Preview: Metro 2033

Dark, scary and just a little bit brutal. Those are our first impressions of Metro 2033 after a preview session with the game’s publisher THQ in Auckland.

Based on a book of the same name by Russian author Dmitry Glukhovsky, Metro 2033 casts you as a rather ordinary young Russian called Artyom living underground in the Moscow metro system after a nuclear war. You’re shacked up with a community of survivors who have lived down there for more than 20 years, and you’ve recently discovered that you and your comrades face an impending threat “from above”.

The game plays like a linear first person shooter, with a sprinkle of RPG in the form of shops, friends you meet along way and customisable kit and weapons. THQ has billed it as a “thinking man’s shooter”, as opposed to something like Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, which is more about non-stop, guns-blazing action.

Life in the metro is dimly lit, quiet, and often drunk. Vodka is the drink of choice among its inhabitants, who appear to live in small tribal communities that don’t always get along.
The fact that ammunition is the common currency, rather than money, gives you an idea of just how barbaric life has become and you regularly need to decide whether to use a bullet to buy something or whether to hold onto it to save your life later. Weapons include conventional knives, pistols and shotguns that have been around since before the nuclear apocalypse, but there’s also a selection of modified and home made weapons. These include a pistol with a crossbow on top of it, a sniper rifle that shoots ball bearings, and pipe bombs packed with nails.
The polished graphics show off super-realistic lighting on walls and steam drifting eerily up from the ground as you wander through the tunnels that link the 30 different Moscow metro stations featured in the game. Shadows loom as mutant creatures reminiscent of Half-Life approach a bend in the tracks and Artyom’s heart beat quickens (you can hear it beating faster) as he realises the impending danger.



One of the most impressive effects takes place when you don a gas mask to enter a radiated area, such as the surface. Your mask fogs up (this happens more quickly if you’re running or exerting yourself) and icicles will even form after a while because of the cold. Your mask can suffer cracks and scratches in fights, forcing you to find or buy a new one if you want unimpeded vision.

Some reviewers have compared Metro 2033 to the Fallout series and S.T.A.L.K.E.R but it is vastly different to both. Its only real similarity to Fallout, which is skewed far more towards the RPG-genre, is its post-apocalyptic plot. Comparisons with S.T.A.L.K.E.R (opposite) have more merit, considering that it looks extremely similar graphically and many of Metro’s programmers helped produce the original S.T.A.L.K.E.R. However, Metro has a more linear storyline and less of the RPG elements of its counterpart.

THQ says the game should provide the average gamer with at least 10 to 12 hours of game play. That’s not a huge amount, but it’s better than Modern Warfare 2, which provides a rather pitiful six to eight hours of single player fun. Of course, MW2 features an extremely popular multiplayer model – something Metro 2033 has decided to avoid entirely.