Since I’m apparently now RPS’ Radioactive Eastern Europe correspondent, I recently spent a couple of hours in Metro 2039, the gloom ‘n’ grit FPS sequel that Ukrainian developers 4A Games have explicitly styled as a return to the series’ roots. From what I’ve played, it is in fact as much of a hybrid as the mutated shrimp-insects that lurk in its Moscow sewers, reviving the claustrophobic tunnel dwelling of Metros 2033 and Last Light while keeping a few favoured twists from the more freely-roamable Metro Exodus.
This familiarity is not entirely a complaint. At this stage I’m not even sure it’s mostly a complaint. Sevastopolskaya, the underground village I began the demo stomping through (as the sternly voiced Stranger – Artyom and his train mates from Exodus are long gone) is, happily, is as finely detailed and chokingly atmospheric as any of the series’ previously visited station-settlements. The surface, still a ravaged grey hell, also remains thick with dread, the acoustic guitar strums and scritchy rat sounds of the station replaced by dusty winds and that dreadful tick, tick tick of your Geiger counter. We’re back, baby, I whisper as the invisible flames flay my organs.
Still, I hope the full game is more willing to tinker with its stealth and shooting. The latter does feel tighter than Exodus’ gunplay, thanks in part to some nicely bangy audio work, and it bodes well that my favourite piece among 2039’s arsenal of hacked-together firearms was the newest: a powerful compressed air rifle that excelled in silent headshots and one-tap mutant kills alike. Otherwise, though, the demo’s combat largely played out like the narrow corridor fights of Last Light. Functional, if not particularly fresh.
One hallucinatory horror section did have the audacity to mix things up, swapping out action entirely for some spooked-out puzzling. This, allegedly, is something we’ll see a lot more of in 2039, the Stranger clearly being burdened with a more troubled mind (and more tragic past) than Artyom ever was. This particular attempt at psychological terror didn’t quite land for me, though. Set in an abandoned school, it pulls every ghost child trick in the book, down to the mysteriously self-moving tricycle creakily wheeling into view. Kiddos, I mowed down, like, fifteen spiky gorillas just to get here. Gonna need more than an empty trike.
Luckily, better scares are available if you look for them. Remnants of Exodus’ freeform level structuring remain in Metro 2039, so while you won’t visit any sprawling open worlds, you’re not constantly funnelled either. The demo’s trip to the surface effectively positioned an overgrown stretch of shattered Moscow as a miniature hub, with spokes of optional foraging and exploration opportunities available before I cracked on with the linear story. That haunted school, I only realised after escaping it, was an entirely voluntary endeavour. So too was another hollowed-out building occupied by Humanimals, Nosferatu-lookin’ mutant folk whose light sensitivity and tendency to sleep standing up presented some of the demo’s most clenchworthy moments of high-tension stealth play.
Your reward and, thus, incentive to skulk off down these side paths tends to be crafting materials, Exodus’ DIY gear-cobbling having also survived the jump to 2039. This sounds like literal rubbish – well done on surviving that colony of nuclear-powered megadogs, champ, here’s some scrap metal and half a bottle of Viakal – but so far, Metro 2039 does appear fiendishly good at stretching out your resources just enough that any spare parts become desirable treasures. I’m fairly sure I ran down to my final minute’s worth of gas mask filters more often in this two-hour demo than I did across the entirety of 2033 or Last Light, and would have surely perished were it not for careful looting. Later, as supplies really started running dry, I was forced into disproportionately agonising choices over whether to spend my precious junk on replenishing my low ammo reserves, or to buy myself more scavenging time with additional filters. The system works, even if it’s not a terribly original one.
The same could be true for much of Metro 2039. Yes, it’s another bullet-scarce creep through wretched tunnels and toxic streets, but few developers do wretched tunnels and toxic streets quite as well as 4A. Besides, though its glimpses of the Führer, 2039’s big baddie and chief peddler of bloodthirsty them-against-us-isms, the demo also provided a taste of the game’s most interesting quality: a renewed sense of political fury. Drawing on both the Metro novel series’ historical allegories and the ongoing invasion of the studio’s home country, 2039 might yet blaze a trail after all – the first AAA shooter to castigate a real, current war, not make ooh-rahhing excuses for it. Safe sequel or not, that’s a game I want to play more of.
