Metro: Last Light is a videogame torn between the specialised its first version staked out and niche conventions that are perceived to help sales. So, to give one situation, you're accompanied for large extends of the game's first part - a crutch at the best of time, and one that rather taints the setting here. Not too your companions Anna as well as Pavel are dislikeable characters - the latter's a chatty rogue with attraction and surprises to spare - but their appearance feels unnecessary.
Metro draws on Dmitri Glukhovsky's series of publications, and the pitiless dystopia designed over two amounts is one where people bleeds, both figuratively and actually. Metro 2033 caught this atmosphere in its tight corridors, and Last Light does the same, though with more caveats.
Otherwise its purpose, I get to respect the accordion's presence in Metro: Last Light. You may listen to the instrument's musical wheezing within a show put on in a nasty theater, one of several populated hubs you'll visit in your travel through the caves of Moscow. In case you opt out of the game's scavenging and shooting for some moments, there's a complete show to take in. It bears all the awkwardness and earnestness of a production that only has to be less bleak than its atmosphere.
Last Light, just like predecessor Metro 2033, is a feat of passionate, paradoxical world-building – you believe this as a place that has been wrecked, poisoned and forced to retreat into claustrophobic hovels. There are glimmers of recuperating life of these bastions, most importantly in Metro's stunning sewer-bound same as Venice. The town layouts are noticeably linear, in part simply because there isn't much room for subterranean sprawl, and simply because the game spends all its cash on the critical path. To explore is to linger, pay attention and look; and that's okay.
When the characters won't be picking up any Oscars, the true star here is the world itself. The depiction of life in this post-nuclear ambiance is probably as intense as your ideas could make it. The various underground factions have cobbled together life from scrap and precisely what is left of the outside world. Vehicles, armor as well as weapons are pieced together from spare parts which can be fascinating to check out, incredibly effective and, more to the point, believable in a Mad Max sort of way.
The under-ground of Last Light surely has an ingenious home made character all its own, however it pales in comparison to the harsh and lethal radioactive world outside. When you aren't being stalked and hunted my mutants, you are constantly scavenging for air filters for your gas mask to steer clear of succumbing to the conditions. There were many times my filter timer was ticking down as I desperately hunted for new ones while trying to finish my mission. I would listen to growls and snarls of mutants, making me spin to see whether I was being chased down. A few times, the footsteps of larger beasts would throw my attention off as I spent a longer time making sure I wasn't going to be attacked than remembering to find a filter or hit my next checkpoint. On many occasion, I ran out of air and had to do it over again from the last autosave spot.
Restarting, I needed more ammo. Needless to say, I'd overlooked some stashes. Again unto the breach and, getting memorised her attacks and easily dismissed the bodyguards, I unloaded every single bullet into her face. She didn't die, which has been a bit of a problem. I retried this fight many, oftentimes, becoming super-efficient with the ammo and hoping all sorts of crazy methods - the enclosed battlefield is stuffed with support columns and walls she can destroy, so I matador'd her into each one. Nothing. A earlier incident showed Big Momma's weight collapsing a wood floor. The middle of the arena looked wooden. Therefore I danced around her on top of it for just a few minutes, praying she'd fall through. Not at present, she said.
Metro: Last Light does fit in the company of Half-Life, though. It's an unusual, meticulously detailed shooter inextricable from its environment – making its refuge in the railways of Moscow all the more apt. The survival and shooting factors engage with what is taken into consideration valuable in the world, and both leave enough room for moments of refuge, exploration and concise violence.
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