Metro Exodus is an early game of the year contender

The shift from underground to the surface has paid off for Metro Exodus, which offers a hopeful and action-packed tale of life after World War III.

The environments in the game really are well done.

The Metro games have gained quite a following since the first one, Metro 2033, was released in 2010.

Based on the novels by Russian author Dimitry Glukhovsky, they tell the story of Artyom and fellow residents of the Moscow underground railway (the Metro) who survived a nuclear attack on the city and have been living underground ever since, battling rival factions and mutated horrors alike.

The latest instalment — the third in the game series — is Metro Exodus, developed by 4A games and published by Deep Silver for PC, PlayStation 4and Xbox One.

Metro Exodus moves the setting from the Moscow underground railway to the above-ground world, which isn’t quite the desolate wasteland the Metro inhabitants had been led to believe.

Your character, Artyom, his wife Ana, and cohort of fellow Spartan Rangers find themselves aboard a Soviet-era steam locomotive named the Aurora, heading east on the Trans-Siberian Railway line in search of whatever remains of the Russian government.

The game can broadly be described as a survival shooter and takes place over the course of a year, starting in the winter and progressing through the seasons, with each season being represented by a different and visually-distinct location (winter on the Volga, summer by the Caspian Sea and so on).

Your home for much of the game is this Soviet-era steam engine, the Aurora.

Metro Exodus looks amazing, especially on a PC with a latest generation graphics card like the Nvidia RTX2060, 2070 or 2080 that supports ray tracing. Light — be it from torches, candles, lamps or things on fire — is an important visual effect in the game, and a ray-tracing capable card adds to the atmosphere in a range of subtle but impressive ways.

The game also looks superb in 4K on an Xbox One X as well, adding to the game’s experience and firmly establishing itself as a current-generation title.

Even generally, the game world is impressive to look at — whether it’s an old command bunker, the snowy ruins of a port, an overgrown Soviet youth camp, or the Moscow Metro tunnels. The levels are well made — the Caspian Sea level in particular strongly evokes the Mad Max films, with a desert setting, petrol as a vital resource, and a feudal leader.

There’s a lot of attention to detail in the game too — they way water ripples off the bow of a boat, light flickers from a torch or a banner flutters in the wind. It sounds like a small thing but it helps create a believable world.

While giving the appearance of being an open world, the locales are really more of a hub, with various objectives that need completing in different locations before your crew (and the Aurora) can move on.

The environments in the game really are well done.

I really liked the moments of real tenderness and humanity between the various locales. Artyom and his wife Ana share touching moments where he comforts her as she expresses fears about where their journey is taking them, and your comrades swap stories, give each other a hard time and speculate about what’s going on generally. Your fellow travellers all have distinct personalities and bring something different to the journey, from wry cynicism to despair to an interest in meeting members of the opposite sex.

Hope was a recurring theme throughout the game and made a welcome change from the almost nihilist approach found in many other post-apocalyptic titles.

What I also liked were the small ways your actions would be commented on in the game world. Where possible, I tried for a nonlethal approach against human enemies and left anyone who surrendered alone. In the Volga level, where I was working against a misguided religious cult, in one area I overheard guards saying that I was not a monster because I did not harm people who surrendered and also had not hurt any innocent civilians either.

The fact enemies can surrender was a nice touch as well — it made me feel like I was encountering real people who would prefer not to become intimately acquainted with a 5.45x45mm AK round when it was clear they’d come off second best.

The Russian winters haven’t gotten any less fierce following WWIII.

Making the human enemies more like people and less “random bad guy (winter camouflage edition)” added to the positive experience of the game — although there were plenty of non-human foes to feel the wrath of Mikhail Kalashnikov’s legacy too.

The gunplay in Metro Exodus was satisfying as well — ammunition is a limited resource, especially on higher difficulty levels, and there was a real feeling of having to make my shots count. The weapons in the game mostly have a real “cobbled together from random parts” aesthetic, and they looked like the sort of things people would actually make using whatever they could scavenge after the apocalypse.

My major criticism of the game is its use of a silent protagonist — having people talk to your character but not being able to respond comes across as either strange or very rude, especially given your character audibly narrates the journey in their diary so there’s no reason the developers couldn’t have them speaking lines to other characters in the game world too.

The enemy AI wasn’t the sharpest bayonet in the rack either, often failing to flank or not noticing when I walked up right next to them with a loaded shotgun levelled.

The story was engaging (if a bit predictable) and some of the voice acting wasn’t superb, but ultimately, this is as close to Half Life 3 as we’re likely to get and is also the first strong game of the year contender I’ve played this year.

Overall, however, there is a lot to like in this game, especially if (like me) you enjoy a solid single-player experience with interesting characters and a well-designed world to explore.

Metro Exodus is a great and engaging journey and one I highly recommend you undertake sooner rather than later.

Are you joining the crew of the Aurora to experience Metro Exodus? Continue the conversation on Twitter @RoyceWilsonAU

Originally published as Metro Exodus is an early game of the year contender