Is Metro 2033 any good?

[Lord Relvenous]

I was walking around a Game Crazy yesterday and saw Metro 2033 on the shelf. I hadn't heard anything about the game, but was interested. I love post-apocalyptic settings. It looked interesting, but I didn't want to buy it without knowing anything about it. I've looked at some reviews, and saw that it was getting good ratings in atmosphere in presentation, but bugs and some stealth aspects were dragging it down. How annoying are those sections? Is it enough to really kill the game's fun factor? I tend to avoid game reviews, as reviewers have certain peeves that will cause them to completely disregard good aspects and give it a bad review (one reviewer said the stealth made the game unplayable, while another said they were minor nuisances).

Does anyone have it? What do you think? Is it worth a used buy?

[Aaron]

It is worth a buy. Be warned that it is short. The stealth aspects I didn't find to bad, as it's obviously intended to play that way (its a hell of a lot easier then trying to be Rambo). The story is somewhat confusing but the atmosphere and the game mechanics are well done. It is certainly one of the better games to come along in recent years.

[Lord Relvenous]

How is it for post-ending content or replay value?

Thanks for the response.

[Stark]

It's a rental. It's got a cool story and nice shooty etc, but it has essentially no replay value outside a few levels so I don't think its worth keeping.

Its definately worth playing, though. Great fun. People played HL2 for the single player, after all.

The stealth isn't forced at all; I enjoyed the huge gun battles you get into if you don't. However, the stealth system is pretty neat and physical; the world is full of broken crunchy glass, banging cans etc to avoid while sneaking around. It's just mega-cheese with stealth weapons.

[Aaron]

How is it for post-ending content or replay value?

Thanks for the response.

Replay, not very replayable unless your an achievement whore. I heard a rumour about DLC a while ago but I haven't seen or heard any confirmation, nor anything about it recently.

Edit: To clarify, if your going to purchase it wait for the inevitable price drop. Good game but not worth the usual 60$ release price.

[Manus Celer Dei]

The first half is pretty great. Then it goes downhill pretty fast, everything after the Library is pretty lame and feels really rushed. Bulletsponge enemies with broken AI, irritating swarms of kamikaze enemies, great long stretches of nothing but "Follow these NPCs and listen to them waffle on in a russian accent". It's kind of lame.

Everything before that is pretty great though. The AI is good enough, and the stealth is pretty balanced; it's not "sneak around able to silently murder everyone" but you can even the odds a lot by doing it. The weapons have a nice feel to them, they've all got their niche, though the silenced weapons become fairly pointless later on as it descends into wave after wave of melee enemies.

The presentation and atmosphere are pretty good, though it kinda bugs me that the main antagonists (for want of a better word) are mostly absent and don't have a whole lot of presence for most of it. The morality system is incredibly dumb though; some of the choices are obvious (give beggar kid a coin, find sick man medicine etc) but some are truly baffling. Watching a blob go down a tunnel nets you "good" points, for some reason, which you miss if you just carry on (I guess you hurt it's feelings if you ignore it) and apparently you're not a nice guy if you ignore an NPCs scripted dialogue telling you your next objective because you're already off doing it.)

There's also a couple of what just seem to be "Haha, gotcha!" moments from the developers, where you just instantly die or get dumped backwards if you didn't already know what was going to happen, which is just stupid and irritating.

It is overall a pretty good game, though short, and worth at least a rental. It could've just used a bit more time to actually finish the second half and a bit more polish.

[Stark]

What are these 'gotcha' moments? I can count the number of times I died using numbers lower than three.

And the morality system was a complete abortion; I just ignored pretty much everyone and got enough 'good' to get both endings. The white screen flashes aren't for karma, however, which is probably what confused you.

The endgame would have been better if they'd introduced the idea of shooting spawners earlier in the game, rather than the player having to work it out in an otherwise impossible section.

[Manus Celer Dei]

What are these 'gotcha' moments? I can count the number of times I died using numbers lower than three.

Off the top of my head there's a couple of points in the maze at the end where you have a choice of which path to go down and there's no indication of which is the right one, while the red guy is still coming up behind you. So you have to basically choose at random the first time and if you happen to pick wrong, OOPS! Back to the checkpoint.
There's also the little holes the rat-things come out of; if you didn't bump into them in the side-tunnels near the start with Bourbon you first find their holes a few rooms before the creatures themselves, meaning you might not have any clue what they are. Obviously if you know the creatures use them you'll probably guess that dropping down into them would probably be a bad idea even though they're only a few foot deep, but if you missed the optional encounter then you might wonder why you're screen suddenly turned black and you got kicked back to the checkpoint.

I mean, these are only tiny hassles, since you don't really lose a lot of progress, they're just irritating.

And the morality system was a complete abortion; I just ignored pretty much everyone and got enough 'good' to get both endings. The white screen flashes aren't for karma, however, which is probably what confused you.

It's the sound following the screen flashes that signifies whether it was good, bad or neutral, apparently. I just used a guide on my second playthrough.

[Stark]

I thought staying away from the angry guy was pretty obvious. I only died at Bourbons gate because the xbox dropped my input and I thought you were supposed to be mving backward

none of it costs you more than a few seconds of non-combat play, so who cares? As the player it's your job to pay attention and make decisions. I bet you like Bioware games.

And seriously the flashes aren't morality, your information is wrong. The flashes are for the exploration achievement. There are plenty of guides that explain this. You can get both endings so long as you're not an obvious retard; I did nothing special on my first playthrough (certainly not any beggars).

[Feil]

I couldn't get past the 45 degree field of view. If you get the PC version, you can apparently hack it to about 60 degrees before the stretch and slur of the graphics near the corners of the screen become really bad. I wouldn't bother with a console version on account of the FOV.

[Stark]

LOL what the fuck are you talking about? The FOV was similar to other fps; there's no sliding or distortion on a widescreen TV.

Seriously?

[Feil]

Other FPS vary between 60 and 90 degrees. If 45 degrees is enough for you, great. For me, it wasn't.

[Stark]

Since nobody noticed except l33t haxx0rs, I'm going to doubt it's a problem. It looks more like 70 to me on TV taking the aspect ratio into account.

Name a situation where this game-crushing issue had any impact and I'll try to remember if this was the case. Maybe poor old PC just got raped.