A Gorgeous Visual Adaptation of a Book; A RelativelyPoor Game
First things first, this game is gorgeous. The overworld, which was frozen in the first game but is now symbolically thawing, looks more or less like STALKER taken to its aesthetic conclusion. At times the game, as it is being played, looks like the visual target concept art of other games. The underground areas manage to not be as monotonous as a game taking place wholly inside of metro tunnels should-- there are clever details all over the place to distinguish one area from the next and keep the environments from looking uniform. It is one of the most successful games I've played at making the spaces you inhabit feel lived-in and real. Especially the towns. The towns, which were already great in Metro 2033, are amazing here both in terms of graphics and sound design. A dozen conversations happen around you at once naturally creating the buzz of a crowd and the game doesn't care if you're tempted to stop and listen or not. A guy plays a guitar but is partially drowned out by the music blasting out of the shitty whorehouse. Everything feels claustrophobic and packed full of people, even when there aren't many NPCs explicitly visible. It's really really really well done.
So that's graphics and sound. I might as well stop there, because that's most of what Metro: Last Light has to offer.
It's a weird game that doesn't know what the fuck it wants to be. First of all it's an adaptation of a book, and is paced accordingly-- which is to say poorly for a video game. You spend a lot of time listening to people talk, or just walking through scripted sequences in order to establish mood. There are many scenes of pure business; story beats that simply do not translate into gameplay. Some story beats are skipped entirely. To use a fictional example let's say you spend forty whole minutes hanging out with a major character named Glenn. Then you reach a narrated loading screen which simply says, "Hey you know Glenn? Glenn left." And then Glenn never comes back.
Most of the gameplay is split into human and monster sections. Human sections are pretty run of the mill 2010s stealth gameplay: watch your light meter, do cinematic takedowns, do headshots with a silenced pistol... These sections are passable; routine but fun enough and they gel with the atmosphere. There are more of these sections than in Metro 2033, but still way too few considering they are the closest this comes to being a video game.
The monster sections are a nightmare. See, the game isn't very hardcore, but it seems to think it is. You are severely limited in ammunition and have to scavenge what you can to get by. "Play smart, conserve your ammo" the game says. Then it locks you in a room with 30 monsters that must be killed to progress, and all of them take half a magazine to take down. This isn't a situation where you've fucked up and aggroed everything, this is just what the monster gameplay is: constantly fucking you over. Monsters are generally of the melee variety with very few exceptions and avoiding their attacks seems more or less impossible much of the time. There are way too many instances of fending off infinite waves of monsters-- with your limited ammunition while waiting for an elevator or elevator surrogate to arrive.
See, in Metro's sister-series, STALKER, going toe-to-toe with a bunch of snorks is dangerous. But it's also an open world game, so you can anticipate and prepare and use the wide boundaries of your agency as a player to your advantage. But here you have two weapon slots, you're stuck on rails, and when the scripted encounter monsters unfairly overwhelm you it ppops you back at a checkpoint with your only option to go walk into the same meat grinder again. You bash your head against the wall until you eventually break through.
It is exhausting and terrible. Speaking of which, the Russian Misery Porn tone seems to have been dialed back. Metro 2033 was nihilistic and chronically depressive, with even the loading screen narrator sounding like he's minutes from opening his wrists. Last Light seems more interested in being an action adventure with brief snippets of poignancy. It simply presents the characters' tortured existence as fact and moves on instead of lingering upon it. At times it even channels Call of Duty (poorly).
Oh yeah, and there's a romance subplot that goes like this:
Female comrade keeps shit talking you -> ???? -> She likes you now -> She gets kidnapped and you rescue her -> You fuck -> She leaves the game forever.
I suppose my thesis statement is as such: The devs are clearly talented, the graphics technology, artistry, and ability to craft environments are first rate. They just need to figure out what the fuck it is they're doing, or something.
