Metro Redux (Video Game)
Ted Hentschke
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Developed by 4A
Published by Deep Silver
Rated M for Mature
Available on PC, Xbox One, PS4
Everyone has that game they go back to. Maybe it’s just a certain level, maybe it’s the feel of the controls, or maybe it’s because it holds some special place in their lives as a glossy nostalgia bomb. I am not talking about multiplayer games like League of Legends or Counter-Strike, who make or break on being infinitely replayable. I am talking about single player affairs.
For a long time, my go-to go-back-to was Resident Evil 4, specifically on the Gamecube. Something about how the laser sight would bold as you drew a bead on a crazed villager’s skull just felt right. When I was spending a summer studying in England, I bought a European Gamecube just so I wouldn’t be without it for 3 months. That is a special kind of love that a man can only share with a digital product that deeply understands him.
Then that game became Metro: 2033. There was a specific level where the player emerges into a snowy waste from the sewers, attempting to sneak past a Nazi patrol to get into their compound. Every time I play that level, racing my way up to a vantage point to pop masks one overpumped round at a time, I reach a rapturous murder-nirvana. Metro: Last Light followed in its predecessor’s tradition of being balls-to-the-wall badass but lacked some of the openness I preferred about the first.
All said, I wasn’t too excited about the redux. 2033 is only 4 years old and was so graphically impressive it can still be used to benchmark new computers, and I have eaten sandwiches older than Last Light. Great games, sure, but it seemed like another pointless re-release. Games like Sleeping Dogs might be just as old, but at least Sleeping Dogs had a metric fuckton of DLC justifying the all-in-one package.
Redux runs the games on the latest 4A engine, which is admittedly gorgeous. 2033 obviously gets the biggest bump, and while I could notice real differences in the Last Light graphics, it is hard to justify buying a whole new game for slightly better rendered post-apocalyptic depression. As a PC gamer and therefore above the petty quibbles of the console masses, I realize this package is not aimed at me. It was mostly made to introduce the games to a freshly rotating console market. Keeping in mind how sparse the library of next gen is, now is a great time for companies to reintroduce quality products. On the PC, I already have a ton of games, and the artificial barriers of console gens are to me but mere landmarks of how hard developers are going to be trying for a few months.
The biggest improvement comes from the introduction of some of Last Light’s new mechanics into 2033. Players can now kill more stealthily, perform melee takedowns, and wipe gunk off of their gas masks. This is really a welcome edition to 2033, as the game’s lackluster melee system and sometimes odd stealth interactions were the root of all of my scant few complaints with it. It was disheartening to love a game where shooting a man wearing a hockey mask in the face was actually less lethal than hitting his chest. These were all minor gripes, but it is good to see they have fixed them.
Other than that, there really isn’t much to say. It looks a bit better, and 2033 plays a bit better. The Last Light DLC comes all bundled in but is a pretty forgettable addition. I didn’t notice any of the improved AI or weapon handling that the game promoted, but they say it’s there, so I won’t argue it. We already have reviews on Dread Central for both games, one of them written by my boss, so I feel a bit weird reviewing the games again. Still, I feel even weirder just leaving this at a page and a quarter, so I guess I can give my brief thoughts on the merits of both.
If someone were to put a gun to my head right now and ask me which I prefer, I’d probably say 2033. While the second is a better game from a technical standpoint, what with all the expanded arsenal and fully rendered boobies, I kind of liked the first’s more subtle approach to the supernatural. In the first, the antagonist “dark ones” are a nebulous, shadowy threat. The second opts for a “everyone is somebody’s bad guy” narrative instead. While I typically like that approach, it throws you into the world with set-piece moment after set-piece moment. It offers more varied and realized locations than the first, but it often feels like you are just getting shuffled along from place to place for the sake of showing you what’s going on rather than being on an actual journey for the player character.
The more muted supernatural elements of 2033 did an excellent job of creating a grey area where anything could happen and be believable. In the wake of nuclear disaster, the whole world is forced to live underground. The game doesn’t really bother with the details of how, but it presents enough realism to feel believable. No nuclear apocalypse would be complete without monsters, so the game introduces some giant rat things to fight right off the bat. You learn of the “dark ones” relatively early, but it never really becomes clear if they are just another mutant threat or something more. As the game goes on, you are given glimpses of ghosts, spatial anomalies, goo monsters, and finally the twisted world of the dark ones. While this might normally sound like a jaunty sci-fi romp, it is presented in such a gradual manner that piece by piece the world makes realistic sense in conjunction with the fantastical. The ghosts are there because the world allows it, not because some designer demanded it.
While Last Light certainly has a larger scope, it gets bogged down in specifics. The game takes the bold approach that you actually got the bad ending in 2033 and tells the story from that starting point. All of the elements of the first are there, such as mutants and ghosts, but they become an overt story element rather than an ambiguous threat. You directly interact with a dark one, and while it does a lot to flesh out the world, I’m not sure it does so to the betterment of the narrative. It often feels like you are thrown into poignant moments specifically set up to show the player the most extreme elements of the world, rather than just a guy experiencing a world. Which one you like more is really going to boil down to personal preference, but for my two cents 2033 just told the story in a more interesting way.
I will say one of the things that certainly set me off about Last Light is the moral binary against killing people. In Last Light, you cannot get the good ending if you go through the game killing people. I get that in a game where everyone is someone’s hero and another person’s villain, you want to make a statement that wanton murder is bad. Still, I didn’t buy this quad barreled makeshift shotgun to not blast people in the dick with it, so the game is a bit at odds with itself when my only option is to sneak by or slap people into a nap. Sure, it breaks it up by having segments where you are free to go whole hog on some monsters, but fighting enemies that rush straight at you versus enemies that react like people is a different experience. Each is satisfying in its own way, but to cut out the enjoyment of one to achieve the best ending feels like cutting off your legs to go in the handicap line at Disneyland.
2033 took a different and unique approach to unlocking the best ending. Rather than boil down to some pointless moral binary like “murder is bad,” the game rewarded you for seeing all that the world had to see. Sure, you had to give a bullet to an oddly placed beggar here or there, and you could miss an ammo stash and be a few invisible points away from ultimate triumph, but it was a unique way to go about multiple endings. It fit the game world and how the ending played out. While Last Light had similar qualifiers, you can also get the bad ending for murdering Nazis and rapists. Really, not joking; the game gets mad at you for killing Nazis and rapists. I’m not sure which one is worse to get mad at me for, and I don’t recall any specifically Nazi rapists, but let’s just agree that both of those groups are generally okay video game bullet fodder and counter-intuitive to punish for.
All said, though, I really do love both games. If you haven’t played either, then certainly buy them. If you have, I can’t really say it’s worth the asking price. It used to be half off if you already owned it, but even at $25 I couldn’t really recommend the buy in for what is basically the same experience. I’m going to rate the package very highly, but only by virtue that the bundled package itself is totally worth the asking price for newcomers to the series. I think the practice of re-releasing shit that’s not even a year old is pretty despicable, but given the changing of the console guard, I can kind of understand it. The bundle itself is an absurdly good value, even if I wouldn’t purchase it myself.
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Categorized:Horror Gaming Reviews
