Metro 2033 produced the closest thing to a pulse the first-person shooter genre’s felt since Call of Duty 4 and BioShock rewrote the rules in 2007. Individual results may vary, but the campaigns for subsequent entries in those landmark games seemed to do little other than amplify ideas established by their predecessors, and it’s not like Killzone, Resistance, or Crysis set the world in fire either. New games certainly had great ideas – on the proper platform Far Cry 2 was the perfect anecdote generator and Left 4 Dead finally established proper cooperative play – but a campaign, a purely single player experience, barred an influx of fresh concepts until Metro 2033 kicked the door down in 2010.
While it certainly obeyed its share of trends, Metro 2033 spent most of its time creating new ones. Chief among its best ideas was its economy; in post-apocalyptic Russia, pre-apocalypse bullets are used as currency. These could also be used as actual bullets – bullets that function more effectively than the comparative crap you could buy or find – but then you’d literally be shooting away your hard earned money. On harder difficulties maintaining any sort of ammo supply was a chore and the desperation when you’d break down and shoot your money was constant source of tension. Managing your depleting air filters, as any terrestrial exploration of the Russian surface required a gas mask, layered another source of tension. Combined with labyrinthine exploration of levels like the library and an emphasis on stealth when facing human aggressors, the Ukrainian development team at 4A Games went out of their way to create an experience divergent from then-current Western trends.
Metro 2033 also made strides toward creating an engaging narrative. Groups of ragtag survivors stuffed through various stations in the titular Metro subway tunnels forged empathy in the mind of the player. Exploring long abandoned areas satisfied any, “what happened here”? curiosities that might be induced after an apocalyptic event. Likewise, the burgeoning supernatural element of the “Dark Ones” was rarely referred to explicitly, existing only as a vague supposition rather than a focal point of the narrative. Post-apocalyptic Neo-Nazis and surging communists was a little hard to swallow, but without the names different allied factions seemed like a natural cultural occurrence. Metro 2033 felt like an unvisited world, or at least more so than worlds from other games that were purported to take place on entirely different planets.
Metro: Last Light seemed to be the ideal follow-up. Released three years after Metro 2033 (and after surviving a publisher transition from THQ to Deep Silver), it wasn’t unreasonable to expect Last Light to pick up where its predecessor last off. Defining exactly what that meant created a point of conflict in the mind of the player. It could either go the traditional videogame sequel route of amplifying everything beloved in the original game, or it could go off in a bold new direction, embracing the spirit of the game that came before it. I suppose the issue is, given its pedigree, most of the 2033 fans were looking for Last Light to embrace the latter. Metro 2033 was rough around the edges, sure, but it succeeded in creating a distinctive experience in a genre badly in need of any form of innovation. Once it’s been done, who wanted to relive those ideas over again?
For all of its assumed ambition, Last Light comes off as a hybrid between Metro 2033 and a modern shooter. Bullets-as-currency, a novel idea in the previous game, functioned as an afterthought it Last Light. Sure, it was still there as a system, but it served no function. On normal difficulty the player always has more than enough money and is rarely forced into situations where the ammunition supply is scarce. The same can be said about gas mask filters; there’s always plenty around. Even though the last fifth of the game takes place outdoors, every single enemy soldier seems to be carrying a filter ripe for looting. An argument can be made for increasing difficulty to ‘right’ the wildly off course ship – but the highest difficulty mode in Last Light is only available for an extra fee and technically not part of the game proper.
Even in areas where Last Light found success, it felt like it was doing little other than offering a bigger and better version of what it had already done. Like its predecessor, most of the sequences where the protagonist Artyom faces human opposition also double as potential stealth sequences. Objectively, these are all quite good in Last Light. There’s always a way around carnage and violence, even though doing so properly is often incredibly difficult. The issue is that Last Light merely obliges this same idea in escalating series of backdrops. You sneak around Neo-Nazis with a destructive agenda again. You slide around and under patrolling guards again. Enemies are kind of idiots and won’t be able to see Artyom if his watching isn’t glowing again. These sequences were novel the first time around and, mechanically speaking, they’re equally satisfying in Last Light – but that’s just it. They feel equal to similar sections of Metro 2033 without particularly exceeding them.
Remaining combat areas are almost identical to Metro 2033. Hoards of charging Watchmen are in frequent supply, as are requisite turret sequences that populate so many other games. Gone is the intricate and ambiguous level design of the past and in its place are hallways masquerading as environments. The lone exception is found in chapter 16, “Marshes,” which presents Artyom with a subtle list of objectives amongst a dangerous open-area field. More often than not, though, the game merely teases vast areas of wide expanse (the opening of Red Square, in particular, oozed potential).
By far the most disappointing aspect of Last Light is its narrative. It vies for improvement in creating a constant antagonist in the form of Pavel, but it fizzles out with its absurd reliance on the so-called Dark Ones as a constant call to adventure. It’s likely in step with the narrative found in the novels that inspired these games, but it sheds any degree of subtlety when crafting the character of Artyom. Yet again, after Dead Space, Mass Effect, and almost every other game, we’re saddled with a character who by some cruel act of writing emerges as the Chosen One to his (always his) particular subset of the human race. Any mystery is eviscerated; Artyom is the chosen one and born savior.
It should be noted that, from a technical standpoint, Last Light is a hell of an achievement. Pushing my year old hardware on max settings, it looked as good as any other game I’ve played. Taking into account the awful working conditions and shoestring budget, and it’s even more impressive. Even the art department, which had so thoroughly explored dilapidated architecture in the previous game, found new ways to express their ideas (Chapter 26’s beautiful flashbacks are marvelous).
Under no circumstances should one consider Last Light a bad game. Its campaign is still ahead of its Western counterparts, but it’s ultimately disappointing when placed alongside its predecessor. It seems 4A Games wanted to make a guaranteed hit as opposed to another cult classic, and it’s hard to fault that line of thinking in the cutthroat world of game development. That being said, it’s hard to see how the fruits of their labor are disappointing from a purely critical point of view.
