Metro Exodus Brings the Series' Grim Atmosphere Aboveground

By taking the Metro titles out of the Metro, 4A Games is conducting a massive experiment—one that mostly succeeds.
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By taking the Metro titles out of the Metro, 4A Games is conducting a massive experiment—one that mostly succeeds.4A Games

Before playing Metro Exodus, or any game in the Metro series, there's something you have to do: Go to the Options screen and find the audio options. Turn subtitles on, and then change the speaking dialog from English to Russian. I am loath to tell anyone they're playing a videogame wrong, but this is the right way to play the Metro 2033 series.

It's the right way because Metro, as a whole, is defined by its atmosphere. Based on a series of Russian novels and set in a distinctly Russian post-apocalypse, these games, created by Ukrainian development team 4A Games, have always been about setting up an intense mood. Earlier games take place in Moscow's Metro system, which becomes a giant fallout shelter for the city's survivors after a nuclear attack—an entire civilization huddled in subway tunnels. These are games about the desperation and privation of everyday life 20 years after the end of the old civilization, less concerned with apocalyptic imagery in and of itself and more with the particularly bleak and isolated way of life that's resulted from it.

Metro Exodus, as the name suggests, changes up that atmosphere by taking the Metro denizens out of the subway. You play as Artyom, a member of a small group of soldiers and civilians on a stolen train, riding out of Moscow with gas masks and guns, hoping against hope to find somewhere on the surface habitable enough to start a new life. Even in this new setting, though, atmosphere rules: The story is less about the politics that led to the apocalypse or the meaning we can draw from it and more about broken train parts, water tanks running empty, and a small band of survivors trying to find hope in the creaking, rusted tracks stretching out before them. It's a game about hope, community, and desperately trying to stay alive when reality itself seems to have decided it's your time to die.

By taking the Metro games out of the Metro, though, 4A Games is conducting a massive experiment, weaving in new gameplay styles and environments into a series that has mostly thrived on violence and stealth in dark corridors. The corridors are still there, sometimes, but there are also vast expanses of desert, frozen marshlands, burning oil rigs, and miles of tundra. This is not an open-world game exactly, but it has several smaller open worlds in it, stops on your caravan's journey.

While these spaces don't immediately feel like they suit the series' somewhat stiff combat and movement, there are some ideas that really shine. Artyom's tools become everything—making sure his flashlight is charged (by hand, of course), crafting ammunition and gun parts out of stolen and scavenged scrap, hoarding oxygen canisters for a gas mask when the air becomes too toxic to breathe. Metro Exodus, for all the plenty it has in terms of space, is incredibly effective at making you feel like you have just enough resources to survive and no more. Monsters and strange anomalies roam the landscape, and getting into a fight with a band of mutants is almost never a better idea than running. This is a world full of things stronger than you, larger than you, threats designed to leave you running on empty and running, period.

Which is to say Metro Exodus has done precisely what it needed to do by bringing the degradation of the Metro world to the surface, retaining the scavenger's terror of feeling constantly at the bottom of the food chain in almost every situation. It falters in places, certainly. The enemies you confront on the journey are fairly exceptionally boring, all Mad Max scavengers and uninteresting cultists. The earlier Metro games treated the Moscow subway society as a sort of petri dish for failed political ideas, with a Fourth Reich and a revival of the Soviet Union and more, and those ideas feel appropriate to the setting, distinct. The other societies you meet in Metro Exodus feel like they could be in any apocalypse story, unfortunately.

The game, as a whole, is full of jank, little frictions in control schemes and design that might be frustrating for some players. It plays idiosyncratically, and unless you learn its particularities it'll be endlessly aggravating.

Still, though—the mood, the atmosphere, the sense of being a part of a band of hopeful warriors, streaking through the ruined world. The memory of a maze of disgusting subway tunnels. Guns that break, jam, and scream in agony as they fire across Siberian snowdrifts. With Metro Exodus, the Metro series remains, resolutely, itself.


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