Metro: Last Light

Metro: Last Light was an experience I was expecting so much more from. Some of it is my fault, some of it is the developers fault and some of it is my friend's fault. There is so much positivity around the game that I was pretty blind sided by the actual game once I started playing it. Some of this blame is something I would like to personally place on +Kamel Tamimi and actually let you know that he bought this game instead of Bioshock Infinite. He actively compare this game to Bioshock Infinite which is one of the best games to come out in an entire god damn generation. His terrible taste in games aside, lets get into this review so I can be done with it.

So, Metro: Last Light is a single player first person shooter, based on Russian author Dmitry Glukhovsky's Metro 2033. The game was develop by 4A Games, and published by Deep Silver in 2013 on the PC, PS3 and Xbox. A Redux version of the game was released in 2014 as well on the same platform as well as the newest PlayStation and Xbox.

The biggest selling point for me that really got me over the edge to buy the game was the fact that I knew it was based on a Russian story by a Russian writer and that really struck me as unique. Even as I played the game and was disappointed by other aspects of it, the only reason I could keep trudging along was the fact the narrative and the world built by this narrative was unique, real while still being fantastical and immensely deep. The different factions and locations as thoughts are just fascinating and I wanted to explore them and just see more and more of them and try to get my head around it all.

That is where it all kind of ends though for, I pretty much didn't like another aspect of the game. Graphically, the game isn't that impressive, it was released in 2013 and never looked great to begin with and now with only a few years having gone by it really doesn't look good. Textures are really clear to spot and the game felt like it was just like one giant grey/brown mass to me. It was tremendously boring to look at and for the most part despite having some really impressive locations and vistas that could have made the experience more enjoyable if they had been given a more active role in the game and not simply been rest stops in between missions with nothing to do or places that you quickly walkthrough in the missions themselves.

You know, stuff like this.

The gameplay was also really standard, this is more a problem on the whole FPS genre as opposed to Metro: Last Light individually though. You have the same guns you expect to see in any shooter and they all work the same way you expect them to work in any shooter. There is also the one hit kill knife that work regardless of whether or not you hit them in the head or the buttcheek. I don't like FPS's that much and I expected that it would be a bit of a chore playing the game, but, what made it ever worse is the fact that the game has some actual technical problems that make playing it even more boring and frustrating. There is of course your standard graphical FPS error of bodies getting stuck in walls, I came across a couple more unique things such as bodies not dropping to the floor once they were killed, getting stuck in the stealth kill position and unable to pull out your gun afterwards, becoming invisibile and being able to walk right up to an emeny and stand there for a few seconds to confirm that he doesn't see you before shooting him and noticing that none of the other enemies in the area even moved or reacted despite being in range of sight. I could go on, but I'm sure you get the point by now, this game has 99 problems and a glitch is most definately one of those problems.

If the game could have had more of this and less badly rendered Russia asses we mght have got along a bit more.

The DLC the game has also isn't anything special. I enjoyed it a bit since they were stories of different characters from within the world on Metro as opposed to Artyom from the main story. But, the same issues that are in the base game as also here so I think I only made it through three of the DLC's before I just got bored with the game and uninstalled it.

At the end of the day, Metro: Last Light was a disappointment for me. The world was so rich, it was so deep, it was different and unique and had that shine of something new and novel when you just discover it. However, its attempt to reach realism through it graphics left its character right in the middle of the uncanny valley while their color pallet that almost exclusively only used colors that would come from vomiting into a cement mixer left the game looking dull and boring. This is aside from the technical issues in the game that either make it to easy to get through parts of the game or break to the extent that you can't defend yourself. I wouldn't recomend getting this game, yes my opinion might be a bit tainted since I don't like FPS games that much but I felt really fell short of its epic narrative. One thing I can say for sure though, is that the game got me interested in getting the book the game is based on, there I can just get into the narrative without having to deal with any glitches or bugs.