Stealth AND Action?! - Metro Last Light
Ah, Russian storytelling. It’s always bleak and grey, but that’s why we love it. Metro Last Light is a stealth shooter that was developed by 4a Games back in 2013. I picked it up in anticipation of their February release, Metro Exodus and I figured I’d give you my thoughts on this one. This is a genuinely good shooter with an interesting story. There is a good balance between the game’s stealth and action elements and while there is a good story, the gameplay is mostly divorced from the narrative.
The gunplay in Metro Last Light is decent, but could be improved upon. There are about a dozen different firearms to choose from that are roughly divided into a couple categories. Each variety has its own arena that it excels at whether that be long range, skirmishing, or stealth. The character can only carry three weapons at a time, allowing the player to tailor their load-out to whatever play style they favor. There are a few ways that guns can be customized that subtly change how the weapons work which can be purchased at different points in the game. While most of the gunplay is industry standard, the guns end up feeling like they do very little to enemies even on normal mode. Multiple shotgun shells at point blank seem to do little to anything but the most grunt of infantry and the mutants are veritable bullet sponges. Despite that issue, the gunplay in Metro Last Light was adequate enough to not get in the way of the game.
Metro Last Light strikes an interesting balance between stealth shooter and action shooter mechanics. At the beginning of most encounters, the player will be unknown to the enemies that they are trying to eliminate. The stealth mechanics are pretty decent. You could spend the entire combat skulking around and stabbing people in the neck, and I did that multiple times. Each level becomes a puzzle as you try to navigate from cover to cover and figure out the secret passages that let you get behind a group of enemies. The game was fairly lenient on what would cause the player to be caught as you could step out in full view of enemies and not be seen, but it was consistent.
The action shooter elements of Last Light would show up whenever the player was seen by someone. Enemies would burst into action, calling reinforcements and starting a firefight with the player. The great part of this is that there was always a chance for victory after being seen. A lot of stealth shooters have a potential to survive being seen, but throw so many enemies at the player that being seen might as well be the same as dying. Last Light struck a balance where there were actual repercussions for being seen, including the expenditure of ammo and the difficulty of the encounter, while having the combat be winnable (at least on normal difficulty). The loss of ammo is not trivial either as there are sections of the game where the player will find little to no ammunition. I found myself running out a couple of times. The balance between rewarding stealth gameplay and winnable encounters when you are discovered made the combat in Last Light feel rewarding and fair.
When it came to fighting the mutants on the surface, the combat was less satisfying. The creatures were either bullet sponges or had a particular thing that you had to do to defeat them. Outside of boss battles, the mutants were mostly made dangerous by throwing a lot of them at the player at once with success or failure being determined by how much ammo you carried. This was not a terrible detriment to the game as these encounters rarely slowed progression much, but most of the encounters with mutants were lack luster in my eyes.
The art direction of Metro Last Light is spot on. The world feels like the post apocalyptic wasteland that it is supposed to be. Shattered earth, otherworldly glowing mushrooms and cobweb laden corridors all gave the player a sense of an empty, dying world. The metro itself felt dark and claustrophobic. Each of the places that the player went to showed the desperation inherent within the people of the metro. The only real issue with the art is that some of the mutants looks a bit silly and had some weird animations. That can be attributed to the fact that even the Redux version of the game is almost five years old at this point, but it is still worth considering. Overall, the environments and general art style of Metro Last Light was perfectly suited for the story that the game was trying to tell.
The story of Last Light is a bit of a mixed bag. It follows the titular character Artyom as he tries to track down the last of the Dark Ones, a species that the player had eradicated in the last game. It follows themes of redemption and questions whether or not humanity is too far gone to be worth saving in the new, broken world. Artyom is the example that can either redeem or doom humanity. In the manner of a lot of Russian literature, humanity was painted as mostly sinful killers throughout the game. This leads to the game giving a conflicted message about humanity. There are two different endings that the game can have depending on how moral the player is throughout the game. In order to get the good ending, the player has to be almost perfect throughout the entire story. That begs the question: if the player had to be perfect to be moral enough to be saved, does that not apply to humanity as well? The moral system and the strictness of it was a strange decision when one considers the themes within the game.
The existence of multiple ending is also quite strange because one is the right ending while the other is objectively the wrong one. I can say this with certainty for both of the Metro games released so far because we know that the story continues on for only one of the possible endings. The other ending is a waste of time because it has to be thrown out when considering the story as a whole. This is doubly strange in that the ending of Last Light that Metro Exodus will follow is the one that very few people who played the game actually experienced. Having multiple endings and hiding the true ending behind numerous hoops that have to be jumped through was a very strange decision that definitely took away from the experience when I realized that what I experience was the incorrect story.
Metro Last Light’sstory and gameplay were mostly divorced from one another. The story was told through cutscenes, voiceovers and notes throughout the game. This game was more of a film and novel that were punctuated by set-piece gameplay. Very little that the player actually did (I mean the actual player, not the main character) had any bearing on themes or story throughout the game. There were instances wherein the player could choose who could be saved or killed, but the multiple endings of Last Light robbed those choices of any real meaning within the story. Because you had to save basically everyone in order to achieve the good ending, choosing who you saved or killed meant nothing in terms of the story itself. It was an all or nothing affair that stole any agency from the player. On top of that, we know that one of the endings is correct and certain characters must live or die, thereby further devaluing any choices that the player chooses to make. While it is industry standard that gameplay should be nothing by hedonistic, that is not how it has to be and the Metro series is a prime example of a shooter that could thematize its gameplay for an even more poignant experience. Alas, it has yet to achieve this.
Overall, Metro Last Light is an adequate shooter with a great mix of stealth and action combat. The gunplay is nothing to write home about, but it does not detract from the experience at all. The player is given the option of being stealthy as they play while the repercussions for being seen are not so harsh as to be an immediate game over. This creates a brilliant marriage of stealth and action gameplay that brings out the best of the stealth shooter genre while leaving behind stealth games worst aspects. The environments are well made with all of them reflecting the desolate hopelessness of the Metro universe. Last Light’s story is a mixed bag. Dark, quintessentially Russian themes run throughout the game as it asks some deep questions about whether or not humanity is redeemable. However, the themes of the game and the player’s own choices are undermined by Last Light’s moral system and the linear narrative that is told across the entire series. Metro Last Light is a very fun shooter that is worth the effort and for all of the flaws that the story may have, it is good enough to give the world character and keep the player engaged. This is a great game that I would recommend to anyone who enjoys the narrative shooter genre. There are few single player shooter campaigns that are quite as good as this one.
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