Remember to buy your ticket for this highly immersive game and take a ride through a good and different shooter.
The graphics in Metro is quite good and you can run the game in DX9, DX10 or DX11 depending on your hardware. My PC is getting old so I ran the game in DX9 on "high" and the game ran smoothly and still looked really good. The only downside to the graphics is that you can't really tweak anything other than low, medium and high (unless you edit the INI-file). It should come as no surprise that a game with the name of Metro takes place mostly underground and hence the levels are fairly dark and moody. But even so the game still manages to make the level-design feel fresh by giving you various new levels to explorer from time to time like the metro, a Nazi base, a tower, a hidden library and various underground cities – there are also levels that take place above ground and they look nice to with snow and dilapidated buildings etc. The game is very linear but you can't really fault a game with a name like Metro for being linear.
The story is based on a novel by Russian writer Dmitri Glukhovsky only you wouldn't really be able to guess that because there really isn't much of a story in Metro. You play the character of Artyom who lives in an underground city (down in the Metro) in Moscow after a Nuclear War. Life in these cities is tough because they are constantly being attacked by all kinds of enemies like Nazis and even more bizarre monsters like gargoyles. Artyom is trying to get help from a bigger city and has to travel through the metro tunnels in order to reach those other cities and that is basically the story. There are some supernatural phenomenon thrown into the mix and you must discover the secret behind it all. The mood is excellent and we get a good feel for how hard life is when travelling through these cities by meeting orphans and soldiers telling war-stories and women pleading for you to find their son or husband.
The game is a standard first person shooter and you have a pretty limited selection of weapons in the game. You get a pistol, shotgun, SMG, assault-riffle and a few pneumatic weapons that you must pump in order to get them working. At vendors in the cities you can buy new weapons or upgrade the one you have or buy ammo for them. One minor complaint here is that none of the weapons have stats so you really have no way of knowing if the weapon you are picking up is better or worse than the one you already have – all you can do is pick it up and try shooting with it. The currency in the game is actually ammo that comes in 2 kinds – pre-war and post-war. Pre-war ammo is the best and most valuable and you use that as currency but you can also use it in your guns and it will deal a bigger punch. Given that the game is marketed as survival-horror the ammo is supposed to be scarce but if you scavenge bodies for ammo then you will probably never run out. My only other complaint with the guns is that the shotgun has a weird reloading mechanism where if you press reload once then 2 shells go in and then you must press reload again to load the last 4 shells and this takes ages to do and seems unnecessary.
The only really bad thing about Metro 2033 is the AI of your enemies – it is absolutely pathetic beyond belief! There are certain parts of the game that is supposed to be done via stealth but due to the bad AI it was possible to simply plough through it like enemy bases and such. They simply can't shoot and they do weird things like run forward, shoot at you then turn around and literally run in a circle like a dog chasing its own tail – it looks funny and give you a good reason to use your knife but clearly is a sign of bad AI. Some of the later monsters are a little more dangerous but only because they do much more damage to you in one hit. All of this is made worse by the fact that you have regenerating health AND medkits at your disposal. The medkits are a complete waste of time and I only used 1 during the entire game just to see how it worked. The thing that will kill you the most are your gasmask that is just plain annoying. When you go above ground or are in toxic areas you must use a gasmask but not only that, you must also remember to change filters in that mask and you will tear through filters faster than a hooker through condoms. If you are out of filters or you gasmask breaks (when you get shot or hit in melee) then you must quickly find a body with a gasmask and take it and you only have seconds to do this. It feels cheap and it just makes combat harder but it would have been much better if they just put some more work into the AI and made the game harder that way. Lastly the game uses a checkpoint-save system and I always dislike those because it usually is a cheap way to prolong the game by making the player replays the same sections over and over again, but it actually works fairly well in Metro 2033. The checkpoints are very frequent and it saves after almost every fight. I would still prefer to have the choice to save anywhere but it works.
All in all Metro 2033 is a fine game from 4A Games. Some of the games from Eastern Europe just seem to have a different vibe to them (like S.T.A.L.K.E.R.) from what we get from American game-designers. They tend to be more dark and mature and with a lot more atmosphere than your typical Disney-shooter from the US. Metro does have some rough spots like a horrible AI and limited selection of weapons and the game may be too easy for some but I actually liked the fact that it wasn't as punishingly difficult as S.T.A.L.K.E.R. For the about 10 hours the game last you will be thoroughly entertained. There may not be any replay value but the game should warrant one good playthrough if you can find the game at a good prize.