The Metro is a very depressing and Soviet place. But also very beautiful and moving.

Got this game for free quite a while ago in a free offer and boy am I glad I did. I had heard it was a good game to be used as a benchmark for high end PCs but the game itself wasn't that great according to reviews so I was keen to see if both of these points were true.

The first part was definitely true. With all settings turned up to 11, the underground tunnels of the Metro and especially the nuclear wasteland of the surface look absolutely stunning. Absolutely. Stunning.

But much to my pleasure, the second part was not true at all. The gameplay, while appearing to be a fairly normal FPS, does have extra depth to it in that there are also a lot of stealth parts to it (which shockingly are not awful) and survival parts to it where you have to manage air filters on the surface to keep breathing. The story if based off a book of the same name by a Ukranian author, so it also has a good plot to it. It centres around a young dude called Artyom who lives in the Russian Metro system after a nuclear war has ravaged the country. He is searching for a way to stop the Dark Ones, a race of humanoids that have evolved on the radiation scorched surface of the earth from destroying his home Metro station and must travel through the Metro and across parts of the surface to achieve this goal. But of course, nothing is ever easy and he meets many people and things along the way determined to stop him.

Because everything in this world is very grey and Soviet, which is quite depressing even when intact, and all of those things have been ravaged by nuclear war, the setting is a very sombre one indeed. But thanks to the 4A engine which seems to rival even the Cryengine, all of this is rendered in amazing detail and looks truly beautiful somehow.

The gunplay is very well executed also. Being mostly ruined old-world guns, a lot of them have quite shaky stability. And there were some strange difficulty spikes like stabbing an unaware guy in the back would not kill him, but a few shots to your knees could kill you but these were small annoyances.

All in all a very engrossing adventure with an excellent story that makes you genuinely care about the people involved. It is also properly scary and exceedingly tense in many sections so if possible, play this during the day and not alone. Great stuff through and through. Looking forward to the sequel. Reviews were wrong. Yet again.