The game won't be "dumbed down," we're told, and the vision of the original will be apparent in the final product.
The survival horror aspects of the first game will return, along with scrounging for bullets and making sure you have enough filters for your gas mask. While the short demo showed only action scenes, that was just to drive home the fact that THQ heard the criticisms and was fixing the shooting.
We were promised more detail in the combat, so if a bullet pings off a helmet or armor there is more feedback to let you know what's going on, instead of leaving the player to feel like their shots aren't having any effect. The difference is that we saw people get killed with one shot, and the weapons don't seem nearly as impotent as we remember from the first game. The same interesting-looking handmade guns are on display-in fact, there's a mechanical engineer whose job it is to create these homegrown weapons in real life before they're put into the game. All the gameplay systems have been rebuilt from the ground up, and in the gameplay demo we were shown, enemies are actually killed with guns in a way that seems to make sense-a big change from the first game. This power struggle is the main conflict of the game, a sort of underground war between the small communities. Old extremist ideologies are flourishing underground, with the neo-Nazis of the Reich battling against the communists of the Red Line. "I don't believe any Western studio could render this, because the history and culture of our eastern European studio is ingrained into the development of this game," Beynon said. Most of the survivors die within 500 yards of where they were born. Very little food, terrible conditions, and an early death due to a respiratory illness are the only things these people have to look forward to. 6 UndergroundĪfter a nuclear war leaves the world above the ground uninhabitable, small groups of hardened survivors live in the Metro system under Moscow, and it's a hard, pitiable existence. The sequel to the game is now officially called Metro: Last Light, and it looks like many of these flaws will be fixed. The shooting itself was frustratingly inconsistent, and the weapons felt more like rubber-band guns than anything that could harm another person or beast. That said, as THQ's Huw Beynon told the press at a preview event in Los Angeles, it was a flawed masterpiece.
It's not rare to play a game where the combat feels dangerous, but it's rare to play a game where you can kill your enemy and still die due to a broken gas mask. The sense of dread and despair that spreads throughout the game, along with the supernatural touches that give the world such a surreal feeling, made this an interesting entry into the world of first-person shooters. Metro 2033 remains one of my favorite games from last year, and I'm not alone in my enthusiasm for the title: the game's cult following is dedicated and large.