I’ve spent about 3-4 hours with Metro 2039 so far, and it’s already healing me even as the in-game version of me, dubbed The Stranger in this sequel, struggles to breathe through a gas mask whose filters don’t last long, thus requiring me to craft new ones from items scrounged by scouring every last inch of its post-apocalyptic world as the countdown timer on my wristwatch constantly ticks down, threatening to choke me to death if it hits 0:00. In a real world where AI is being shoved down our throats at every corner, from our emails to the customer service reps we interact with, one of my biggest takeaways from Metro 2039 is that even though it’s an apocalypse-ravaged hellscape, every inch of it is very obviously and very painstakingly handcrafted. This franchise always was, of course; this is nothing new.
But still, there’s just something about the way 2039 is hitting for me at this exact moment in time that I needed. It is a game that neither offers nor tolerates any bullsh*t, and I love it for that because said bullsh*t surrounds us in the real world. Metro does not hold your hand. It regularly keeps your blood pressure somewhere between slightly elevated and spiked, and it makes no apologies for it. Its irradiated world is Hell, and it very convincingly conveys that at all times. And in an age where single-player first-person shooters are slowly going extinct because they only make money for their publisher once while multiplayer live-service shooters vie for our time and attention on a daily basis (and often contain lots of bullsh*t, like microtransactions and/or drawn-out gameplay loops), Metro’s single-player-only craftsmanship and attention to detail after my first few hours with it have me already prepared to call it my favorite first-person shooter in a long time.
If you’ve played Metro before you’ll certainly be right at home, but even if you’re new to this series, it’s easy enough to get up to speed with. In short, everything is lethal, from the mutated monstrosities on the surface to rival survivors who’ve laid claim to the places you need to get through to the very air you breathe. You are almost never, ever “safe” in Metro 2039. The one place you can’t get killed is where my preview build started out in the Sevastopolskaya Metro Station, which is filled with NPCs and shopkeepers. It feels very alive – a stark contrast to the 180 that happens as soon as you grab your backpack and gun and exit the metro and head to the very dead surface.
There, you are completely and utterly alone. Not literally, as there are mutated freaks abound, from giant maneating rats to jumpy beasts that like to keep their distance and fling barbs from their tails at you to oversized mosquitos who like to get right in your face to huge prehistoric-sized crustaceans who emerge from the waters of the sewers. And, as mentioned, there are plenty of other survivors out there too. Except all of them are hostile – or at least, everyone I met outside of the metro during my hands-on time immediately wanted me dead.
I appreciated being thrown straight into the deep end as soon as I reached the surface. Yes, a map on a crude tablet gave me a general idea of where to go towards my next objective, but beyond that I was on my own to figure out the best path – and to survive along the way. I wandered into a drug store – well, the picked-apart remnan ts of one, obviously – and I checked every nook and cranny for crafting items I could use to make medkits, ammo, and most crucially of all, new gas mask filters. Pressing Y on the keyboard lifts your gun up a little higher so you can clearly see your digital wristwatch, which constantly ticks down the minutes and seconds until your current filter will expire.
I found environmental puzzles tucked away in various places, and felt compelled to try and solve them all because the reward would likely be those precious crafting resources that would well and truly keep me alive. Some of these puzzles utilized the Stranger’s UV light, guiding you to follow clues that were scrawled on walls and floors such that they could only be seen under the purple hue. In my experience, these challenges may have been optional, but they were worth pursuing every single time. Again, it can’t be said enough: Metro 2039 does not mess around. It does not waste your time. There doesn’t seem to be any filler content here. Everything seems to be meticulously considered and implemented.
The weapons are something of a puzzle unto themselves. They can all be modified and customized, from their scopes to their hilts to their muzzles and more. At one point fairly early on, I found a double-barrelled sho tgun that I decided to swap out for the single-barrel version I had on me, and it became my go-to gun in the close-quarters “dungeons” I spent much of the latter half of my demo traipsing through. I even found a laser sight to attach to it, which is almost comically pointless on a close-quarters death-dealer like this, but I didn’t have anything better to stick on there, so I figured, “What the heck.”
Oh, and as you may very well have guessed by now, ammo is scarce. You can find and craft different types – everything from rudimentary metal balls to incendiary rounds to armor-piercing machinegun rounds – and you’ll certainly need to. I survived a miniboss fight with a nine-foot-tall mutant and his feral accomplices with so few rounds left on me that I prayed there was nothing else waiting for me for the next little while, because the fight took place in knee-deep sewer water, which meant that I had nowhere I could set my backpack down in order to craft more. (Fortunately, Metro’s game designers took pity on me, and I was indeed given a short reprieve.)
سەرچاوەی فەرمی بە زمانی ئینگلیزی: https://www.ign.com/articles/metro-2039-the-first-hands-on-preview
