Metro 2033 Hands-On
Two hours in the Russian underground.
December 1, 2009 - Horror-themed shooters have sent gamers chasing down little girls with bloody feet and clearing out demons from ancient ruins with the Biblical apocalypse only seconds away. Metro 2033 sets its scares in the underworld of the Moscow metro system. A massive network of stations and miles of track, the Moscow metro is not only one of the world's most impressive public transportation systems, but in the alternate future of Dmitry Glukhovsky's best-selling Russian series of sci-fi novels, it is the only place in Moscow that can support what's left of humanity following a nuclear war.
At a recent event in Moscow, THQ and developer 4A Games let players give the first two hours of the game a test-drive on both the Xbox 360 and PC. Though 4A was present and mingled with us, they largely kept back and just observed how people played the beginning of the adventure. With Metro 2033 still in alpha, no judgment should seem definitive at this point. But the pieces are coming into focus after nearly two years of little news on this shooter.
Metro 2033 is a narrative-driven first-person shooter. The majority of the story is told through the eyes of Artyom, a young hero that was only a babe when the bombs fell. All of his formative years were spent eking out a meager existence in the underground Exhibition station. The action is largely scripted, mixing shooting scenes with dialog-heavy interludes to propel the story forward. Metro 2033 is not an exact translation of the novel. 4A made some structural changes with the approval of the author but despite its move to "action-up" the novel, in its current form, Metro 2033 comes to many screeching halts to tell its story.
As somebody that played the final third of the original Assassin's Creed strictly for the narrative, I almost cannot believe I am typing this: there may actually be too much scripting in Metro 2033 right now. It's a shooter. You want to shoot things. But in the first few hours of the game, well over half of it was spent walking, talking, and listening. When you do finally enter into an action scene, it is very carefully orchestrated so that things happen in sequences that never change or adapt. Take a scene with Bourbon, a salty tunnel rat that joins you on the way to one of the stations. You absolutely cannot proceed down a tunnel without giving him adequate time to keep up, even if you do all the dirty work of blasting the giant rat-like monsters called Nosalises or rival station "clans" that attack you.
![[IMG]](http://pcmedia.ign.com/pc/image/article/105/1050654/metro-2033-20091201042139514.jpg)
These fellas really should be looking at the sky right now.
The demo opened with a prologue that doubled as a tutorial. You slip to the surface of Moscow, which is a wasteland that humans cannot survive. Well, at least not humans like you. Creatures that bear slight human resemblances own the surface world, and you must pop up to check out a new threat to humanity's beleaguered existence: the Dark Ones. Since this is the first stage, you are no match for the Dark Ones. One of the winged creatures knocks you to the ground and appears ready for the kill when Metro 2033 flashes back to eight days earlier.
Once you complete the tutorial, you catch up with Artyom as he is about to move on to the Riga station in the metro network. The town scene unfolds with lots of storytelling and non-action tutorial stuff, such as explaining the game's interesting commerce system. Bullets and shells are used as currency as well as ammunition. You must keep a tab in your head between striving to buy the best weapons and gear and leaving yourself with enough ammo to get out of a dangerous situation. This has enormous promise if balanced properly. It adds a degree of desperation to battles, as you realize that to avoid death in a tricky situation, you may have to put off that machine gun you had your eye on back at the last station. Since Metro 2033 uses a largely HUD-less system (more on that in a moment), you literally watch your money blasted through the barrel as you target monsters in a panic.
The general consensus among players at the demo was that the lack of HUD really contributed to the atmosphere. The demo ends with you moving above ground to press into bombed-out Moscow. When you step outside, you must pull a gas mask over your face and then check your watch to make sure you have enough oxygen and are not overexposed to the poison air. The longer you stay outside, the foggier your mask. There is no running clock that alerts you when you are running low on oxygen. You must raise your watch to check the time constantly, just like you would do in real life – and if you were caught in a post-apocalyptic Moscow. Checking your watch means not looking up for a dangerous moment; this is just enough time for one of the monsters to strike. I like this system for the same reason I like the visor system in the recent Metroid games: it adds a level of cinematic immersion. You are not seeing the world through the eyes of the developer. You are seeing it through the eyes of the character and must be aware that to look at one thing means not paying attention to another. In a deadly environment, this matters.
![[IMG]](http://pcmedia.ign.com/pc/image/article/105/1050654/metro-2033-20091201042140045.jpg)
"And now, little man, I give the watch to you."
Of all the dozen short stages played at the demo event, the best was a tunnel chase. You take an old rail car along a stretch of track not used often – and for good reason. The track is "haunted." After just a few moments in the tunnel, you all fall asleep and have a terrible vision of a monster wiping out fellow humans. (Visions actually play a large role in the game – there is one ghostly sight of a stretched-out shadow that 4A refused to explain.) When you wake, you need to defend the rail car from an army of Nosalises. Using a shotgun, you blast these beasts off the car in a situation that gets worse and worse with every meter you scream down the track. After so much talking, a pure action sequence was quite welcome. The same goes for the jaunt to the surface at the end of the demo. Here, the game finally takes shape as a first-person shooter; you are given large expanses of game to play without any dialog interrupts. Hunting the Nosalise in the ruins of buildings had a real cat-and-mouse feel to it, especially when you discover one of the Nosalise calling out for reinforcements. You need to work fast and cut it down before the call is complete.
We had the chance to try Metro 2033 out on both the Xbox 360 and the PC. (THQ was careful to not give any hope for a PlayStation 3 edition.) Without question, the PC is the lead platform for Metro 2033. Everything just looked sharper, crisper, and more colorful. Not only did Metro 2033 look incredibly polished for an alpha, but the mouse-and-keyboard controls were vastly superior to the Xbox 360 controller. The 4A representative said that the Xbox 360 controls would of course be tweaked, but the gap between the PC set-up and the 360 controller was as wide as Red Square. And, of course, there is much time for balance and tuning in the coming months. Aiming needs to be tightened. The amount of ammo found in the wild needs to be increased. But it seems that the narrative structure of the game is pretty well locked down.
Walking away from the Metro 2033 demo, I found myself dwelling on the best non-playable character in the game: the metro system itself. The huge network of stations connected by dangerous miles of rail is a wonderful setting for a horror-tinged shooter. It's dark, it's creepy – and to many Westerners, it's something both foreign and new. It's not like the New York subway at all. It also evokes claustrophobia. When things go sideways in the tunnels, there are only two places to run: toward and away from trouble. And while I may be concerned with the sheer amount of narrative that separates the action, I really enjoyed the story. I want to know more about this awful future. And if 4A and THQ go through with all the tuning they promise, I will definitely keep Metro 2033 on my 2010 radar.
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