![]() Yet, somehow, the polish and ease-of-use subtracts something that was inherent to the original game. ![]() Many of the game’s advancements, such as a watch that lets you know whether you’re visible to enemies or hidden in the shadows, weapons that can reliably extinguish life, and super-powered silent throwing knives, are also wonderful in practice. I’m not saying Last Light is made worse for being smoother, because it’s an absolute joy to sneak up behind an enemy and have the option to kill him or to knock him unconscious - and what’s more, to have that option work once you trigger it, unlike the original game’s failed knife-flails at a now-shouting watchman. Stealth was even more uncertain, as you were never sure exactly how far a soldier’s headlamp cut into the inky darkness, and even if you had a solid guess, chances were you couldn’t take him down without alerting all his friends. Violence was always a shaky proposal - even shooting a person in the head wasn’t a reliable way to take them down unless you were using the best weapons loaded with expensive money-ammunition. The predominant emotion evoked by much of Metro 2033’s gameplay, and Frontline exemplifies this, was a sense of nagging uncertainty. Metro 2033 was clunky, from the shooting to the sneaking to the buggy game engine itself, and there were lots of people, myself included, who thought it would benefit from having some of its rougher edges sanded down.īut that clunkiness serviced the game in a couple ways. ![]() ![]() Metro: Last Light has no analogue to this level, and it’s largely in part because Last Light’s systems work so smoothly. Chances were they’d catch sight of you and cut you down like so many other soldiers who had been found expendable already. You had to listen to the frantic conversations of unwilling soldiers that hinted about a place to which deserters could escape, and then you had to find and travel this rumored route while avoiding commissars’ booby-traps and searchlights. This meant you didn’t have to kill anyone or waste any ammunition, but it was even harder than the violent method. So, alternatively, you could sneak past the fighting. Your ammunition was filled with diluted powder, so targeted enemies were more likely to lose a chunk of armor or receive a slow death than be killed outright and while you could load better bullets into your weapons, doing so was a defeat in and of itself, because those high-powered rounds were the very currency of the desperate societies that lined the metro’s gut, and wasting them on combat meant you might not be able to afford vital supplies later on. The first was the obvious method, especially for a game about shooting: load your guns and shoot, murdering your way past fascists and socialists alike. It was pitch-black, lit only by the occasional lightning-flash of rifles, the cook-fires of terrified soldiery, and glaring searchlights that brought machinegun death to every dark corner they happened to peer into. In the original Metro 2033, there was a level entitled “Frontline.” In it, our hero, a stranded and lonely Artyom, had to pick his way through a rotten and creaking metro line that happened to be the entrenched position of two hostile forces. (sidenote: you can, and should, click to embiggen these pics).ġ.
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