Metro: Last Light Review

The charm of Metro: Last Light rests in its story and setting. The gameplay is solid, too, but Last Light also suffers from some notable problems

Getting everything out of Metro: Last Light requires slow and patient play. In a post-apocalyptic adventure that relies a great deal on constant bits of exposition, the experience quickly grows into something much more than just your everyday shooter. The more time you spend exploring, listening, reading, and watching, the more you appreciate what 4A Games has created: an interesting story-driven single-player-only FPS. It undoubtedly rewards methodical players.
Getting through Metro: Last Light also requires a different kind of patience, the kind that lets you forgive occasionally uneven play, questionable AI, and a story that starts strong but ends flat. These issues aren’t enough to sink Last Light – it’s most certainly a good game – but 4A Games’ latest foray is certainly hindered by them.

Inspired by the Metro universe created by author Dmitry Glukhovsky, Last Light is a follow-up to 2010’s Metro 2033’s riveting story of the years following a mutually assured destruction nuclear holocaust from the Russian point of view. Metro: Last Light shows this world-changing event in a stunning opening cutscene that illustrates the bombardment of Moscow as Russia launches its own missile stockpile, when it’s already too late for anything but revenge. By the time you jump in, decades have passed since that fateful day. Survivors are packed into the dark and always-dangerous subway tunnels under the dilapidated, radioactive capital city.
You’re cast as one of these survivors, a ranger named Artyom, the hero of Metro 2033 returned for another valiant adventure. Artyom, along with his group of survivors -- and innocent bystanders in general -- find themselves caught with increasing frequency in the middle of warring factions in the metro, a situation made all the more dangerous and untenable by the mutated creatures that live both in the tunnels and on the surface. Metro’s world is tangibly dangerous and rife with terror, with a feeling of risk and foreboding around virtually every corner. The political thread that connects everything – how surviving factions lucky just to be alive could still be at each other’s throats -- makes the situation that much more interesting.
Last Light presents itself linearly, but it does a wonderful job of setting up plenty of context for your actions and goes to great lengths to make itself more than just another shooter as it alternates between missions that are action-packed and those that are slower and more deliberate. The latter are what make Last Light truly shine, for it’s here that you get to experience the careful attention to detail that 4A Games has packed into its dystopian adventure. The mood and atmosphere pad gametime with something more meaningful than loading screens and bad dialogue (though Last Light’s dialogue is littered with sometimes-abysmal Russian accents).
Exploring the various outposts and settlements you encounter conjures up tangible thoughts about what a post-apocalyptic situation would be like. Some of the better locations successfully transport players to this fictional place and time in question. Factory manufacturing is no more, large-scale agriculture is impossible, everything that already exists suddenly has a new, ingenious use, and just about anything you can hold in your hand – from an old postcard showing the colorful pre-war world to finely made bullets that act as currency – is precious. Precious, too, is electricity, clean water, and breathable air, the latter of which becomes essential to gameplay as you constantly have to juggle gas masks and filters to scrub the atmosphere’s isotope-laden oxygen.

But there’s more in Last Light than just things to look at. Discovery also comes through conversation, and while Artyom is your typical silent protagonist, everyone around you has a great deal to say, even if they’re not talking directly to you. You can spend a great deal of time listening to these conversations, building context for and understanding of the plight of the metro’s survivors, holding on to life by a mere string. You can even see things from Artyom’s point of view in the form of journal entries strewn around the tale’s various chapters. In a clever twist, these weren’t written by others; when found, Artyom will write notes to himself in his journal, working around his silent posture and providing players with one of two ways you get insight from the protagonist himself. The only time you ever actually hear him speak is during load screens when he verbally explains what’s coming up next.
Last Light’s plot weaknesses are readily visible, too. It starts out strong and really got me into Artyom’s plight – which I won’t elaborate on here – but things get muddled towards the end. With a chance to focus more on the survivors, their settlements, and individual stories, Last Light ends up getting mired down in a more supernatural tale that’s simply not as interesting as everything grounded in post-apocalyptic reality. By the last third of the game, I was longing for more about the Nazis and Communists (yes, both faction factions survived the apocalypse) and less about otherworldly entities. When it matters, Last Light chooses to ignore the politics and personalities that prove far more interesting.
There’s plenty of action to be had in Last Light, though its gameplay isn’t as strong as its presentation. This isn’t a guns-blazing shooter; at least, it’s not meant to be. It’s a stealth-first game that changes between bouts of forced action and slow-paced, methodical sequences that dare you to keep quiet and stay out of sight. Little things, like crouching while walking and unscrewing light bulbs or extinguishing oil lamps can leave your foes at a disadvantage and give you the edge, though Last Light’s predictable and easy-to-manipulate enemy AI removes much of the drama if you want to play with a stealth slant.

Indeed, getting through most stealth sequences requires stunningly little thought, and only late in the campaign are you in any real danger of running into trouble. Simply outmaneuvering, flanking, and backstabbing -- or knocking unconscious -- adversaries is the name of the game, though there doesn’t seem to be much of a point in letting anyone live by merely clocking them in the skull. When they are grouped together and talking, you usually have to wait for them to stop and walk away. If they don’t, then there’s almost assuredly a way around them. Of course, if you’re dying for some action, you could always just start shooting. Just be prepared to reap the whirlwind; if an enemy alerts his comrades, heavily-armored backup will scour the area looking for you, and you’ll need to use all of the firepower you have to survive, supplemented by the ammo, firearms and other goods your foes constantly drop once felled.
On the other hand, with Last Light’s litany of mutated creatures, stealth gameplay won’t work. The guns-blazing approach is a requirement, and it’s in these action-oriented engagements that the adventure begins to lose a little of its luster. The interplay between being underground in dank tunnels and caverns and on the surface in hazy, debris-strewn sunlight is admittedly brilliant – post-blast Moscow is stunningly detailed and a highlight of Last Light -- but fighting the abominations that stalk the desolate cityscape leaves something to be desired. These frays run the gamut from acceptable to obnoxious, and there are a few instances that vividly illustrate that while human enemy AI is weak, creature AI is too aggressive. This could be lazily explained away by the game’s lore, but Last Light tends to create the wrong kind of scares during fights with abominations in particular, the fright that comes from knowing that the odds are against you due to unbalanced, frenzied AI.

Metro's political intrigue is, at times, fascinating.

Nonetheless, Last Light’s economy keeps things interesting if you let it. Borrowing from the last game, you’ll be able to spend bullets to purchase weapons, explosives, and other assorted gear, or upgrade your weapons with an array of attachments. This system is underutilized and the player could very easily get through without ever visiting a merchant, but it’s cool that it’s there. Like its deep, detailed plot, characters, and setting, a system akin to this is not something I expect to find in a first-person shooter.

(Playing on PlayStation 3, I ran into a number of troubling and frustrating technical issues that are simply impossible to ignore. Some issues, like screen tearing and occasional texture pop-in, are common, but some problems are of a more exotic variety. Last Light locked up my console several times, forcing a hard-reset. One happened during the ending, which was an incredibly immersion-killing happenstance. It also constantly auto-saves, and occasionally it would cause framerate hiccups, creating the illusion of a locked-up console for up to five seconds at a time. And most troublingly, I ran into a serious set of glitches on one stage in particular that allowed me to run through an entire part of the chapter while the enemies stood and watched without raising a finger. I could even replicate the problem by going back to the previous auto-save, something I had to do when the game froze during one of these botched runs.)