Its been a long time since I've played the first two Metro games. Back in the early 2010's I was blown away by Metro 2033, its tight linear gameplay, horror elements, amazing graphics and careful resource management. Then I have brief memories of Last Light shortly afterwards and remember not liking it as much, thinking it was more "consolized" and dumbed down/easier but my actual memories of Last Light are really fuzzy and I need to play that again at some point. But I got Metro Exodus not really knowing that much about the latest installment in the series, but also because I got a new graphics card and I've heard (and briefly seen) that this game has some of the nicest graphics out there nowadays, thats really all I knew about Exodus before I installed it.
First thing is that it asks what difficulty I want to play. It was Reader,Easy/Medium and Hardcore, then "Ranger hardcore". The difficulties give a description and it said for Hardcore is "reccomended for experienced FPS players". I guess I would qualify as that so thats the one I picked.
The game starts crawling around in a bunker, you get a taste of the later gameplay by being equipped with different weapons and getting in a few fights with some monsters, then you get rescued by a squad and are introduced to many different characters and situations in the game. Its a very story heavy game and full of cinematic sequences where its not uncommon to sit there watching cutscenes or following NPC's around for 20-40 mintues at a time before you ever shoot a bullet or do anything. In the first introduction of the game though, its kept relatively brief and you are shortly sent out in a mission to leave the Metro (finally?) to explore the desolate winter landscape in search of answers. The graphics are pretty amazing, the enviornmental details, the sound effects, the whole game has a very immersive atmosphere with a minimal HUD that tries to suck you into the game world. You have to put on gas masks, change your air filters, manually wipe sweat and dirt off your mask with a button press, listen for radiation, and so on. The graphics are mostly "hit" but there is some miss. Sometimes the physics can glitch out or be subpar, and some of the facial models and textures can sometimes be less than impressive but for the most part its great, the lighting and general attention to details and interesting things to find scattered around. Its very much reminiscent of Fallout at times, you have to search the enviornment for resources and crafting supplies, opening crates, boxes, lockers , but also there are frequently little unique objects scattered around that help the areas have enviornmental storytelling that makes exploring the areas that much more interesting.
You get introduced to the main cast of the game especially the two main characters, Anna (your love partner) and her father Miller. You get sent out and encounter the first stealth segment of the game. Its this factory full of enemy soldiers and the game really encourages you to sneak around here. Thankfully, the sneaking is really overpowered in this game and as long as you are crouched you can pretty much sneak right up to enemies and almost always remain undetected. Theres a mechanic where on your wrist you can see a light on your watch shine, that tells you when a potential enemy is able to spot you, which is also helpful. Also, the game allows Quicksaving from the main menu, but only outside of combat. Its easy to almost 'exploit' this behavior, you can keep checking for the precise moment when it allows you to quicksave, its pretty forgiving in this regard and makes progressing not too challenging usually.
Then finally after this 'prologue' you are in the "real game" I will say. Metro Exodos, unlike previous games in the series, is a psuedo-open world game. I say psuedo, because the game is still level based, 12 levels infact, but many of them are giant open segments where you can proceed in any direction at any pace you want. While other levels are very linear indoors type levels similar to the previous games. After you've completed a level, you cant backtrack to the previous map, so its not quite truly open world, but the parts when it lets you 'free roam' are very much in the same spirit. The game moreso than ever before feels very STALKER and Fallout inspired in these open world segments.
The first main open world map is this big winter landscape.
The entire games premise is that your team has found life/hope outside of the underground dwellings of the metro stations, and now you have a train where you travel across the country completing various tasks and overcoming problems. Its a great premise and opens up lots of opportunities to have interesting, organic locations come about through the storyline. So I give props for that idea. This first open world winter landscape area was very captivating. You have a Map which shows you an icon of exactly where the next main objective is, and a compass which points in the direction. Your character has to physically take out the map and look at it while moving slowly, so its not like you can just stare at the icon the whole time you still have to foucs on the game world, you can only open it to quickly get your bearings then put it back down. At this point in the game you encounter both enemy monster beasts, and enemy humans. Its a great mix of threats and dangers and really feels like youre traversing this deadly, hostile apocalyptic wasteland. For the most part, I simply ran past the beast type monsters, but at least for the first bit of the game, when coming across human enemies I chose to usually sneak past them - simply because I didnt have that much ammo, or even any guns. Again, the stealth is pretty effective because its so forgiving on being detected, plus you can easily sneak behind enemies and either knock them out or kill them, then take their guns and ammo which I used to my advantage for the first bit of the game.
One of the first main quests is to enter this religious cult base which was both fascinating and entertaining. Eventually though, I started to really engage with the gunplay and generally fighting enemies head on. The combat gameplay is fairly tactical, strategic, and penalizing. You cant just rush in and shoot full auto. Ammunition is in short supply, so firing more than one bullet at a time usually felt like a huge waste. Every bullet almost always was important. This had a fun dynamic of resource management and trying to weigh pros and cons of when to shoot or who to engage with or when to run away. Though, since you can loot both ammo and dismantle enemy weapons for resources, shortly into the game I had an AK that was stocked with over 100 bullets so I was feeling pretty well equipped and could engage enemies more confidently. The guns feel good, they are very weighty and pack a punch when you shoot the enemies, theres tons of voice acting and the enemy reactions to getting shot is both viseral and gives good player feedback. The enemies can kill you in just 3 or less bullets so I always had to play carefully which kept the combat engaging. The game doesnt have regenerating health - instead you must either find health kits or press a button to place your backpack on the ground and create a mini-crafting station (in real time) where you have to hurrily craft med kits (and other equipment) in the middle of battle which I thought was both an immersive and exciting mechanic.
But really one of the most fun combat mechanics the game has is the weapon customization. Every enemy you kill you can scrap the attachments on their guns with the press of a button, this then permanently adds those attachments to your equipment 'pool'. Then, at any time you can open your backpack and swap attachments on and off your guns. I always looked forward to finding more of these and playing around with all the different weapon combinations because they really do make a huge difference both visually and gameplay wise. You can totally transform a wimpy looking pipe gun into a real military tactical rifle type thing. One thing I found odd is that some of the weapon sights/scopes didnt make much sense. Like the red dot sight, you can barely even see the red dot. I actually usually found the Iron sights more reliable than the red dot, especially guns with glow in the dark Iron sights. Is it just because its a post apocalypse and the red dot sight has low batteries or some kind of graphics bug? I dont know. Also things like Night vision scope, when would I ever want to use that? and the fact that the Laser sight took away your crosshair (which glows red when youre pointing at enemies) , something too valuable to give up. But regardless it was always fun to explore, loot enemies and the enviornment to find new guns and attachments. It's also kinda odd how the previous Metro games were all about hoarding bullets as currency and trading with merchants with them, yet this game has no merchants at all.
One gripe I have is that the UI at parts could be a lot more clear. For instance, when youre picking up guns, you have no idea what the gun is called. The only way to find out the name of the gun is to go to a crafting station and swap through the guns there. It should tell you the name of guns when you pick them up. Also, other minor thing such as your gas mask can break and get a hole in it and you can always choke to death, despite replacing the air. I kept dying and reloading my save wondering why my gas mask wasnt working - You can just press a button to patch up the gas mask. Well that was not clear to me at all. Maybe it should have given me a button prompt or something. Just small gripes, but eventually they added up.
The open world levels also have side quests, though its unclear what the point of doing them really is. The characters will sometimes stress the importance of doing them to you, and I did do a few of them, such as obtain the Guitar from the bandit camp for Stefan, and free the slaves from the slaver boat on a later mission, but nothing really came of it. No quest reward, cool weapon or attachment, not even really a thank you. I guess for the Guitar one I got to see some scripted events of him playing the guitar and that was pretty entertaining, but the whole thing felt a little unfinished and jarring in its implementation. Theres not even a quest log to track them or anything. A little strange.
More missions on this first open world winter map are doing things like capturing an enemy bandit ship, going through radiated underground tunnels fighting monsters, and eventually going on a quest to obtain this railcar to be able to take more civilians with you on the main train ride. Theres a huge bandit gunfight here when you drive the railcar back, which was probably one of the highlights of the game for me. A lot of long ranged tactical shooting, and picking my targets carefully. A fun challenge fighting these bandits at this car park facility place. Reminded me a lot of STALKER. The human enemy AI is average in this game, sometimes I saw them repeat the same action over and over through my rifle scope. Like ducking to one corner, then jumping to another wall, back and forth for 2+ minutes. Like weird script loops. But other than that they didnt do anything overly impressive or anything overly stupid, it was a good challenge considering how fast you can die.
Something weird happens after this , though.
The game takes a surprising turn. The winter map ends, now you're on a brand new big open world set in the desert. "This could be bad or good" I thought. I was kinda hoping the whole game would be set in this wintery post apocalypse but guess not..Well at least the beginning of the desert level has you going into this headquarters of some commanding supposed allied army. But it turns out when you arrive, they are actually bloodthirsty cannibals that captured you and want to eat you. Alright, well this is both awesome and horrific. So the first 'level' of this desert episode is great, actually. But unfortunately the enemies in this level are mostly a push over. They use melee weapons and just rush blindly at you, making it a cakewalk to just mow them down with your guns. After this brief but frankly awesome cannibal level, youre put back into another kind of open world map, where you leave from your train and have to go around this desert wasteland completing the main objective. At first its just to kill some bandits, but then the game introduces a new mechanic: Vehicles. Oh no. So this next big chunk of the game basically consists of you driving back and forth in this vehicle across barren, rocky wastelands and if you dare go off the beaten road path then navigation becomes a total chore. Like really theres not much gameplay here. All you do is drive around and try to naviage this desert plain. It sucks. Its a real problem with why sometimes open worlds can just be way worse. Its because now, the game is designed with this focus around the fact you'll be driving around, so no longer do they expect you to be traversing on foot. That means if you do happen do choose to traverse on foot, its even less exciting, its a total waste of time basically. You have these big stretches of land that only serve as filler to go from point A to B with nothing really substancive in between. Yeah theres the odd building here and there, with probably some supplies or maybe even a unique event in them, but I found the whole driving thing so unappealing that I was hoping it was only a short segment of the game so I was trying to get this part over as fast as possible.
Unfortunately, the driving parts of the Desert section is only one reason why the whole chunk of the game is kinda shitty. You then go through these underground bunkers but the only threat and enemy here is spiders. And the thing is, they hate light. So you just end up doing some like Alan Wake shit where instead of engaging in fun combat, you just shine a flashlight at the spiders and stare at them tediously until they die. Its just boring and bad. This is like an entire hour long section of constantly spinning in circles looking for the next angle a spider will come at you while you stand there shining a light on them and then slowly proceeding. Sure, the atmosphere and general tension and idea is great, just the execution was lackluster. I especially like the graphics where you can see spiders crawling on your screen/characters arms it really gives you the creeps. So good job on the presentation, again, at least. A few 'side quests' open up on the desert map too, these are marked by various icons on your map. But again, theres no quest log, so theres no way to remember what the hell any of them are. So, since I hated the vehicle, and felt like the map was filler, I had little interest to do these side quests. However, at a certain point the important Anna character keeps reminding you to "At least go save the slaves at the ship" so I did that. I went down to this big ship area, side quest, made my way in and killed all the bandits, which was fun. The game utilizes these sort of 'boss fights' where you sometimes have to fight a bandit wearing a full suit of plate armor wielding a minigun. Hes slow and clunky and sprays bullets around the room so you gotta just crawl around him taking pot shots. Its a fun little change of pace and challenge but slightly frustrating with the AI events. Like theres a small window where he walks in the room where hes invinciible and you can just waste ammo shooting at him (I think) which sucks. Anyway, I saved the slaves (which wasnt obvious how, there was a tiny lever somewhere) but then....nothing came of it. I went back, and Anna didnt even say thank you or congratulate me or anything. What was the point? Why was it so urgent? The side quests are so loosely put into the game it just feels like more filler and half-baked ideas, its totally unrewarding feeling.
Eventually (thankfully) I get past the whole Desert map, and the plot progresses where Anna has been constantly coughing and needs medicine. So you set off for literal greener pastures and arrive at this green forest type area. You get separated from the rest and get captured/kidnapped, lose all your equipment, and have to start sneaking past these tribes of enemies. So I was really looking forward to getting out of the desert, getting away from the shitty spiders, but then all it takes me to is basically an entire episode of almost forced stealth where I lose all my cool guns and have to use some shitty crossbow. Sad. Atleast the writing here is interesting. Its not just gangs of bandits, its these two tribes of relatively peaceful people who are just trying to establish law and order in a chaotic world. The only reason theyre hostile to you is they think youre a bandit. But they atleast give you warnings and dont shoot on sight. Because of that, I felt like it was worth sparing them, so It was enjoyable to be this shadowy figure sneaking past them all through their bases and listening to their conversations. So that alone made the episode atleast somewhat fun. But thats basically all I did for 2 hours.Sneak past group after group, quicksaving reloading, getting into these psuedo boss fights aganist this giant bear that really al you have to do is climb up a ladder...and then...more spiders in more underground bunkers. Sad. Towards the end of this segment you come across an elevator in a radiated area that needs power but it took me too long for me to figure out how to turn the power on, so I wasted almost all of my gas mask. I kept running out of air and dying and reloading. Well you cant leave the area (I dont think) so I think I almost bricked my whole game? I would of had to atleast reload to a way earlier save. I somehow managed to just barely get enough gasmask air to complete the objective (by grabbing those green crafting goop balls and crafting air) but yeah I can see how that would be really fucking frustrating if It became impossible because I didnt have enough air, and It almost was. It makes me wonder how youre supposed to progress in this game in other similar times, there are quite a few times where youre forced in some area , but what if I have no ammo? What if I have no gas mask? Are you just supposed to reload from hours previous? luckily It never happened to me, but I was really close a few times to being screwed.
In between the 'open world' segments you have a few brief individual linear levels, usually crawling through bunkers and facilities, those are for the most part enjoyable changes of pace. Its weird how the game goes back and forth between open world and linear without the ablity to backtrack, but it kinda works. After the desert, then after the forest, thereyou get to the last segment of the game which is back in the kind of winter biome. You find out anna needs some special medicine locked away deep in some heavily radiated complex. Unfortunately, the game doesnt really get any better here...after the past few hours of disappointment after disappointment, this segment mostly sucks too. For starters, you dont really do anything until 30+ minutes of listening to dialogue/following an NPC around. Seriously. You first drive through this linear straight line, then get to a bunker. Then, you just follow this old guy around the bunker while he talks to himself and giving you huge plotpoints. The story is decent enough, but its like way too much exposition. Narrative dumping without gameplay...not something I usually like. When you finally do get to play on this segment, its just standing around in a small room while a few waves of enemies come at you, you kill them, then it goes back to following the guy around and listening for another 15 minutes, repeat. Not great. Eventually you get separated and finally are by yourself to play as you see fit. This part is pretty cool, you go through a heavily radiated, rotting pungent disgusting bunker/tunnel system, boating through these rancid tunnels with weird creatures spitting goop at you ,getting attacked by radiated monster beasts which are pretty damn challenging and I just barely had enough ammo. Theres a few parts where youre on a boat getting attacked by sea monsters where I had to just kinda shoot at them randomly until it let me progress, which wasnt very clear and I died a few times that was kind of annoying , since the area is so radiated you get a bunch of scripted events of your character going mad and hallucinating, its got great atmosphere and is emotionally impactful here but, the gameplay is still pretty lackluster. Nothing really happens gameplay wise, its all driven by narrative here. Which is fine, but it leaves a bit to be desired.
The last few moments of the game is being chased by this big Yeti monster as you run through a series of bunkers pulling switches and opening doors, finally finding the medicine for Anna, passing out then getting saved. Driving back to the train, almost dying, the old man dying from radiation -- then the ending happens and the NPC's were saying they need to donate blood to me. Little did I know this game has 2 endings, good and bad. In the bad ending, the main character dies because you didnt save enough NPC's to donate blood to you. Well, the whole game I had so many NPC's saved that I dont know how I didnt get the good ending. Right up until the very last cutscene I was surrounded by all sorts of NPC's that I didnt let die -- yet in the very final cutscene there was only 1 guy. NO idea what happened, really disappointing. I read online that apparently the game has a Morality system!? well that WAS NOT obvious at all. Its something like when you do a moral action your screen flashes grey? I literally never noticed anything like that. So if thats true, the game does a terrible job informing you of any such morality system. Fail. And apparently to get the good ending you need to play the game really stealthily the whole time making sure not to kill certain enemies and only killing bandits or somthing...convuluted stuff... yeah not happening. I just got the bad ending, quit the game, then looked up the good ending on Youtube. Good enough.
Metro Exodus has a compelling narrative, great presentation and atmosphere, interesting enviornments (mostly) and encounters, but in the middle of the game it starts to really fall flat with some design choices such as changing locations too much, leaning too much on expecting stealth, unnecessary driving segments, and some rather boring (spiders) missions here and there. Its interesting that it has an identity of its own compared to previous games, where it tries to merge both linear gameplay and open world gameplay, and takes hints from both Fallout and Stalker, but sadly it just missed the mark on being a great game. If it leaned more heavily into the Winter segments and really dialed in on unique combat encounters, maybe even some more 'boss' type human enemies or mutant instances, and had less filler and downtime in between combat the game would have probably faired better.
6/10
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