Metro: Redux

In 2013, a nuclear war devastated the Earth. The city of Moscow was destroyed by several direct nuclear hits, the few thousand survivors being driven literally underground to seek refuge in the Moscow Metro. Twenty years later several competing factions have arisen, with the Spartan Rangers, the Fourth Reich and the Red Line fighting whilst several independent city-states try to survive in the crossfire. And above their heads, strange creatures have arisen to take control of the surface world.

Originally released in 2010 and 2013, the first two instalments in Ukrainian 4A Studios' Metro series of first-person shooters were accomplished games. Metro 2033 and Metro: Last Light told an intriguing story of survival, horror, war, love and loss against a superbly-realised background, provided by Dmitry Glukhovsky's trilogy of source novels (Metro 2033, Metro 2034 and Metro 2035). The developers have form from working on the earlier S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series of games, although the Metro series eschews those games open-world settings for a much more linear and focused experience.

In 2014 both games were reworked and re-released in "Redux" editions. These editions of the games rework graphics, AI, controls and difficulty to provide a more consistent and linear experience across both games. Minor differences in controls, interfaces and enemies are smoothed out to form what is effectively one large game.

Being the older game, Metro 2033 benefits much more from the upgrade. Graphics, physics and lighting are much-improved and things like the games' stealth system is now more reliable and works better. Best of all is the evening out of the first game's infamously punishing difficulty. The original game's "normal" is now "hard" and a newer, normal difficulty level has been imported from Last Light, which makes ammo easier to find. In contrast, Last Light has inherited 2033's more punishing optional difficulty levels to turn it more into a survival game. The disparity between the two titles is gone and you can now play both as either a hardcore survival shooter or a more relaxed and forgiving action title.

Both games have aged well, and their at-the-time impressive focus on stealth has become all the more impressive. The games don't do a great job of telling you about the stealth system though. Basically, enemies, no matter how tough, can be killed with a single thrown knife as long as you take them unawares. You can also sneak up behind them and knock them out or kill them in close proximity without alerting their friends. If one enemy does spot you, instead of magically letting everyone else know your precise location via telepathy, you do have a narrow window of opportunity to disable them before they can alert other guards, allowing you to recover from serious errors. You can also use muffled weapons to take down enemies, extinguish lights, although causing too much mischief from the shadows can lead to the enemy getting suspicious and switching to a higher alert state.

Both games retain impressive action set pieces and the storytelling remains intriguing. The environmental storytelling, reliance on NPC companions and your status as a silent protagonist all make for positive comparisons with the Half-Life series. However, the games suffer a little from their morality system, which they don't tell you about. Basically, the less mayhem you cause, the more guards you knock out rather than kill, the more you go out of your way to avoid killing (even mutants), the higher your morality score. This unlocks secret endings for both games. For Metro 2033, to be honest, this is a bit pointless as the secret ending is not canon (Last Light starts the "negative" ending from the first game, which is off-putting if you're playing both games together), but for Last Light it's more important because the "secret" ending in Last Light is the canon one and sets up the third game in the series, Metro: Exodus. Unfortunately, some of the high-moral outcomes in Last Light are a bit obtuse, requiring you to uncover secret caches and avoid killing even when it appears fully justified to do so.

These vagaries are minor annoyances, and made up for by the package's impressive amount of side-content. All of Last Light's generous DLC is included, including more missions expanding on background events in Last Light (focusing on various side-characters and their own storylines), a solid single-player survival mode set on an open world map with you scavenging for supplies at a huge library, and a specialist (and punishingly hard) sniper map.

Metro: Redux (****) takes two strong, older games and makes them sharper, better and more enjoyable for modern gamers. The morality and stealth systems feel a bit under-explained, but once you get to grips with them, they enhance an atmospheric and accomplished pair of shooters. The package is available now on PC, PlayStation 4 and X-Box One.

Metro: Last Light

2034, post-apocalyptic Moscow. A year has passed since the Spartan Rangers discovered and occupied the D6 bunker, making them one of the powerhouses of the Metro. Artyom is now a respected ranger, but is haunted by his decision to nuke the mysterious 'Dark Ones'. When word arrives of a Dark One infant that survived the cataclysm, Artyom sets out to rescue the creature and atone for his actions. Along the way, he discovers that one of the other factions in the Metro has discovered a secret weapon that could turn the tide of power amongst the survivors forever.

Metro: Last Light is the sequel to Metro 2033, picking up where that game left off and building on its storylines and characters. Last Light is pretty unforgiving to those who haven't played the first game, not bothering with backstory or exposition, so I recommend that players either pick up the first game before this one, or make full use of online plot summaries to get them up to speed.

As before, this is a first-person shooter which alternates combat with exploration and survival elements. Combat is great fun and enhanced this time around by the addition of better stealth mechanics: Artyom can knife opponents from the shadows or knock them out if he can sneak up behind them. Given a fairly frugal approach to ammo in the game (although it's not as punishingly stingy as the first game), conserving firepower and resorting to stealth rapidly becomes the first choice in every situation. Stealth is even more important when fighting the game's mutated wildlife, who can't be stealth-killed but can be avoided by hugging the shadows and extinguishing light sources.

The survival element comes in the form of the handy gas mask, which is necessary to survive on the surface and exposed parts of the underground. The mask's filters need to be changed on a regular basis and it can get covered in debris, gunk from exploded enemies and water quite easily, forcing you to wipe it clean. This is fine in general exploration, but mid-combat it can add a panicky moment of blindness which adds to the chaos of combat. The survival element is tremendously enhanced by the impressive visuals and the bleak, lonely atmosphere. Metro: Last Light does atmosphere better than almost any other FPS game I've played.

The moments of bleakness are counterbalanced by the towns (former Metro stations that have been taken over as habitations for survivors), which are bright, warmer and packed with people. The towns are a good place to chill out and restock on supplies before heading out. Unfortunately, as with the first game, they are essentially just shops with only modest improvements in giving you more to do (though a couple of optional missions can be found, along with a dubious strip club and a shooting range mini-game). The towns are crying out for more development, and as with the recent BioShock Infinite there is a feeling that maybe this would have been a stronger game if it had been more of an RPG than a FPS.

Still, an FPS it is and a good one at that. Making the linear corridor FPS (which is what Last Light is, apart from a couple of enormous arena-like outdoor areas where you have more freedom to choose what approach to take next) compelling and interesting is difficult, but 4A Games has managed it by giving the game a sense of place and atmosphere that is second to none. The limited nature of the genre means that you can't explore the people and places as much as you might want to, but through overhead dialogue, some excellent art design and Artyom's own notes, they successfully engross the player in this strange world.

Voice-acting is good and characterisation is fairly strong, although a romance with another character does kind of come out of nowhere. Whilst you spend a good chunk of the game going solo, you also team up with other characters for chunks of it, and they manage to be effective aids in combat without hogging the limelight. One character 'buffs' you by providing you with intelligence on enemy positions and numbers rather than fighting outright, which is a great idea that the game executes well.

Metro: Last Light (****½) is an improvement on its predecessor in almost every department: it's slightly longer, with more impressive graphics, more satisfying combat, vastly superior stealth and a more interesting storyline. On the minus front, it does feel very reminiscent of its forebear, more the second half of the same game rather than a sequel, and arguably the game makes a few too many concessions to the mainstream, with more plentiful ammo and supplies meaning less moments of nerve-shredding terror. Still, it's a bleak, atmospheric and gripping game. It is available now in the UK (PC, PlayStation 3, X-Box 360) and USA (PC, PlayStation 3, X-Box 360).

Metro 2033

2033. Twenty years have passed since a nuclear apocalypse ended civilisation. A number of survivors have built an underground society based in the Moscow Metro. Stations and their adjoining halls and tunnels now serve as towns, some banded together into factions. Some of these factions are at war with one another, and all are threatened by the hostile creatures (transformed by radiation into mutants) that roam the tunnels and the overground.

A young man named Artyom volunteers to leave his station and journey to the largest town in the metro, Polis, to seek help against the creatures threatening to destroy his home. However, this is only the start of a long journey as he discovers that there is a potentially greater threat gathering and he may be the only hope of stopping it.

Metro 2033 is a first-person shooter developed by the Ukrainian 4A Studios, an off-shoot of the recently-closed GSC Game World (the creators of the STALKER series of games). It's a post-apocalyptic game employing some elements of survival horror in addition to its more traditional FPS trappings.

The game is played from the POV of Artyom, who narrates the game through observations that appear during loading screens. Otherwise, he is a silent protagonist in-game, more willing to listen and learn from other characters than engage in lengthy conversations. The game style is inspired by the Half-Life series, most notably the idea that it's up to the player how much exposition and backstory they need to hear. When in a peaceful area, such as a town, you can simply press on immediately with the next mission or stick around and listen to conversations to pick up more information about the world and setting. There are a variety of NPC characters who help Artyom out during missions, though usually they are forced to bail out at some point, leaving Artyom to press on alone.

The STALKER influence can be seen in the atmosphere, which is dark, brooding and often oppressive. When on the surface or in gas-filled chambers, Artyom has to wear a gas mask to survive. As the gas mask's filter clogs up, his breath starts to fog over the screen and the sound of his increasingly laboured breathing becomes dominant, until he replaces the filter. Finding filters is thus essential to survival (though only truly an onerous task at the highest difficult levels). This gives a tremendous sense of claustrophobia to some parts of the game. Another issue is that bullets are relatively difficult to find in the game and enemies tend to soak up a lot of damage, making the player have to think much more carefully whether to engage in combat or attempt to sneak past enemies by sticking to the shadows.

The game employs a highly naturalistic style to its interface. Your journal and compass are in-game objects and looking at them means unequipping your weapon, which can be lethal in dangerous areas. The onscreen HUD only appears when needed and tends to vanish whenever you're not using it. There are both stealth and morality mechanics, the former tracking how locatable you are and the former how 'good' or 'bad' your decisions have been, but both are invisible to the player. This adds to the atmosphere, as it leaves you wondering if you have made the right decisions rather than being able to hit a button and bring up a bald numerical figure representing your situation.

The game's art style is dark but impressive, cold in atmosphere and successful in conjuring up an air of constant terror during missions. The towns are warmer and richer, with people huddled over fires discussing how they are surviving and merchants eager to sell you their wares. However, the towns are let down by a lack of variety (they're similar to one another, with little in the way of optional side-quests available) and also a sense that they are not necessary. Whilst ammo is very limited, there's usually enough to be looted in the wild to make depleting your (extremely limited) supply of currency. Amusingly, currency in the game are also bullets, which in moments of desperation you can use as ammo.

Combat is chunky and in many cases satisfying, but the game's difficulty level can make it frustrating. At normal difficulty headshots have no impact and enemies can take a lot of damage to kill. At high difficulty levels enemies can be killed more easily, but at the expense of also making you extremely fragile and also making ammo and money extremely difficult to find. Unfortunately, the game also pulls the old Far Cry trick of removing the satisfying human opponents in favour of unconvincing monsters and mutants later on, but unlike Far Cry never brings back the human enemies later on. The mutants tend to be much less satisfying to fight, which is a problem since they dominate the second half of the game. Particularly annoying are the ape-derived 'librarians', who take ludicrous amounts of ammo to put down. There is a system for 'staring them down', but it feels somewhat arbitrary whether employing this tactic is going to work or not.

Metro 2033 features regenerating health, but only at a very slow rate, making it almost impossible to heal up mid-battle (you also have pain-killing injections that speeds up the process, but is little help in frantic firefights). There is also no cover system (at least beyond the old-school 'duck and pop up again to shoot' technique). These reductions in modern gaming's most tedious and over-used elements are successful in returning real menace and tension to combat, although they do sometimes go the other way and make battles annoyingly frustrating to win. This isn't helped by a checkpoint system that, whilst never as enragingly awful as Max Payne 3's, is still sometimes unforgiving, forcing you to replay lengthy sections as punishment for tiny mistakes (or random chance).

The game's atmosphere is tremendously effective, its setting interesting (and surprisingly varied) and the characters you meet and ally with tend to be well-motivated individuals. There's a jet-black sense of humour that constantly pervades the game. The game also has a surprising, twist ending (but only if you've done enough 'good' acts to unlock it) that nicely subverts the violent action game you thought you were playing. This has to be balanced against sometimes frustrating spikes in difficulty and a sometimes ridiculous lack of ammo for a first-person shooter.

Metro 2033 (****) is definitely one of the more original and impressive first-person shooters of recent years. If you can get over its brutally unforgiving difficulty, this is definitely a game worth playing. It is available now in the UK (PC, X-Box 360) and USA (PC, X-Box 360).