To be clear, I’m enjoying my time with Metro but it’s like, such a dumb piece of shit at the end of the day. Fully apocalypse-as-aesthetic window-dressing, no thought behind a piece of it. Every location has electricity for some reason. Russian electrical grid is fucking lit imo. You can run on some pretty shitty track but the idea of driving a train around 30 years after a nuclear apocalypse is just fucking bananas. Which, fine, let’s allow it. They’re burning coal at the beginning of the game, and then they announce on a loading screen that they ran out and they’re burning ‘old ties.’ Not to be a nickpick but like, the nuclear apocalypse was 30 years ago, what could ‘old’ possibly mean in this context. Then, it’s like, ‘ah, we found Mad Max zone,’ we’ll get some fuel from the oil wells which are still going, and it’s like, what you’re going to convert the fucking thing to diesels-electric? And then we steal a tank car of, as far as I can tell, just straight oil and the next time I walk around the train they’re… burning coal lol. This isn’t like, ruining anything, I suppose. Like, there’s a train because trains are cool. There are oil wells because Mad Max is cool. There are lights everywhere because it’s nice to be able to see in a video game. I’m willing to go along with it for shooting people in a video game reasons. Also, I would absolutely marry a woman who is merely pretending to be Russian.
The real problem is just like, shooting people is not good lol. We really need to stop making open world FPS games I s2g. If you’re not having corner leaning and huge engagement ranges, it is so fucking hard to make compelling open world shootmans with human enemies. 95% of open world FPS’s just skating by on the fact that it’s always fun to shoot people in the head with a sniper rifle. Veeeery telling that all of the big setpiece fights always find some fucking excuse to put you in hallways and have you walk forward until you’ve shot everyone dead.
One thing that I do think the game does a good job with is like, I’m increasingly uninterested in any kind of morality systems in non-RPGs because like, I just don’t find that compelling? ‘Oh wow the game has two stories and your actions influence which one you see!’ idk why not just pick the better of the two and go with that? I’m not playing a fucking video game more than once. Metro at least drops any of the weird ‘are you a good person or are you just super evil?’ nonsense and the game more measures how, idk, callous you are? Like, there’s a bunch of parts where characters are like, ‘Hey, let’s not shoot any slaves and only shoot slavers, ok?’ and really only a real fucking psycho would shoot slaves in a video game intentionally, but it is asking you to take one second looking through a sniper scoop or before aiming a shotgun to make sure you’re not shooting some innocent and that’s honestly a little affecting?
I already locked myself into the bad ending because you get it for killing non-evil people (including people who will try to shoot you) and for killing surrendering enemies, and I can’t get my ‘knock out’ and ‘stab with knife’ buttons straight and have killed a lot of surrendering people lol. Fair enough, Metro, I am exactly ‘not bothering to learn my buttons to avoid a bad end’ level of callous
