearguard action and silently blow you up instead. At times Artyem appears to just give up rather than actually die, just to push your patience that little bit further. Did I mention you have to do this twice?
Metro 2033′s unfair nature is infuriating, and for completionists an utter chore. If it doesn’t beat on your conscience to let a game go half done, then you’re blessed; but to the rest of us who hold obsessive compulsive urges to complete every game they own, it leads you to question the point of your existence, let alone the sodding game’s. It’s poor game design to exact such a request for perfection on the player on normal difficulty, and the theme runs throughout, which can’t hide behind the fact that the tactic is used to extend the its lifespan, producing a ten-hour play-through out of what should really last six hours. With that comes an apathy in that you expect to die as you approach each new section, which inevitably dislodges your sense of progression through the game and resulting in a totally unsatisfying playing experience.
The letter 'D' and the number '6' will never be the same again
