Usual formalities skipped, Metro 2033 is an ambitious and innovative title doing what it can to pull itself above the rather small budget it was made with, and failing just a little too often.


The good

The best part about this game is the immersion, and this was done better than nearly any other game I've ever played. You feel a sense of desperation when you are in unbreathable zone, gas mask filters are running low, your breath is heavy, there's huge cracks in your gas mask severely limiting your vision, and ammunition is low in proportion to all the mutated boar things trying to kill you. Moments like that are high points that often occur, and not just high points for this game, but playing videogames in general. The great sense of immersion can thank the great atmosphere in this game. Post apocalypse Russia seems like a place that's there, and same with the characters that inhabit it.

Another thing I really liked about this game are the gun mechanics, and the swing and delay of the guns makes the game feel more immersive. Just shooting the guns in general is quite satisfying, and even more so when looking down your scope and getting headshots with burst fire.

There is quite a large variety in Metro 2033, enough that over the course of this rather short game, it never gets repetitive. The weapons are varied, with crappy assault rifles, better assault rifles, high pressure automatic BB guns, crossbows, and underpowered shotguns. In total, the weapons are actually less than ten, though there are a slew of attachments, along with diversions such as throwing knives and grenades.

The not so good

When I say this game often fails to pull itself above the budget it had, the graphics are what come to mind. The graphics aren't bad at a glance, or even in general. the lighting effects are actually spectacular. The problem is the severe of polish in them. Textures initially look good, but are very pixelated when you look at them slightly closer. It's not much of a problem but worth pointing. What certainly is worse though are the animations. Quite often glitchy and with rough transitions. I often found myself taken out of the sense of immersion with the all the poor animations. Like in the beginning cutscene, you see a kid running at, and then a immediately running 20 degrees different angle. No animation of him turning. I frequently found myself paying more attention to things like this then what characters speaking to me were saying while this was happening.

My other chief complaint with this game is the pacing. As AVGN would put, the pacing of the difficulty with this game is AASSSSSSSSSS. The sections of this game where you're fighting mutated creatures can almost always be completed in one or two tries. Then there are the sections where you are fighting humans armed with guns, and it often takes upwards of 10 tries to get past these sections. There were probably about 11 checkpoints throughout the entire game I got stuck at.

While the AI in this game doesn't play a huge role, it's quite sub-par. A single guard realizes your position and his whole faction knows where you are, even if you killed him before they could be alerted. This makes all the stealth weapons in the game nearly worthless for their intended purpose. Non-essential friendly AI are almost guaranteed to die, while the essential ones are typically scripted.

...and then there's the ending. Not the very end. The last two levels onward.

At the second to last level, the difficulty goes from rather easy to nearly impossible. This reiterates my complaint about the pacing. There's all these weird

Spoiler:

that deal very high damage, and your AI partner is just slowly walking through them toward his destination. He doesn't even try to shoot the spawner, instead just killing them at the very rate they spawn. Trying to save him will result in being stuck in a cycle until you run out of ammo and they kill him, trying to destroy the spawner will result in his death, rushing in before they can kill him will result in your death. But once you get past that one section and the three checkpoints in it, you're on top of the world. That is, until you're at a complex sequence where the objective is poorly explained.

You might finally finish the second to last level, and it's on to the relatively easy last level and the poor story tie-up contained within it.


Misc
The shotguns are underpowered. The game is rather lacking in content, with a 10 hour singleplayer campaign, and that's it. Very little is there to change with a second playthrough.


Metro 2033 is an extremely immersive and entertaining, even if it is severely flawed.
Renting this game is highly recommended, or in my case, sell it on ebay right after you finish it. Though it's not really worth keeping.


Score: 5 out of 8