![]() ![]() The story spans a whole year in game time, starting off in the Moscow winter and taking in a wide variety of other landscapes, from desert to forest. Set 23 years after the initial missile strikes the landscape around Moscow is less dangerous, or at least less radioactive, than the previous games and it soon becomes clear that Artyom is right and he and his team of soldiers, plus his wife Anna, end up commandeering a train that takes them east across the country. ![]() You play as an elite solder named Artyom, who has become obsessed with the idea that there are other survivors outside of the metro – despite all evidence to the contrary. Exodus is a direct sequel to both the games and the novels but has a much more straightforward narrative, that requires no previous knowledge of the franchise. ![]() Yet even in this dead and desolate place, faint embers of hope still linger.As interesting as the previous games’ stories have been in terms of their allegory of Russian society – and ultimately human society as a whole – the storytelling often got a little muddled and relied too much on familiarity with the novels and reading every little note scattered about the game world. It’s an excellent conclusion – haunting, frightening, and desperately sad. Here Exodus exposes you to the full horror of the apocalypse, as the experience takes on a surreal, otherworldly quality. But this is undermined when it repeatedly makes her the object of the story rather than the person you work with to achieve the expedition’s goals.Īs Exodus’ story draws to a close and the pace picks up, the world becomes narrower and more directed, and a final chapter takes players to the most dangerous Metro location yet. Exodus generally gives women a more prominent role than in previous games, and clearly wants players to invest in the relationship between Artyom and Anna. The game is determined to put her in positions where one or both men need to save her, but Anna is a talented sniper who is initially your main companion. Particularly frustrating is the talismanic portrayal of Artyom’s wife, Anna, who is also the daughter of the expedition’s commander. A drink and a chat with members of the expedition is as much a part of Exodus as a gunfight – perhaps too much so, as many conversations are overlong, and the script, clumsily labouring the same points, isn’t sharp enough to keep you engaged. But the focal point of the Aurora as a mobile home lets us get to know the game’s characters better. Given its novelistic source material, the Metro series has always had a strong narrative. Part Peter Pan, part Lord of the Flies, it is equally touching and tragic. Grownup and living a Robin Hood life in the forest, they make offerings to their deceased and deified Teacher, who protected them when society crumbled. Soon after, you encounter the missing children. One of game’s best subplots occurs in the forests surrounding the river, where you discover an abandoned school in an overgrown village. On the icy shores of the Volga, a firebrand priest has convinced the locals to shun electrical equipment and pray to a monstrous catfish that lurks in the water. The Aurora, your transport for Metro Exodus. As you journey through Russia in the steam train Aurora, you encounter various groups of people asking similar questions and finding all manner of answers. It is hope that prompts the protagonist Artyom to look beyond the confines of the Moscow metro in the first place – and hope that keeps him going when a startling revelation makes their journey one way. Metro Exodus’s narrative explores where and how people look for hope when the world has ended. The larger environments also enable more methodical combat: you can scout out bandit camps with binoculars before choosing whether to attack from a distance with long-range weapons, or eliminate enemies nonlethally via close-quarters stealth. You’ll need to scour abandoned houses and dangerous lairs of mutants to find new weapons and equipment, while collecting resources to maintain your guns. Meanwhile, the broader scope gives Metro’s survivalist shooting room to breathe, albeit through a gas mask. It spent 20 minutes slowly scudding forward before finally assaulting me with lashing rain and gusting winds. At one point, a storm loomed on the horizon like a wall of black smoke. You can almost feel the chill in the air around the Volga as you explore abandoned trainyards and navigate a creaking rowboat through a half-submerged village. This provides 4A’s meticulous environment designers with much larger canvas, and they paint a world stunning in its devastation. Horrors lurk underground in Metro Exodus. ![]()
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