I bought Metro 2033 for PC, because my PC is awesome and I wanted a game that needs an awesome PC. To test my PC. For science.

Anyway, Metro 2033 is set in the train tunnels under Moscow, after a nuclear war. The surface is too nuked and frozen and irradiated for happy living, and it would appear that people/animals that were topside have mutated quite badly and are now quite ugly and exceptionally hungry.

You play a guy whos Station (ie little village place) is going to get destroyed by a heap of monsters, unless you can go out into the Metro and get help from other stations. Fair enough. That's the plot, really.

The gameplay is good, but to be honest, the mutants are stupidly tough. The smallest enemy takes 2 shotgun blast to the face at point blank to kill. All the "starter" weapons take approximately 9000 years to reload, and mutants always attack in large packs. So, basically, mutant fighting is not fun. I hate it. Later mutants, such as "Librarians" are stupid, and take 15 to 20 shotgun shells to the face at point blank range before they die. Before meeting these bastards, you're told to avoid them, and never turn your back on them. WELL GUESS WHAT. The game is a typical linear FPS, and you never get the chance to avoid them. Ever. Luckily, if you're careful, you won't have to take on more than 1 at a time though.

The game has a lot of cool features though.

Gas masks. Used in (surprise) gassy environments, and also on the surface, they stop you from suffocating in the noxious air. You collect filters and replace them as needed, as each filter only lasts for 15 minutes, if you don't exhert yourself too much. Also, the visor of the gas masks will crack and break if you take too much damage while wearing one. You only have 1 gas mask, so while you might have plenty of filters, if you're attacked while wearing one and the mask itself breaks, you're screwed unless you can find an intact one somewhere.
This makes those intense firefights great, as you can even shoot enemy gas masks off their faces, and watch them look for a replacement before suffocating dramatically in front of you. Some enemies carry spares though, but you can shoot them and shatter the visor, making them useless. Cool!

Bullet holes. Yep. Actual bullet holes, in thin metal and cloth. You can see through the holes to the other side. I thought it was pretty sweet.

Enemy gear. Instead of walking over enemies and picking up stuff, or looking at enemies and "using" them, you instead look at enemies and "use" the stuff on them... for example, a commando might have 3 AK47 mags on his chest, a pistol on his belt, a throwing knife in his boot and a pack of health kits in his right thigh pocket. So, you look at and "use" each individual item/area to pick up the gear, which makes the player feel more involved, and also you can see that you're stripping the body of gear, as the stuff is removed from the model as you take it.

Enemy body armour. The hitboxes are great, and allow you to shoot off shoulder pads, knee pads, helmets and masks. The body armour feels almost realistic to have to kill people through, so that's good. If you're a good shot, you can aim for unarmoured areas, or shoot off the armoured areas first, or just shoot them in the face. Every enemy is different though, with individual armour setups and loadouts.

The game is very pretty with dynamic shadows, motion blur, particle effects out the yin yang and dynamic smoke/gas. Glass also breaks and shatters very well, right down to gas masks being broken from a bullet.

Where it falls down is missed opportunities. There are some supernatural elements that are not used to their full potential, in particular some ghost style happenings that are never encountered while alone, and as such are not as scary as they could have been. Environmental anomolies are seen rarely, and are only dangerous if you do something outrageously stupid, like try to hug one.

The game incorporates both a medikit system and a health refill system if you don't take damage for a while. I've had to use the medikit once, and in the end it was partly only because I wanted to see if it did anything special. Answer: Not really.

You'll also die without explanation. Once I died because a building collapsed on me. It took me 3 tries before I figured it out. Another time I kicked it because a certain patch of water was insta-death. Or a mutant would insta-kill me from behind without warning. Several times I was killed by enemy gunfire, or stabbed in the face by a mutant claw and the games "load last checkpoint" screen told me I was killed by an anomoly, and how I could avoid anomolies in future. Great, but I'm not sure a shotgun to the back of the head is really an anomoly, and more the result of... well, a shotgun to the back of the head.

Combat would have benifited from more people shooting and less mutant shooting. Mutants are all close range attacks, so shotguns are really the only viable weapon of choice. Only 1 weapon has a melee attack too... The auto shotgun. The knife is hideously underpowered, even against unaware opponents.

One thing the game does right is stealth shooting with silenced weapons. Oh boy can you go to town with a silencer. Much fun to be had by all.

All in all, it's a good game by the same bunch who made S.T.A.L.K.E.R, very pretty and suitably creepy/action packed. No multiplayer, but oh well.

Good game, but it could have been better. I'd say worth getting if you see it for under $60.

Graphics: 10/10
Story: 8/10
Gameplay: 9/10 when good, 4/10 when bad
Sound: 8/10

This post has been edited by princecoo on July 27, 2010 09:56 pm