Metro: Exodus

I just finished Metro: Exodus based off of a friend's recommendation - they said this game is awesome, so why not try it after buying it in a bundle?

It's ok. The game has a pretty rough start. I don't love the Hollywood-esque linear sections, but they're here. The following open world area is pretty great, and probably the best part of the game because it feels cold, along with being open and empty and fairly scary. I just hate the water sections - traveling on the boat is so slow and annoying.

The Caspian Sea area is alright. I love the little car they give you, and I did all of the side content. The little map you can use reminds me to Far Cry 2 (I mean that as a compliment!), it feels so immersive. I also love the weapon customization. This works especially well when you get to the forest and have all of your shit stolen - the weapon customization rocks, seriously.

I thought the forest area was the best, with good gunplay and good flow. I genuinely despised the areas with the spiders, both here and in the Caspian Sea. Just horrible to play through imo, they just aren't fun to fight.

The final area of the game is alright. You can tell the devs were like "wait... we should take the best part of the best Metro Game (the first one) and just remake it!" and it turned out worse. It's fine, it just makes me want to play the first game instead.

Overall: it's ok. I love the concept of traveling by train in theory. I liked the story ending, I guess. I hated the scripted sections, basically all of them. I liked the water sections in theory (horrible in practice, such slow pacing and annoying overall). I like this game in theory, but I just felt like I wanted it to end. I'm conflicted rating this low because the game had some good highs, so I don't want to be harsh. Also the devs clearly have gone through hell, so, I feel a bit bad? If I could cut out all of the bad parts of this game and mush the remaining sections together, it'd probably be a nice 7/10 - otherwise it's around a 5/10 maybe. Just play Metro 2033, it's significantly better.

Metro Exodus for me was shaping up to be a very disappointing experience, thought the plot alone was almost enough to ruin the whole series and the fact it was going the "semi open world" route worried me.

But surprisingly enough, I think it's actually the best in the series. It retains the great atmosphere and story of the other games but without many of they're issues, which means that the gameplay isn't just fineee.

I thought the gunplay was quite great in this one, the way you unlocked attachments for guns was also cool, you don't buy them but get them by looting guns that enemies drop. You can change attachments on the fly now which makes adapting from stealth to combat a lot easier when you can just change to a suppressor when you want to play it stealth and then change to something else when you fuck up the stealth and shit goes to hell.

The backpack and crafting system is implemented extremely well and though I miss using bullets as currency (which was a mechanic with A LOT of potential and was really interesting but oh well), I also like how it is in this game, you don't just pause the game to go to a menu where you can craft stuff but rather take out your backpack in game and then you can craft stuff, it keeps you vulnerable and doesn't break immersion.

Influences from Far Cry 2 can be felt heavily on how the map works for the open areas and the gun jamming thing.

Pulling up your map is, well literally just pulling up a map in front of you, something I wish more games implemented personally. And you have to clean your guns now when you get to a crafting bench otherwise your gun will jam which is a nice twist on gameplay when you're in a really tense moment and then suddenly your gun stops working and you panic and don't know whether to fix it or just switch to another one. Though I have to say, it prb won't happen often to you, for me it only happened like twice in the first 3/4th of the game and a bunch of times in the last mission.

The semi open world aspect of the game will prb be the make or break for most people and for me it’s a make, because it’s actually really well done and doesn’t just go into OK HERE’S THE MAIN OBJECTIVE BUT ALSO HERE’S 6895329532 MARKERS ON THE MAP THAT ARE ALL JUST COLLECTIBLES AND COPY PASTED SHIT! territory, you gotta find the side stuff yourself usually or you’ll be told about them and then the markers appear on your map, there’s only a couple of side missions per area and they are usually either around where a main mission takes place or it’ll be on your path. They’re pretty alright as side quests go and I enjoyed the ones I did.

The train sequences were a huge highlight for me. The game really comes alive in these scenes, the writing is great, the characters are all likeable and it’s really hard to not care for them by the end, they’re all doing something or have something to tell you, it’s not always something deep or important but that’s kinda what makes them so nice, it feels like a friend telling you a story, not a piece of information for the 5 people who want to know everything about the lore or whatever.

The only issue for me is...well Artyom himself, the loading screen narrations are all interesting but the problem is, he never talks outside of them, it’s always been something unique to the metro games but it always felt more like a useless restriction rather than something that adds to the story, especially here when a lot of great scenes could have been elevated into amazing if Artyom just fucking talked or responded to the characters. But oh well as it is, not that bad, at least he talks over the loading screens which is always cool to hear.

The attention to detail in this game is almost insane at points, not just in terms of environment and graphics but also in dialogue and in game stuff, like getting different dialogue if you killed/didn’t kill enemies, if you holster a weapon while talking to someone, that someone might acknowledge it and act differently afterwards. Hell in one of the areas, if you kill enemies you’ll end up getting a bad ending (you’ll get told a bunch to not kill enemies during that part though so you’ll prb figure out that you aren’t supposed to do it lol).

During certain fights, you can notice the enemies dialogue changing as you pick them off, going from them being confident and sure that they’ll kill you to slowly losing that confidence and getting scared, sometimes the last enemy/enemies will even put down their guns and surrender, begging you not to kill them. Seeing that shit happen and not having it be a scripted sequence is simply amazing.


The Metro games up until this game have all been just a bit short of reaching the 10/10 level for me because if the gameplay itself isn’t that great, then the story and atmosphere can only get me so far. But since now the gameplay is great and the atmosphere and story didn’t take a beating, it reaches that level for me.

Really looking forward to seeing where the series goes from here, I hope the next one can be just as good or even better than this one somehow.

I went to this game hyped up, considering that i loved Last Light and enjoyed 3033, and this one seemed to have more money behind its production. Its moved to semi open world levels also made a whole lot of sense for the series, whose best levels were always these small open areas in which you had the freedom to look for supplies. Unfortunatly, this one is a very divisive game.

First the good stuff, its graphically brilliant. Lots of variety of areas on display, but always gorgeous to look at, and the samll touches like the dynamic map and crackles on your mask help to make the game highliy immersive. Music and sound is also very solid.

The not so good part is the story, that while it isnt bad, its definitly got one foot in the campy side, which i dont think fits the series all that well. I look at this series like the modern replacement of Stalker, and it irks me for a series whose themes is post apocalyptic survival rellies so much on banter and dark comedy. Its not like the tone is sarcastic from the start like Fallout, but the tone is inconsistent and it ends up taking away from the overal impact of the story.

Gameplay is also a mixed bag. The guns are solid and are enjoyable to use (though the morality system descourages you to do so in a lot of key moments). The enemies have a big of brain dead AI that dont pose much of a challenge, and the mutants have bad animations. The game attempts at a few boss fights that have no other words to describe them other than atrocious.
Then the survival / crafting / exploration game is another mixed bag. Because while the act itself feels rewarding, the thing is that the upgrades you end across dont fundamentally change the gameplay all that much. They dont feel satisfying, and at least on normal difficulty they dont feel needed.
The movement of the game is extremely clunky, and this is noticed the most when you are fighting bullet spongey bosses. Artyium gets stuck on everything on the environment, and transversal is really a hassle.

Finally, though i usually dont mind this a whole, but the game has crashed on me multiple times and the loading times on PS4 are really discouraging to keep playing, often several minutes at a time.

So yea very flawed experience. There is definitly a solid FPS in here, marred down by way too many issues that cant be ignored.

An okay experience in the more open and free roaming stages but absolutely falls flat for me during most of the scripted encounters and story events. Mostly an endless stream of generic monsters and boring jump-"scares".
What really put the nail in the coffin though was a game-breaking bug that prevented me from continuing the game. This wa I tried older save files but the damage was done. I asked myself "should I scour the Internet for a workaround and give it another chance?", to which the answe was just no. No I can't see myself bothering to even try.

I remember 5 years ago when I first played Metro, I heard about this game franchise and rented Last Light for my PS3, it was the Fall of the year I just graduated college a few months prior and played a ton of games that Summer and Fall after. Its actually kind of weird to think its been that long, but even if Last Light had flaws, it was a solid enough stealth FPS hybrid and offered an interesting atmosphere. I then played the first Metro on the PS4 collection the Summer after and also enjoyed it although not as much as Last Light. Then years later after not thinking about Metro, this game was announced at an E3 and I remember thinking they could do interesting things with this franchise on the new generation consoles and expand on things. Metro Exodus is a game that could have been good, but really ended up being average.

It tried to copy other games by being an open World survival game, which in this era feels so unoriginal, every other game is open World and Metro really doesn't work too well in this setting, it worked better as a more linear streamlined experience. Its sort of like Evil Within 2 where throughout the game you go to several open World maps throughout the game and are free to explore and do side missions while having the main objectives. Exodus is easily the most difficult of the Metros and I often found myself dying and running out of ammo on normal difficulty which was never and issue I had in the previous games. The problem is the game will just throw too many enemies at you, especially in the late game that unless you are a master of stealth, you'll be dying like crazy trying to fend off enemies.

Really I can't say too much because this game really doesn't have much notable, it plays sort of similar with the stealth action hybrid of the previous games, the story is pretty generic and doesn't have any character I found too interesting. The game also sort of turns into Rambo 3/4 of a way through where you are randomly thrown into a forest and must sneak through taking out enemies with a bow and fight a massive bear. Exodus just doesn't have a clear identity like the previous games, the previous games were solid linear experiences that had decent stealth segments and weren't overly difficulty, and the stories actually were interesting. In this, it just feels like a generic open World survival that is more frustrating than fun, and the story goes nowhere interesting. It tries to give the characters life between chapters when you get to interact with the different characters, but I just didn't grow attached to any of them, and really Anna was the only character I cared for in this because of the previous games. Exodus isn't bad, but its easily the weakest of the 3 main Metro games. Its not even the fact that this game went open World because it could have been like STALKER, but instead it just does nothing interesting with the design or story, and I just felt myself plodding through this uninterested for most of the game. Its a shame because this franchise could have been something great, but instead its going to be forgotten in less than a year as better games come out.

I was really hyped about this game after the reveal at 2017's E3, it just seemed so amazing in the trailer and this really big world to discover. In retrospect I might have overhyped myself, because the game is good but not something that really pushes video games further. Or perhaps me not being a fan of stealth and survival mechanics, which are a good portion of the gameplay in Metro Exodus.

The game starts in a very linear way, you advance and shoot things until you trigger some story elements that makes the game move forward. It's only in the 2nd area where it becomes more "open world", but it's really limited as you'll only have a few optional side areas that you can visit. Most of the time you'll be focusing on your objective as there isn't that many interesting things to do outside of it. As mentioned the game includes stealth options, you can either kill everyone in sight to complete your missions or try to be sneaky with minimal casualties. I'm personally not a fan of these mechanics at all, so I'm always shooting the shit out of the enemies. Additionally this is a game that provides you with very limited ammo and resources (survival), I found playing on Normal was a little too hard for me as I'd always end up with nothing and wasn't particularly enjoyable. The game got more fun when I switched it to easy (granted the challenge was very minimal) as I could make the story progress and could enjoy the shooting parts of the game which are pretty good. Another annoyance is that it's not always obvious where the damn switch/lever to make progress to the next area I'd often run around for 5 minutes trying to find it until I google the answered.

As you progress you can get upgrades to your weapons by dismantling the guns of your enemies, giving you options of what type of guns you want to bring on your missions. The modifications can give them pretty different styles, you can even put a scope on the shotguns if you want (not recommended, but still fun option). This is a nice mechanic but about halfway in the game you'll have seen most of them and already chosen your favorites, I felt the game lacked the "late game" addition of mechanics as you're just running through the motions in the later stages. My favorite aspects of the game was the story and the atmosphere. You get into these really dark places and you hear all these weird sounds from afar, really makes you wonder what the fuck is happening. The story is pretty good, a good what if Nuclear holocaust had happened and how do people live in it. It makes me wish I had played the earlier titles before getting into this one. You'll also get to connect with all your crew members with their extra dialogue if you feel like talking to them (the entire game is voice, a definite plus).

Overall the game is flawed and kinda clunky at times, but I did have fun playing it and enjoyed the story as it unfolded. It's not quite exactly my type of game, but I liked that it gave you the option to go away from the stealth mechanics and play it more light a straight shooter. I don't think that any of the elements (crafting, shooting, stealth) are done amazingly, but their combination together somehow works. I wouldn't go out of my way to recommend it and I can perfectly understand the criticism of the game, but I do think it's worth a try anyway.