Super Nerd Sunday Presents: Metro: Last Light is Pretty Disappointing!

Metro: Last Light isn't a bad game.  Let's just say that at the top.  It's not evil or mean or dark.  It's not even a poor game: as a crafted object, it's quite competent.  Its systems generally work pretty well, and it's more or less a transparent taskmaster.  It's fine, more or less, which is actually pretty disappointing in the context of its predecessor, Metro 2033.

Some context to those who didn't play Metro 2033: Metro 2033 was a ballbustingly tough shooter about crawling around tunnels and then, for brief stints, running about on the surface of a blasted post apocalyptic Moscow.  Metro 2033 was fearsome, even when it was buggy and unforgiving.  It was a game about the end of the world that really managed to effect a sense of want and need.  Currency, represented by military grade bullets that could kill most enemies in a single shot, was rare and extremely necessary.  Each encounter in the game, be it violent or non-violent, played into a gripping economy that forced players to choose how they'd spend their bullets, quite literally.  Would they shoot them, buy necessary gear long before it was available (or, in some cases, during the only period of time in which it became available) or save their rounds for future purchases?  There was some dicey but effective shooting all around this system, but at the game's core there was an economy, a real sense of want and scarcity, even at the easiest difficulties, that gave every second of exploration and acquisition a sense of true urgency.

Metro: Last Light hones the shooting gameplay of the original Metro 2033 and more or less abandons those concepts of scarcity.  Within seconds of the introductory cutscene you're given a staggering number of military grade bullets, to spend or shoot as you choose.  As the game unfolds there are more things to buy than before (many more!) and yet, overall, so many bullets to spend and so many pieces of equipment to find that the bullets that keep piling up barely need to be spent.  I finished the game with nearly two thousand military grade rounds, having never actually purchased any equipment during the game itself.  I spent money on upgrades, sure, but I never felt the need to swap out one gun for another.  The end result is that the economy of scarcity that made Metro 2033 so gripping is totally absent.  Each encounter in Metro 2033 filled me with a kind of dread.  It made me nervous about how things would turn out, how I'd be able to make it through what was to come.  Metro: Last Light made encounters feel like chores at worst (the majority of the mutant battles, which often involved endless or obtusely structured respawns in their worst incarnations) and puzzles at best (while attempting to non-lethally move through a space occupied by human soldiers).

Indeed, the only time I ever felt any sort of challenge from the game came from the long stretches where I chose to play through the game without killing a single enemy.  These portions of the game became conceptual puzzles about enemy movement, control over light sources, and careful timing.  The shooting portions moved in the other direction: instead of being sharp, nifty puzzles or pulse pounding firefights, they were "squat and sit" endurance competitions where I waited in a corner for enemies to wander into my line of sight, then mowed them down adeptly.  Some of the mutant battles were rough, to be fair, but that felt less like a product of intent and more like an issue of design: fighting "boss mutants" was a bit like trying to rebuild an engine without a manual: I could figure it out, given a little bit of trial and error, but I never felt like the task I was being given was actually difficult.  I just felt like I wasn't being told what the fuck I should be doing.  Not to claim that rebuiding an engine is as easy as beating the bosses in Metro: Last Light: unless you're trying to conserve resources, you can just pop in some of that military grade ammo you haven't been spending and let loose with abandon.  I mean, what else would you be spending that shit on?

Perhaps this is something that would be resolved by playing through the game at a higher difficulty - I don't know.  I don't think so, though.  Much of the ease comes not from the currency itself (which is purportedly severely limited on higher difficulties, along with air filters, the "currency for being able to explore above ground") but from the degree to which things are just lying around.  Of course I didn't have to buy any guns; every gun that I saw in a shop I saw on the ground beforehand, often with some money saving attachments hooked on to it.  I'm reticent to test out the dynamic loot system to see if it makes a difference, because it's not just a matter of things being available: it's an overarching disconnect between world and gameplay that leaches into the story in a pretty insidious way.

The original Metro 2033 was a seamless hybrid of game and story.  Everything about the desperate, simpering world you lived in felt true to life and real in a pretty disturbing way.  Nothing was easy, and the game itself was desperate at the best of times.  Playing Metro 2033 was like clawing your way out of a pit: harrowing and satisfying in an unexpected and somewhat disturbing way.  Playing Metro: Last Light is a bit more like climbing up a ladder.  The game goes out of its way to accommodate players, then show them how awful the world has become.  Just before you fight a roving gang of rape-bandits, you're given a chance to buy and sell items at a store, just to make sure you have all the ammo and supplies you need.  In the event that things go wrong, you can always back-track from the bandit hold to the store.  Heck, you can even shuttle weapons back there to sell for a few more hundred bullets, again, easing the economic stress that the original Metro saturated the game with.  The end result is a hard, nasty world filled with dozens of bad dudes sitting next to a polite makeshift settlement.  This is not an isolated phenomena: there are two or three other shops that fit this pattern, each of them somewhat ridiculous.

That's not to say that ridiculous shit should never happen: some of the most absurd moments in the game are the most enjoyable.  The cabaret show in one of the makeshift cities of the future is actually a pretty good time, and showcases some pretty deft movement animation and scripting AI.  But these absurd moments, or moments of simple, understated human storytelling are offset by over the top black and white morality choices.  For every showcase of human endurance, cruelty and want that I encountered I was met by two opportunities to rob a napping fisherman blind or give a child back his teddy bear.  The benefit for doing the former was negligible, the benefit for doing the latter, considerable.  In Metro 2033, attempts to help people could lead to you getting mugged.  In Metro: Last Light, consequences are all apparent.  There's no real grit to the world.  Things are ramshackle, but booze is abundant, food is plentiful, and even the Nazis are, in the end, pretty reasonable.  Metro 2033 told a story about failing to understand one's enemy and suffering for it.  Metro: Last Light tells a story about a cartoon villain and then, almost accidentally, reveals issuances of relevant human experience and endurance in a world gone mad.

There are other problematic elements of the game as well.  I wrote last week about Last Light's childish relationship with sexuality and queer identity, but that childish tone saturates the entire game.  That wouldn't be a problem at all (childish tones can be a great thing!) if not for the fact that it's a game about witnessing multiple, simultaneous nuclear apocalypses all at once.  Gleeful, friendly allies who become menacing, mustache twirling enemies, baby psychic gorrilas with hearts of gold and guilt complexes, sexy lady snipers who go from tease to tart to mother in the span of three one-sided conversations.  Metro 2033 was a subtle, well crafted slice of game that directed all of its systems towards one single, pounding goal and did so with relatively few compromises.  Metro: Last Light is a sophomoric follow-up that effectively re-creates elements of the tunnel-rat gameplay that made Metro 2033 great while losing much of the tension and tone that made the original great.

If I'm a bit harsh on Metro: Last Light, it's because it failed to deliver on the promise of its predecessor, and because it's occurring in my life along with a number of spectacularly constructed games that execute so wonderfully on their concepts that the flaws of Metro: Last Light become all the more apparent.  As an engine for shooting things, Metro: Last Light is second rate.  As an engine for telling a story, it's groan worthy.  As a means of killing time, it's effective, though you'll want to take frequent breaks to make sure the tedium of running into invisible walls doesn't wear too heavily on you.