Game Review: Metro 2033

I don't know whether to dislike this game or not. I'm incredibly under-whelmed by it. Maybe I'm just burned out on FPS's from days of playing Singularity. That may be it, because if I pick the game apart, it's pretty good. I'll explain.

It's a post-apocalyptic game, based in Moscow. Twenty years ago we blew the world to shit and the survivors took refuge in the subway tunnels. Pretty original; far-fetched, but not quite as far-fetched as the government preparing decades in advance for the apocalypse and building Vaults for it. Our main character, Artyom, was born when the bombs fell and raised in the Metro tunnels. A friend of his step-father is visiting the station (apparently named Exhibition, although I don't think this is mentioned until much later in the game.) The station is having problems with mutant attacks and also attacks by something called "Dark Ones". No, that's never explained; it's kind of like the weird shadow people in Condemned. They're there, they're vital to the plot but nobody really knows what the fuck they are.

The graphics are OK. The majority of the game is in the dark so you don't really notice them a whole helluva lot, but there are glitches. I don't know if it was just me, because the DVD drive on my Xbox 360 is starting to crap out, but the textures sometimes lagged behind the rest of the game so sometimes things were really fuzzy. Other than that they were good; the mutants were disgusting and rather creepy, seeing Moscow and a city blown to hell and plunged into nuclear winter was mildly depressing. The sound was basically what you would expect from a game where you're stuck in the subway tunnels under a nuclear blasted Moscow inhabited by mutants: lots of growling, grunting and other creepy sounds.

The other thing that struck me as original and actually making sense was the currency: they use military-grade ammunition as money. I know I already mentioned that, but I still think it's awesome. That was one of the things that bugged the piss out of me about Fallout 3. Bottle-caps? Really? What the fuck use is that? Bullets makes sense; in a mutant infested wasteland, bullets have value.

I don't know, there aren't any major sticking points that really piss me off with this game, but I still just can't tell if I like this one or not. Just...meh.