I tried playing Metro Exodus twice in the past and by that I mean put it down in the first level because it was so boring, but this time I powered through because I read that it had open world elements past the introduction. Was it better than my first two impressions? Yeah. Do I recommend it? Not really. Here's my review for the game.

You're Artyom, the mute protagonist of the past Metro games who really wants to leave the Moscow metro because it's a shit hole following a nuclear apocalypse. The non-spoiler premise of the game is that it turns out there are people alive outside of Moscow so you take a train across Russia to go fulfill various objectives. The introductory level is so questionably dull because you'd think a game would put an exciting hook at the beginning that would be representative of the experience to come but instead you get a slow linear sequence with a lot of sneaking and dialogue. Once you get past this it opens up to the main loop which consists of visiting a sequence of open levels to complete the main objective of that location. For example this is Volga, the first stop after exiting the capital wasteland.

Core Loop

The gameplay can be described as an exploratory FPS with a focus on organic presentation and by organic I mean physical actions you do as if you actually exist in the world. You have to pressurize your gun when it gets low, charge a hand-held generator to use your light, wipe your gas mask if it gets clouded with dirt. There are no automatic waypoints and map markers have to be manually discovered by focusing onto the location through binoculars. UI gauges like light and radiation levels are physical devices on your wrist. Your map is a physical clipboard you pull out that doesn't pause the game. The free form exploration is refreshing as it doesn't feel like the game is eyeing you at every step, it just gives you the map and trust you to find your way in the apocalyptic world.

The main rewards for exploring are new weapons and weapon parts that enhance your ability to kill humans and mutants alike. It's really fun to navigate the world with a weapon you've personally crafted throughout your journey but the facade starts to crumble in the second open level when you realize the only things you're looting are essentially supplies and weapon parts. You have all these seemingly interesting POIs which you clear out whilst spending precious ammo and health kits, and all you collect are more supplies which you use to craft ammo and health kits which you wouldn't have used if you hadn't gone in the first place. Mutant encounters are particularly pointless because they drop nothing and there's no level system in the game.

The only meaningful progression is the added functionality you get from weapon parts like a night vision scope or long barrel for better fire power. This is exciting at first but the fun factor caps out when you realize that weapon types and customization are very conservative; that is to say there are no weapons that would be significantly awesome to use like a grenade launcher or a flamethrower. There is an ammo type that lights enemies on fire but that's about as drastic as it gets.

Enemy AI is also very simple so there's not much pressure to approach combat encounters with different strategies; Human shoot outs devolve into clicking on heads that generously poke out from cover. All this means is that there's not much room to play around with the goodies you collect in an interesting way. Like sure I just went through multiple buildings to build a gun that has marginally better ammo capacity but what for? At first I took my time to be immersed in the atmosphere of the wasteland but found myself rushing through when it dawned on me how vapid the world was in terms of gameplay elements. It's a very impressive landscape that ends up being a backdrop for mashing E on containers.

Visuals and Audio

Graphically this game looks really good. For the record I played the enhanced edition which adds Ray tracing and DLSS to the original release from 2019 and it gives the environment a lot of realism when exploring. This comes paired with decent performance that doesn't detract from the visuals. Anecdotally I'd say I had between 50 to 70 fps and no stutters on an RTX 3060ti which deserves a lot of praise in the current landscape of buggy and stuttery titles.

From the squeaky sound of replacing a filter to the rustle of your pack as you place it down for crafting, the audio design also adds to the realism but this immersion unfortunately doesn't extend to NPC dialogues.

You know how some people in real life talk like they're giving a presentation even when you're not saying anything. Every character in this game is kinda like that. Artyom is mute yet every person you encounter goes on a monologue when you enter their dialogue range and the worst part is that they all independently talk over each other like a recording that can't be paused midway. I'm using subtitles and there are instances where the subtitles of a person speaking isn't even on the screen because it's already showing text from a different person.

Conclusion

Metro Exodus presents a very refreshing take on the semi-open world FPS genre which seems promising at first but doesn't evolve into anything interesting as the game goes on. It feels like I was baited into a much bigger experience that never arrived before the game ended. I think a comparable game that hits the mark for me would be Fallout where your exploration is rewarded with say an interesting questline or a rocket launcher.

⭐⭐/5