(Indeed, the least believable thing about Last Light is that the women of the subway tunnels are so universally ravishing.) It feels bizarrely natural to hand a beggar a few cartridges-or toss a few into a stripper’s tip jar. Bullets are money in the Metro, and while Last Light has a much more forgiving economy than 2033 (ammo is less scarce, and non-lethal takedowns make it less essential), the conceit is just as effective a storytelling device. There’s even a dedicated button for wiping condensation (or blood) off the mask I made frequent use of it. As in the original, going topside requires keeping your mask on, making scrounging for filters essential. The same effect is accomplished with the returning gas mask and ammo-currency mechanics. This humanizing effect grounds the sci-fi premise in an oddly believable and endearing way. At one point I witnessed a tangential conversation between one-off characters go on for more than five minutes. Still, characters are rendered with remarkable fidelity, with dozens of custom animations for characters we see only once. At times, this (and the many scripted events where control is taken away from the player) gives the game a theme park ride-like feel, somewhat like Bioshock Infinite. Like its predecessor, Last Light is strongest when it gives us these moments of incidental storytelling eavesdropping on ancillary characters’ conversations is often more rewarding than slaying waves of beasts. Last Light’s pacing is similar to 2033’s in that bouts of stealth and shooting are punctuated by periods of calm in the ramshackle towns of Metro stations. As a bonus, players who have read the novel will recognize some conversations lifted nearly verbatim from the book. It’s unlikely that those who haven’t played or read Metro 2033 will fully grok Last Light, but familiarity with the world is certainly a plus. It is a linear, authored tale, but like the first game, there appears to be a hidden “karma” system affected by your choices. The story, which Glukhovsky worked closely with 4A to develop, sags in the middle after a solid opening, but regains steam by the end. Artyom is accompanied much of the time by one of several AI companions, a technique that allows 4A to develop characters while moving the plot along. This theme is carried out throughout the story, which is surprisingly coherent, given the many leaps of logic Glukhovsky’s world asks us to make. He’s been ordered to kill it, but he makes it clear to us that own quest is about redemption. As the story begins, Artyom sets out from D6 to find the last surviving Dark One. A war is brewing in the Metro over control of D6, a well-provisioned government bunker that Artyom’s Rangers (the paladins of the Metro universe) inhabit. As Glukhovsky explained to me at PAX East, Last Light assumes the “bad” ending of 2033-that Artyom launched the missiles that destroyed the Dark Ones, supernatural beings that may have been humanity’s allies all along. Last Light picks up the story of Artyom, the protagonist from Metro 2033. 4A’s new offering, Metro: Last Light, is a sequel that improves upon the original in significant ways, and yet it retains several of the elements that made the original an occasionally maddening experience. Still, it’s fertile ground for a video game franchise, where atmosphere often trumps plausibility. Leave it to a Russian to make this level of bleakness compelling. Glukhovsky’s universe is an irradiated hellhole populated by mutants, Communists and Nazis, where pathetic bands of survivors barely cling to life, if not hope. It also inspired 4A Games’ 2010 first-person shooter of the same name, a flawed but occasionally brilliant trip through the post-nuclear wasteland of underground Moscow. His 2005 novel, Metro 2033, has spawned two sequels and some 33(!) spin-off novels to date. It’s tough to pin down why Dmitry Glukhovsky’s Metro universe is so popular.
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