Metro Last Light is a piece of contemporary art that takes you to a high level of imersion in a deep story.
There are so many details! Every room, every shelve, every corner is packed with objects, debris, textures, and all sort of stuff meticulously placed to tell you a small piece of the story.
Exploration is rewarded by curiosity, like for example, on the beginning on the way to the Garden you may explore a side tunnel and have a sad view of the skeletons of a family embracing each other, telling you that the world changed in a blink of an eye and all they could do at that moment was to share their love.
The graphics are fantastic, the lights are dynamic, the shadows are perfect and everything casts shadows (including you). The texture are in a resolution not seen in any other game, you can get really close to things and see the full detail of the texture, no blur, no pixels. There is a fair use of the tesselation technology not only for perfectly round heads but also for small details that pops up with tesselation like buttons, rocks, wall tiles, etc. The materials reflections is worth mentioning there is a good range of reflections levels and everything looks very real, you can see not only light reflection but image reflections, like in window glasses where the environment image is subtle reflected with the correct distortion.
The combat is part of the narrative and, as everything in this game, the combat is meticulously planned. Every combat scene with humans is a puzzle that can be solved in many ways, the enemies don't follow a fixed pattern, they do some stuff then they do other stuff, then they interact, then they go and do other stuff. So you have some unique opportunities to take them down silently, if you miss it you need to readapt because the same situation won't repeat. Most of the combat scenes have resources available that allow you to try different strategies, like different paths, places to hide, lights that you can break or switch off, you can make noise and attract the attentions of one or two guys, etc. The combat with creatures follow other style, they are more like old school fps, move and shoot.
The story is deep, as deep as the universe designed by Dmitry Glukhovsky, it talks about hope and disappointment, love, duty, greed and a wide range of human feelings that moves the day after day of a society constantly questioning the reason to continue living in a world that drives the Albert Camus's "absurdism" and the "The Myth of Sisyphus" to last consequences.