Metro: Last Light Review

Even a single breath is a valuable commodity outside of the metro. You must don a gas mask to stay alive, but masks require filters, which have limited life spans. You discover more filters by exploring your environs--but exploration takes time, which means watching your available supply of healthy air slowly diminish. If you don't value each minute, the pace of your mission could suddenly change from slowly methodical to terrifyingly urgent, as you sprint towards your destination, gasping with increased desperation and hoping against hope that you might cling to life. Unfortunately, you could encounter one of Last Light's uncommon but annoying invisible walls during such a circumstance, thinking that you might be able to leap over a small obstacle or follow a narrow path, only to discover how wrong you were.

Sometimes, saving one life involves the taking of another.

The air is healthier in the metro, but the dangers are no less real. You still confront misshapen mutants in the tunnels, but the darkness plays an important role. One type of creature recoils from the beam of your flashlight, eventually flipping onto its back and making itself vulnerable to your bullets. Battling several at once results in a rhythmic dance as you use your flashlight to keep your distance between you and the mutants' pincers, firing only when you do the most damage. You often find such critters in the blackest of passages--passages you aren't forced to investigate. Yet the lure of such places can be irresistible. The glow of mushrooms and the possibility of valuable ammo beckon you inwards, as does the chance of rescuing an innocent captive held hostage by the enemy factions that also lurk in the tunnels.

You aren't required to go toe to toe with human opposition. You can use darkness to your advantage, twisting light bulbs and flipping circuit breakers to keep yourself hidden, and then sneaking through bases to avoid combat altogether. You can be silently murderous, sidling up behind a guard and slicing his throat, and then quietly flinging a knife into another's back. Human enemies go about their actions in realistic ways; they follow patterns, of course, but they aren't always so regimented as to seem unnatural. As a result, the stealth is fun and tense, though you can always shoot your way out of a bind if you need to.

Evil things descend from these swirling skies.

Firefights can be tough, depending on where and how you're caught sneaking around. You could find yourself cornered, wishing you had put a silencer on that sniper rifle rather than drawing everyone's attention with a single shot. Your enemies are uniformly aggressive when alerted, though hardly the sharpest tacks in the box. Several might get stuck in place, their weapons' barrels clipping through each other and the wall as they twirl about. Others might run about in nonsensical ways or fail to notice your presence as quickly as you'd expect. Yet given the close confines in which you normally face these soldiers, AI issues aren't great distractions, as you'll often be too busy staying alive to notice the oddities. It's when you get stealthy again that the discrepancies become most obvious.

Metro: Last Light's battles and sneaky sequences are tense delights, but what makes the adventure truly sing are how such scenes flow from one to the next--and how the detours between them make battles more impactful. Last Light frequently disrupts its own pace, going from terror to relief in a heartbeat, and putting you in one atmospheric location after another. At one point, you get a short look into a room before you drop into it from the vent above. The room is full of corpses, but it's the sight of one corpse in particular that fills you with unease: that of a little boy. Last Light doesn't linger here; there is no internal dialogue that tells you that Artyom is driven to anger in that moment. But the visual enrages you nonetheless, making the upcoming action and plot points more than just about warring men, but about the consequences that conflict has on the future of the metro.

The epitome of hiding in plain sight.

The surface brings a tenuous visual warmth, even though though the sunlight is diffused through dreary gray clouds. Out here, one companion in particular brings the harsh exterior an unexpected humanity, while diverse sequences, like one that has you escaping the brash onslaught of the wind, keep the pace from ever becoming too predictable. And even in this wasteland, there's visual variety that keeps Last Light from becoming too overbearing. There's beauty in its indigo skies and battered cityscapes, and even in the sunken, asymmetrical angles of a watcher's face. The console versions of the game look somewhat drab in the darkest of regions, the glimmers of light not quite piercing the blackness enough to make environments come alive. Additionally, the PlayStation 3 version doesn't always maintain a slick frame rate, though this version is still excellent, regardless.

Metro: Last Light is not an endless barrage of bullets and beasts. It takes the time to let you breathe in the choking atmosphere and allow the chilling fog to seep into your bones. And when it finally comes time to aim your shotgun at mutated fiends, the payoff is grander for the eerie silence that came before. Last Light is notably superior to its predecessor, merging storytelling, shooting, and sneaking into a remarkable and cohesive whole. And through this harmony of game design comes the caustic dissonance of a world so torn asunder that a single possibility can bring with it endless hope.