Metro 2033

Picture the scene. There has been a nuclear war, followed by nuclear winter, and the world has been frozen in decay, ruin and death, save for the mutated monstrosities that scuttle about on the surface. Such is the vision of Dmitry Glukhovsky's novel, Metro 2033, upon which this game is based. The name comes from the fact that the remnants of the human race have literally gone down the tubes; living in Moscow's defunct underground network, each station converted into a settlement with different ideals and goals.

Life in the underground is predictably full of horrors. Let's face it, it's always been full of horrors, as anyone who's done the run out to Heathrow airport, having to stand up the whole way with the sweaty armpit of some stranger hovering near their face, will know. However, Metro 2033 takes the terror of the tube to a new level, the shadows of the tunnels filled with abominable beasts, ghosts of the dead, and other weirdness which makes the hairs on the back of your neck want to stand to attention.

This is a first-person shooter, although it isn't all action by a long way, as it's blended with survival and horror elements. During some parts of the game you'll be crawling around on your hands and knees, turning your torch off and hoping that drooling-mawed, growling fiend loping around nearby won't notice you. Or you'll be trying to make your way through an enemy base, picking off sentries one by one with a silenced pistol, or a well-aimed throwing knife. Big blazing firefights certainly break out on some levels, but a lot of the time it's wise to keep to the shadows and rely on stealth, as sometimes you'll find it tricky to survive some of those massed gunfights.

Another consideration is that there's a limited supply of ammo for the three guns you can carry. In fact, in the Moscow metro the actual currency is shiny pre-war ammunition, which is far more effective than the contemporary manufactured “dirty” rounds. Pre-war ammo can be exchanged for med-kits, grenades or gun upgrades, or you can fire it at the beasties and take them down much quicker. But, as the game points out, you're literally firing money. However, rather that than pay with your life, if you fail to take a big mutant creature down.

If Metro 2033 has a major weakness, then it comes in the behaviour of said creature. Although it's not the mutants that are so noticeably weird on the artificial intelligence front, as they tend to run straight for you, claws slashing, which isn't so difficult for the AI to handle. The underground gun-toting bandits and mercenaries, however, are more complex in their routines, having to take cover, use grenades and so on.
And sometimes they manage all this just fine. At other times they act like they've had a lobotomy, and not a good one either; a third-world back-alley doctor with a hacksaw job. We had armed guards stand and stare at us without shooting, while we filled them full of lead. And enemy gunmen ran around taking absolutely no notice of us, when we were standing right in the middle of the room. It's fair to say that this is more the exception than the rule, but you will witness some daft behaviour from enemy troops in Metro 2033, guaranteed.

The good news is that this rogue element is about the only thing which dampens your immersion in the game. Because otherwise, it draws you in like a masochistic moth to a flamethrower. The moody, grainy graphics, from the flickering fires of the oil drums that folk cluster around in the underground, to the barren icy wastes of the city of Moscow above, capture the post-apocalyptic ambience bang on the mark. The characters and script are well devised and suitably hard-edged, and the entire interface is integrated into the game to make the Metro 2033 experience a seamless one.


For example, when your torch runs low, you actually have to take out an electric hand generator and pump it up manually using the right trigger button to produce more power. Even the quest journal is a dog-eared pad which your character has scribbled on, and to look at it in dimly lit areas you'll need to fire up your Zippo lighter to illuminate the page.

Metro 2033 feels more real as a result, and it's genuinely exciting and unnerving at times. In a desperate firefight, as bullets zing around you, bits of plaster are knocked off the walls in great chunks, like something out of the Matrix film. The psychic flashbacks, echoes of ghosts in the tunnels, and the glowing phenomenon called the “anomaly”... we won't give away any spoilers, but it's genuinely chilling stuff, particularly with the 5.1 surround sound cranked up.

Having gushed about that, Metro 2033 can be a little too realistic and unfriendly at times. In some levels you have to think a little outside the box, with no help given by the game. We died and reloaded about twenty times on one section, before we figured out what we had to do, and it wasn't particularly obvious. This does fit with the game's sharp and brutal style, though, as does the campaign length erring slightly on the side of brevity.