Metro Exodus - out of the metro tunnels and back on Steam

Is Exodus more like 2033 or more like Last Light / 2033 Redux? I absolutely loved Metro 2033, it was a top tier slav game, but then Last Light came out and felt very much more like some American AAA game, and I can't really say I enjoyed any part of it; similarly 2033 Redux felt like a downgrade both with some of the gameplay tweaks and, of course, the graphics.

 

Exodus is the latter turned up to 11.

 

It's like Last Light.

The company moved to Malta therefore the slav vibe is gone except for location and language.

 

RIP. Gonna give it a pass then.

 

I'd advise at least trying it. Exodus isn't much like either of the previous games, but I thought it was great. It retains a lot of the same atmosphere but with open-world size maps. It also offers more variety both in terms of environments and the enemies you'll face, and it looks fantastic if you have the hardware to run it on higher settings.

 

Wow this game is absolute dogshit. Shitty console port, check. Clunky menus, check. No in-game FOV slider, check. No in-game option to turn off motion blur, check. Hold-button-to-interact-with-things, check. Dumb cutscenes that pull you out of the game, check. Shit VO, check. Shit writing, check.

Refunded, and thank fuck I never bought this piece of shit on the Epic Game Store.

 

Last two games were annoyingly rail-roaded experiences with cutting-edge graphics being its only major selling point.

 

I never much understood the appeal of this Metro popamole.

 

Bleak and gritty post-apocalypse is rarely done well.
Unfortunate reminders of Fallout 76 and Rage 2's existence make me blow air out my nose, this genre is at it's best when depicting a tragedy but developers insist we get zombies!!! and pink mohawk zaniness.

 

Not every game needs to shoot for realism and grit.

 

I'm not saying there is no room for anything else.
Devs tend to get away with more serious subject matter in this genre and I fear that will be phased out in favor of more easily digestible hair dyed mohawk men wearing armor made of assembled kitchen pots and plates driving mad max cars and shooting at super mutants while Country Roads or similar pop songs are played at high volumes.

 

I think there's a decent balance when it comes to tone. People spazzed out on Rage 2 for being Mad Max to the 10th power, but as long as stuff like Metro is equally viable I don't have a problem. Something for everyone, etc. etc.

 

If anything I think it would've just been better if they stayed a linear popamole game with it's own semi-unique style and identity. Exodus going open world just makes it another mediocre open world game in a sea of mediocre open world games.

 

4A misunderstood the complaints about linearity.
Their belief was that people wanted ammo and air filter scavenger hunts in larger, more open levels when most likely people just wanted them to drop the level format so they could do Moscow tunnel runs and occasional surface trips at their own leisure.

It's also very possible I just suck cock and people wanted the former but they just didn't get it right this time.

 

I haven't played it yet... is it "open open" like Rage 2, or "large nonlinear levels in sequence" like a Deus Ex or Witcher 2?

 

Exodus isn't mediocre compared to other recent open-world shooters. It's the first shooter I've played in a long time that doesn't lead you around by the hand with quest markers, etc. It also does a lot of little things that add to the immersion like having a minimalistic HUD and actual maps that the PC pulls out to look at vs a map screen. I realize not everyone cares about details like that, but I think those things are part of the reason it has an overwhelmingly positive rating on Steam.

While most shooters nowadays have tons of icons and markers floating around the screen, 4A took the opposite approach with Exodus, and that made it a much more immersive experience imo.

 

The latter.

They mix it up though. Most of the maps are quite large, but a few of them are smaller and more linear and story-driven. The weather also changes as you progress through the story which takes place over approximately a year. The first chapter takes place in the Winter, the second chapter during Spring, etc.

 

Maybe. Maybe it's also because most people are retards.

 

i think i will try it when it is cheap enough on steam

 

Unfortunately most games are shooting for banality, there is a difference of aiming for fun and avoid any interesting exploration about anything because of cowardice/stupidity/creative bankrupcy. The Metro series arent gritty or realist, at least they are only that at a very surface level. The first game had an unique style, they were shooting for this bleak life on the metro with a strange new culture arising from people having to deal with a new ecology and developing a new strange mysticism arising from the Moscow ruins, the borrowed ideas from Stalker are there.

It ends with you discovering an abandoned soviet nuclear silo that ends on you repeating the same descend on madness that lead to the war with you killing things you couldnt undestand out of fear.

The second one, they throw most of the things interesting on the setting to focus on the factions that are just cardboard box villains for you to shoot, they are tropey to the extreme and completely ignore the reality of the setting they are in, no much different from those generic raiders on Fallout 3. They are bad guys for you to play Call of Duty with, that is it, there is a theme in there where humanity not learning anything and fighting again for nothing but was really underdeveloped, and placed on the backburner in favor of the popamole setpieces.

This one isnt much different from Last Light, but instead of aping Call of Duty, it is aping the open world model, there are some moments here and there and the game feeds the basic open world gameplay loop on a basic level but it is very meh at the end. Dimitry Glukhovsky made an interesting story for a book, 4A decides to do an adaptation, they make their best game then they sell out to make big bucks, sounds like CDProjekt alright.

 

The only good game that came out of the Ukraine is Cryostasis Sleep of Reason

 

So finally got around to finishing it + the DLCs. For me personally it's one of the best games of 2019, easily. It's more Metro only bigger, better and more emoshunl.

Yeah, that's what I like about it the most - emoshun. What's the last major western game where you actually felt something - unease, fear, sadness, when you were moved by something? It's all just flashing, honking, dinging carnival nowadays, all fake laughs, cheap scares and retarded cliches. Today real emoshuns can only be found in Eastern Yuro games like Witcher, Kingdom Come or Metro.

It's not all rosy with Metro, the PC port is p. bad, shit kept crashing on me unless I forced a Safe Mode through an obscure line in an obscure .cfg. Jesus. The graphix is a strange mix of new and spectacular (mostly vistas and outdoor scenery) and the same visual feel from 10 years ago (mostly indoors). And their solution to replace standard cutscenes with in-game ones isn't the best for this vastly expanded narrative scope. Oftentimes you gotta stand in a spot with your dick in your hand for 10+ minutes to absorb some lore (or even get a sidequest).

But the vibe is still absolutely unbeatable. When I finished the main campaign my buttocks were squeezed together like two car wrecks in a hydraulic press and my stomach was a knot. Nobody else could do this sort of post-apo vibe, except maybe the old Stalker. If Half-Life and Stalker fucked Exodus would be the offspring.

As for the DLCs - Two Colones is a great concept, a return to the linear old model, unfortunately the gameplay is severely constricted. It's mostly an interactive movie with two short crawl-throughs (both very fun) and one fleeting gunfight. I didn't like Sam's Story much. The world is big on the map but in reality only like 10% is actually accessible. The story is...fine. Both DLCs are inessential unless you REALLY wanna more Metro.

Hopefully 4A got some nice dough out of this, they're really good at what they do.

 

In this day and age? Yes they do, because realism and grit are very rare now.

 

Wait there are actually people that think 2033 is better than Last light? Metro 2033 was weird Eurojank which only got attention because it was made in Ukraine and looked fantastic. Last light, on the other hand, was a good game with fun gameplay with an engaging story.
The most amazing thing is that the devs never fixed issues the first one had like the non-functioning stealth and bad AI even for FPS standards. The only things they improved over the years were gunplay and presentation. I swear the AI in Exodus does exactly the same shit it did in 2033 back in 2010.

 

How long is this game with the DLC included?