There are two sides to Metro Exodus, 4A's third and probably greatest post-apocalyptic adventure - two varieties of space engaged in a hesitant dialogue. On the one hand, there are the wilds of post-nuclear Russia, absurdly splendid, absurdly deadly and moderately open-ended, from dessicated ports where beached tankers jut like dinosaur bones, to ice-locked cities whose sewers have become intestines, clogged with squirming radioactive polyps. Here, you'll act much as you do in other virtual wilderness escapades - trotting to the points of interest you've circled on your paper map, shaking down corpses for crafting resources and avoiding or murdering the many people and things who want to make soup from your thighbones. Metro Exodus review Developer: 4A Games 4A Games Publisher: Deep Silver Deep Silver Platform: Reviewed on PS4 Reviewed on PS4 Availability: Out Feb 15th on PS4, PC and Xbox One These are spaces in which life is cheap - cheaper, certainly, than medical kits - and the risk of ambush is unrelenting. Exploring them is a breathless yet resolutely workmanlike experience, in which you'll spend a lot of time crouched in the undergrowth, wondering whether your last three shotgun shells are enough should the bandit upstairs catch sight of your weapon's laser pointer. But running through these vistas is another kind of space, in which other kinds of action - kinder actions, in fact - are possible. This is the mighty steam locomotive that carries protagonist Artyom and his comrades from map to map, as you journey eastward from Moscow's underground in search of a new home. Between lengthy stopovers in each region, usually for the sake of fuel or to deal with obstructive locals, you'll spend an interlude aboard the train - rattling past arid woodlands, poisoned waterways and wilting apartment blocks, in one of 4A's trademark masterstrokes of location design. Each interlude corresponds to a season - Exodus's 20-30 hour campaign spans a year in-game - and it's a joy to watch those variations play out across the train's dented hull, sand caking the engine in the dry salvages of the Caspian Sea, ice brightening the fittings in the depths of winter. You can even walk along the boiler to the prow to watch the miles disappear under your feet, like Leonardo DiCaprio glorying in the view from the Titanic. But the real triumph of the train is that it's a living place, in each sense of the word - a space that evolves during the narrative as carriages are added to serve various plot purposes, and new faces join your ranks. Metro Exodus is, in this regard, both a quest for home and a story about how journeys create their destinations, as you nourish a haven whose greatest strength is that it's utterly transitory, always in motion. What begins as a dingy cabin crowded by rowdy blokes in converted welder masks gradually becomes a little village on wheels. Making my way down to the passenger car I find the squad's amateur guitarist, Stefan, playing a melancholy folk ditty, and Sam, our lone American, fussing over a stewpot in the canteen. To the rear somebody is showing a little girl we rescued how to repair a leather strap, while the train's engineer Krest sneaks a cigarette break behind the toilet. It's reminiscent of BJ's submarine headquarters in Wolfenstein: The New Colossus, though 4A doesn't really need the inspiration - the first two Metro games are stuffed with comparably makeshift and cosy NPC settlements, scraped together from the rubble of Moscow's underground stations. And as in Wolfenstein's submarine, you can exert forms of agency aboard that train - "verbs", to lapse into armchair designer parlance - that are seldom available when you disembark. You can mess around with a radio, for one thing, searching for one of Russia's few surviving DJ stations or to eavesdrop on conversations at your next stop. You can share a smoke with the group's cantankerous leader, Colonel Miller, discussing the previous chapter's events (characters often pick up on your choices in each chapter, especially if it involves bloodshed, though none of these substantially change the story's outcome).You can cuddle up on a bunk with Anna - Artyom's wife and the squad's ace sniper, though she's more often found playing the part of damsel in distress. You can escape, in short, from the well-thumbed fantasy of the apocalyptic world as a kind of post-historical firing range, and explore a prospect videogames seldom really investigate - the reforging of connections in society's aftermath, the gentle process of rebirth. All of which may sound rather grandiose, and I shouldn't overstate how far Exodus strays from type. This might be a shooter with a heart, but it is still very much a shooter. The weapons are still dirty great handfuls of pipe, wood and wire, and you now have the gratification of clipping them together yourself from scavenged parts - plonking down your backpack to attach and remove scopes, barrels, different magazine sizes and stocks, the effects of which are immediately apparent in the handling. In addition to rifles, shotguns, SMGs and pistols, there's a choice of pneumatic ball-bearing rifle or crossbow as your special weapon. The satisfaction of cranking the former's Super Soaker handle aside, their appeal is that you can craft ammo for them on the go, while bullets, grenades and shells must be manufactured at workbenches that are few and far between. The general scarcity of ammunition makes for more considered gunplay, as does sluggish character movement and the absence of automatic health regen. There are plenty of stretches in which combat can't be avoided - bunkers full of giant spiders, for instance, and a bossfight with a bear large enough to plough through cover - but Artyom is no Master Chief. Given the choice, you'll probably hold fire more often than not, scouting positions through your binoculars, then sneaking around them after sunset with the aid of night vision and motion trackers. I think there's more, however, to this ethos of restraint than the heart-stopping click of an empty chamber. Like many a video game narrative greased by shooting before it, Metro wants you to question the role violence plays in its world. Unlike most such games, it goes about this convincingly. Partly, that's because it isn't really an open world game, however much it might resemble one. There are only two wasteland environments that feel anything like Far Cry; the rest are roomy canyons or winding, scripted corridor encounters in the style of Half-Life. Nor are these maps systematised to the gills, as in the average Ubiworld: there are no territory bars to fill, no thickets of side-mission categories to hack through, no outposts to cleanse and turn into fast travel points. Each region has its spread of optional weapon and gear upgrades, and as in Far Cry 3, you can tag objects of interest through your binoculars, but all of your objectives are bespoke, part of the main plot or a slight departure from it. If the game is to some degree a response to the open world, Metro's borrowings from that genre are as delicate, as thoughtful as the process of dividing up crafting ingredients between ammo and health kits. As such, it stands firm against the open world's propensity for empty, cyclical violence in the name of piecemeal content drops. Beyond that, it's a game in which you'll often leave people alive because they appear to be, well, people, even when bluntly labelled "THUG", "TRIBAL" or "BANDIT" in dialogue, and even - or perhaps especially - when committing obscenities. Metro harbours plenty of anomalous mutants, unhinged sorts and predatory animals who can be gunned down with impunity. The writing can also be very clumsy, not least because Artyom only speaks during (lengthy) load-break voiceovers, which means you sometimes feel like a post-apocalyptic Lassie. "What's that Artyom? You say Anna's fallen down the hole into the underground biowaste disposal plant?" But the game's wealth of incidental overheard chatter is good at making you question those dialogue labels, thinking about the grayzone between stranger and enemy.<doc-sep>The Metro series so far has been defined by its claustrophobic setting and worldview. After nuclear war ravages Moscow in 2013, survivors who flee to the underground tunnels of the Metro system form their own independent states and societies, all in a bid to keep on living. That element of survival against the odds in a dangerous environment, rarely going outside into the irradiated city ruins, is inseparable from the franchise. So what happens when the series takes a step outside, hops on a train heading out of the tunnels, and goes above ground and into the heart of Russia? Artyom, hardened Ranger and inhabitant of the Metro, is searching for radio signals on the surface of Moscow following the events of Metro: Last Light. After a series of revelations resulting from this, he and his comrades from the Order hijack a train and set out into the rest of the Russian Wastelands, leaving behind the brutal wars of the Communist Red Line, Capitalist Hansa, and Fascist Fourth Reich, chasing potential survivors and finding a new place to call home. For Artyom and for the world of Metro, the underground became normality, and the outside of its tunnels atop the crumbling skyscrapers became alien. To leap out of its confines and into that unknown world feels like jumping into a space cruiser and departing the planet earth. Aptly named the Aurora by its crew, the train becomes your ship à la the Normandy in Mass Effect. The locations you visit, varied in their look and feel, become planets. As I explore unique and visually captivating miniature open worlds that constitute the “levels” of Metro Exodus, my train becomes a place of refuge. Between locations, I can roam about its carriages, catch up with its crewmates, maintain my gear, and partake in little activities like playing the guitar or smoking newspaper cigarettes. It’s functionally and aesthetically a train. But it takes on a mood unexpected of the franchise’s genre: warm, relaxed, and nonviolent. 4A Games took this opportunity to explore a range of different post-apocalyptic environments that move with the seasons over the game’s yearlong timeline. The Volga River is a swampland home to villagers who worship a giant mutated shrimp. The Caspian Sea is a lake dried out into a desert. It operates under the tyrannical thumb of a Mad Max-style oil baron and his legion of thugs roaming the wastes in shoddily repaired cars and trucks. Taiga is a lush forest region home to an unusual tribe and beasts. The world isn’t fully open, but compared to the corridors of the metro, it isn’t linear either. I’m given plenty of approaches to the different encounters I run into. One mission has Artyom and some of his squad infiltrate a dock to steal a tugboat. You could stealthily approach the building on foot, or you could ascend a nearby radio tower occupied by bandits and use the zipline at its peak to reach the rendezvous location in a speedier (and cooler) fashion. The weapons are weighty and powerful. They collect dirt as you traverse through dust and mud and require cleaning at workbenches, but it never feels tedious. Moreover, this need for maintenance coupled with the plethora of attachments you use to customize them gives every gun a sense of ownership. This is my Kalash: There are many like it, but this one is mine. There’s a lot of busy work like this in Metro Exodus. Much like my guns, my gas mask can get dirty, and I have to wipe it clean if it becomes difficult to see. I have to replace its filters as they start to deteriorate, lest I choke on the toxic air in pockets of radioactivity. But it never feels like work. It’s organic, and eventually it becomes second nature. I find myself taking all of these factors into account when interacting with the world: Is there a lot of mud here? I’ll be sure not to sprint through it, kicking up dirt onto all of my equipment. Am I about to head down into a little bunker? I’d best make sure to craft some more air filters, in case I end up needing them. Accessibility options are somewhat limited but nonetheless present. For QTEs, there are the choices of rapid tapping, holding down, or just pressing the required button. Subtitles also come with a few different options: changing their size; toggling the speaker, background, and sign subtitles; and deciding whether lines of dialogue are labeled with the character that says them. While it isn’t an option in the accessibility menu, hit markers give a lot of feedback. If a shot makes contact, the marker flashes white, and upon killing an opponent, it flashes red. This is helpful in some particularly messy gunfights, and also adds to the satisfaction factor. What doesn’t add to the satisfaction factor is the occasional stretchy-armed ragdoll of a bandit I’ve just killed, or the sudden disappearance of an ally mid-conversation, only for them to return once I reload a quick save. Fortunately, these incidents are so few and far between that they don’t impact my experience in any extreme way. What is Metro Exodus setting out to achieve in the world that it has created? For 2033 and Last Light, it was arguably to show how humanity is doomed to the same path of self-destruction, even after the nuclear bombs have long fallen. Exodus is different, though. We still see the monstrosity of humanity, the horrors of brutal survival. But that isn’t the dominant worldview here. Metro Exodus injects the Russian post-apocalypse with hope. Between two locations, as we cruise along the railway passing green valleys and distant mountaintops, I join my comrades in the kitchen of the passenger carriage to drink, laugh, and play music together. We joke about one crewmate’s obsession with women, cough and wheeze at the strength of the booze, and toast again and again over what lies in the future for us. I don’t need to participate in this. Within the confines of the game, it’s completely optional. But in a world destroyed by war and violence, pure and innocent moments like this are captivating. Without saying too much, the buildup to Metro Exodus’ climax does become a little dire. But even then, that desperation is born of optimism. Throughout the game, I run into a series of moral choices that are unclear in their impact, and even in their actual morality. I lose friends, for better and for worse, and my actions have consequences on the communities that I meet. But that faith in a better tomorrow still lingers, never fading away. It’s refreshing. There have always been shades of gray in the Metro franchise, but until now the darker shades dominated its emotional and moral landscapes. Metro Exodus is more of an overcast spring afternoon. On my journey aboard the Aurora, I encounter pockets of humanity that have already lost hope. But on this train, beside my friends and family, there’s still hope yet.<doc-sep>I take my anxious first steps into a desolate post-winter wasteland. All around me, I hear mutants scratching and snarling. One sights me. Three more follow. I rise to fire my rifle. It jams. I feel frightened, vulnerable, out of sorts. But also, at home, like I’ve stumbled into a lucid dream shared by Far Cry 2, STALKER, and of course, Metro 2033. I’m on a train—our train—surrounded by friends. Family. I can overhear their conversations as sun glints through lightly fogged windows and the train clacks down the tracks. Laughter. Stories. Boasts. Hopes. I sit down in a cramped cart with our heavy weapons specialist Stepan and a nurse we rescued named Katya. Stepan is playing guitar. I pick up another and join him. Together, we add to the gentle cacophony. I can hear each stair creak as I ascend the lair of a “gargoyle” mutant. “This is suicide,” I think, but I keep going. A little girl asked me to retrieve her teddy bear. I’m going to do it. I reach the gargoyle’s nest. It’s curled up, asleep beneath a moonless sky. The teddy bear is in its nest. I shuffle toward it and reach out a trembling hand. The creature stirs and lashes out twice. Blood masks my face, clouds my vision. Teddy bear in hand, I bolt. I see a zipline. I latch onto it and soar away from the gargoyle, turning back to make sure it’s not flying after me. I finally start breathing again as I land hundreds of feet away. “Fuck you,” I say to the teddy bear. I’m surrounded by darkness. If the cramped ventilation system I’m squeezing through stays dark for another few seconds, I’m dead meat. Mutant spiders chitter and screech, out of sight but definitely not out of mind. I furiously pump the charger on my flashlight. I’ve been in this situation many times before, but I never stop internally freaking out, no matter how many times I tell myself I’m finally over it. Mere feet away from me, I hear a spider leap. I turn and hit it with a fresh beam of light. It falls to the ground and exposes its belly. I fire off two bullets. It dies. Others stir. Behind me. In front of me. On all sides. I can’t take it anymore, so I charge forward in hopes of emerging into a more open space. I hit a dead end. I can hear them closing in, but I can’t see them. Then I remember: I have one molotov cocktail in my inventory. I hurl it down the vent and pray. The black answers back with spider screams. It’s finally over. For now. My heart beats in my chest as my character’s pounds in my earphones. I find myself on the train once more. I’m talking to my character’s wife, a field-hardened special ops sniper named Anna. She’s angry that the she spent so many years in the tunnels of the Moscow Metro—once thought to be the only place safe from a ruinous plague of radiation after the bombs dropped—when she didn’t have to. But, despite it all, she’s hopeful. “It’s not like there’s many of us humans left now,” she says. “So I hope someday we will be able to trust others just because... because they are people, too.” I prepare to slip into a sewer to infiltrate a raider compound. These raiders have been hounding us the whole time our train has been stopped in the desert. It’s time for them to pay. My companion, a Kazakhstani medic named Damir, asks me to see things differently. Some of these raiders are his people, he says. Many of them are young and desperate, taken in and enslaved by a ruthless and charismatic leader. He asks me not to kill them as I stalk through their lair. He asks me to understand. Metro Exodus is a series of moments, a blur of sometimes nearly-incoherent events that pass like scenery outside the window of a fast-moving train. You pick out a few, but others fly by so indistinctly that you’ve forgotten them minutes later. It’s a bounteous bouquet of first-person shooter ideas, encompassing everything from modern open-world level design to hyper-linear scripted set pieces to walking simulators, one right after another. But the game struggles to cohere. It’s inconsistent, frustrating, and frequently less than the sum of its parts. The moments I wrote about above, I remember with perfect clarity. But I’m already struggling to remember many others—strung together, as they were, by a post-apocalyptic cliché-heavy plot, factions that never quite click, and missions that introduce extra characters to an already bloated cast instead of giving the spotlight to crucial ones. Honestly, I couldn’t tell you much about half the characters that traveled with me, even after listening to them talk at me for literal hours. Advertisement Exodus is far more structurally ambitious than previous games in the Metro series, both of which were linear adventures confined to post-apocalyptic train tunnels. This time around, main character Artyom and friends are done tussling with Nazis and monsters in tunnels. Now they’re topside in the remains of a world they were certain no longer existed. As a result, you divide your time between exploring areas that are either open or linear, depending on what the story calls for, and hanging out with your pals back on the train. Many of the moments, environments, and atmospheres Exodus creates shine even as they’re surrounded by a world of despair and decay. The game visits a veritable greatest-hits album of post-apocalyptic settings while managing to maintain a unique feel and atmosphere. No small feat, given how many other shooters have already visited the end of the world. Exodus is at its best when it marries its bleak, no-nonsense vibe with unpredictable landscapes and light survival mechanics. In the game’s excellent first, STALKER-esque open area and less excellent (but still pretty good) Mad Max-inspired second open area, supplies are hard to come by, meaning that you’ve got to strike a balance between using them to craft ammo, medkits, and canisters for your gas mask, as well as putting them toward upkeep on your weapons, which get dirty and become less effective with use. Advertisement All the while, bandits, mutants of every conceivable shape and size (humanoid, gargoyle, bear, spider, big crab, almost dog), and freakier things like floating, maybe-sentient electrical “anomalies” roam the wastes. Often, they behave less like enemies and more like hazards: If you don’t get too close, they’ll go on living their lives. Sometimes they even fight each other. Multi-layered, almost Thief-like sound design clues you in to their relative locations, with snarls, cries, and lengthy bandit conversations creating a feeling of constant tension. At the start of the game, I felt like I was near the bottom of the food chain. It was thrilling—a return to the feeling I’d been missing in the absence of late-2000s shooters like STALKER and Far Cry 2. I had precious few bullets to spare, so I crept through half-dead bushes and underbrush instead of trying to play hot-shit hotshot against packs of mutants who a) wouldn’t give me any supplies and b) were imminently capable of tearing me limb from limb. Brief moments of empowerment—mostly involving stealthing my way through bandit lairs and freeing those they’d captured or enslaved—felt like triumphs. But beyond the reaches of those flimsy, man-made tents and walls, the wasteland was still waiting to pounce. This was Exodus at its best. However, it repeatedly proved capable of suddenly flipping over and exposing its ugly underbelly, like a screaming spider freak mutant exposed to too much light. As I said in my impressions after 30 hours with the game last week: Yep, the Metro series’ trademark jank is back, and in many places, it threatens to be the game’s downfall. Exodus is admirably ambitious, blending countless mission types, combat variables, and a series of locales that seriously feel like they could each be from a different game, but AI and other systems struggle to keep up.<doc-sep>
I find myself in awe of Metro Exodus for reasons I did not expect. Each entry in the series is known for pushing the visual boundaries of what is possible with current-gen hardware, but Metro Exodus takes it to another level. Exodus has some staggering environmental effects and detail, taking the best of Metro Last Light's semi-open world environments and fully exploring the potential therein. This includes dense forests choked with fog, dynamic reflections on frozen lakes, and scattered light through thick storm clouds, washing everything in vivid shadows. Metro Exodus is a visual masterpiece that showcases the full potential of the 4K Xbox One X, with tight, survival-shooter gameplay layered on top. This is the quintessential Metro experience, but for every area where 4A Games has improved, it shines a headlamp on some of the series's lasting problems. Stunning apocalyptic adventure Metro Exodus $60 Bottom line: A few glitches can't stop this staggering artistic achievement from becoming one of the Xbox One's most important shooters. Pros: Excellent level design. Satisfying survival-shooter gameplay. Intriguing story and good characters. Cons: Voice work is a bit patchy. It's glitchy and suffers occasional crashes. See at Amazon $24 at Walmart Visual design, performance, and sound Metro Exodus continues 4A's tradition of breath-taking environmental design direction, weaving wholly believable post-apocalyptic environments across a range of unique biomes. As Exodus's name suggests, this is the first game in the series that takes you completely out of the dank subway tunnels of the Moscow metro system, taking place in a string of large connected areas and far larger in scope than Metro Last Light's flirtations with a more open format. Metro Exodus is a genuine work of art. Despite taking on a more open approach, Metro Exodus is completely devoid of copy and paste. Every area feels hand-crafted, brimming with detail and reasons to explore. Using safe houses, you can sleep to switch the game between night and day; otherwise, the day cycles dynamically, bringing with it vivid lighting, gorgeous skyboxes, and even weather systems. Heavy rain-washed environments in light-reflecting dampness and radioactive mist can roll in, blanketing your vision in darkness. These aspects of the game's visual design play heavily into gameplay. Beyond the open environments, Metro Exodus's open plains are dotted with points of interest, which often serve a similar function to dungeons. These areas come across as more traditional "Metro," with large, winding structures with multiple pathways and secrets, across a variety of location types. Metro Exodus really explores the Mad Maxian-style reality of its nuclear wasteland, with macabre attention to every rust-bitten detail. Metro Exodus also sports native Dolby Atmos support, making it a true joy to play with headphones. The game is light on UI in general (even more so if you play on Ranger Hardcore difficulty), and those Dolby Atmos audio cues add an almost disturbing sense of directional awareness. Dolby Atmos really puts you in the game, emphasizing Exodus's stealth and horror elements, for better or worse depending on your temperament. As good as Atmos is, sometimes, it makes dialogue far too quiet, forcing you to turn it off. And since the subtitles were bugged out as of writing ... I found that I had to keep it turned off most of the time. All the good stuff that resides within Exodus shines a bit of a spotlight on areas where 4A still has work to do. I'd quite happily put the environmental design up there with the likes of Red Dead Redemption 2, but the character animations haven't improved a great deal. Additionally, Exodus could use a few performance boosts on Xbox One X. Areas with thick smoke or particles can slam the frame rate to a crawl, and there are plenty of glitches with animations, models clipping through walls or doors, seemingly unable to handle some of the game's more dynamic area layouts. I also experienced crashes here and there. Finally, the game has some sort of input lag on Xbox One X, which makes it feel a tad unresponsive and sticky to play. There's also a bug where if your controller disconnects due to battery loss or inactivity, Metro Exodus won't detect that you've reconnected it, forcing you to restart the game. Overall, Metro Exodus is a rare type of game that I'd recommend to shooter fans on the basis of visuals alone. Bugs aside, the artistic and technical achievement on display here cannot be understated, and Metro Exodus is a work of art.