 Hey everyone, I missed a week of videos because there were two games released this month that I wanted to play and write about. I'd played Metro Exodus first and was gonna get a quick video up about that, but then I started playing Anthem and decided I had to get to that video first. But today we're gonna get into Metro Exodus and what makes it really good. In fact, let's get one thing clear right at the top. Metro Exodus isn't a good video game. It is a great video game. One of the best three shooters of the generation and unbelievably tightly designed and powerful work of gaming art. So join me as I finally talk about a game that didn't piss me off. Or at least not much. I mean, I get pissed off easily, so after the logo. I don't know about you all, but I really loved the first two Metro games. That's not much of a surprise considering these games were developed by many of the people who created Stalker, one of PC's best shooters. In anticipation of Metro Exodus, I went back and played the first two Metro games again and found them to be basically, as I remembered, a really cool blend of survival horror, stealth, corridor shooter, big-budget set piece, and hardware pushing graphics wrapped up with a bow of game-breaking bugs. Each of those first two games had a clear inspiration. Metro 2033 was paying homage to the first Half-Life game and Last Light was like a mixture of Call of Duty and Half-Life 2's Raven home level. But ultimately part of the charm of those games was that every time they tried to pull off being a modern big-budget Call of Duty-style shooter, they failed. Miserably. They featured absolutely terrible turret sections, ridiculous QTE sections, and observed set pieces as well as a really really obvious lack of polish. Whenever the game wasn't trying to be a AAA big-budget blockbuster, they were unconditionally spectacular. The world building, stealth, gunplay, exploration, and visual storytelling were as good as any game I've played. While the localization and voice acting weren't great, they were surprisingly solid and the stories were excellent. And there's also something quite appealing about just how unapologetically Soviet those games are. They can be enjoyed by all, but having even a basic grasp of Soviet history makes them even more enjoyable. And it's enlightening to play a game whose heroes are the people I was taught were the enemy and who I grew up fairly sure would be responsible for newthing my home. With all that behind me, I was looking forward with nervous anticipation to Metro Exodus. As the first game of 2019, I was really excited to play. There are less FPS campaigns than ever now, and we're getting to a point where like focused narrative SPS games are almost non-existent. The age of the half-life style narrative corridor shooter seems to have passed in favor of bloated wheezing open-world games. I was excited to see what 4A and their engine would pull off with a bigger budget and on modern hardware, but I was also nervous that by trying to modernize the formula, it would just be a grittier far cry. But first, let's get a little brief history out of the way, alright? A brief history of Metro Exodus isn't quite open-world, thank God, but it is also certainly not a corridor shooter. Usually. To fully appreciate what this game actually is, we need to just really briefly go over some history and rather than start with the first Metro game, we need to go back a little further. We've got to go back to Stalker, Shadow of Chernobyl. Most of the team that created Stalker ended up going on to make the Metro games and they have clear similarities and some notable differences. The Stalker games were semi-open worlds featuring several large stitched together maps and being kind of a mix of linear FPS game and sandbox game. They were set in the Soviet Union after a nuclear apocalypse and both featured human enemies and mutated monsters that attacked the player in packs. As well as being apocalyptic survival horror typeshooters, they also featured supernatural elements. And, like all the other games, they pushed PC hardware forward with extremely impressive versatile graphics, physics, and NPC AI. And it was also a mess of game breaking bugs with serious performance and quality control issues. Many of the people behind Metro, including the creative director, were the same who made Stalker and the first two games retained some of the flavor of Stalker while still being quite distinct. The Soviet and nuclear post-apocalypse setting, being inspired by a novel, a world with supernatural elements, and most importantly a kind of survival horror FPS game that pushed limits graphically. What was different was that rather than a sort of incoherent nonlinear story set on a large map, Metro 2033 was a tightly focused narrative corridor shooter. But holy shit, those corridors were amazing. The lighting in all of the Metro games is unbelievable and for its time it was just spectacular with terrifying creatures and gorgeous, brilliantly designed levels, exploring with tense and exciting. Mechanics like radiation and needing to move quickly so as not to run out of air filters meant the game never dragged. While its setting and its trappings were the same, its pace and gameplay were very different. Yes, it was a linear narrative corridor shooter, but its gameplay was so great. Its story was so great. Its creature design, its graphics, its sound, all were fantastic. It really is like the Ravenholm section of Half-Life 2 with better graphics, stretched out into an entire campaign with a heavy stealth focus and better shooting mechanics. If you haven't played those games and that sounds good, you should play them right now. There are re-releases that make them run at 60 FPS on console and they're available with Xbox Game Pass if you have Xbox. And on PC, they just look amazing to this day right now. Also, both still had major bugs and problems at launch, many of which still remain to this day, unfortunately. So these games were all ambitious and featured fantastic graphics, but also had serious issues with performance. And both of the Metro games, especially, suffer from some sections that are almost hilariously awful if they weren't so frustrating. Things like terrible checkpoints that catch you into unstoppable death loops or broken contextual commands or doors that won't open or hard crashes. My hope for Metro Exodus was that it would be a new Metro game that's more highly polished with a really great story and without the game breaking bugs. Exodus, amazing and broken. I'm going to dig pretty deep on the actual game itself, but right now I'm going to make two things clear. First, Metro Exodus is an unbelievably good game. And second, it has enough bugs that it can get frustrating, especially on console. You have to come into a Metro game with certain expectations. It is a game that belongs to a genre called Eurojank and Eurojank games are known for their terrible onboarding, their failure to properly explain their mechanics or nuances, bad UIs and bugs. And to be fair, Metro Exodus fixes many of these things. It onwards the player really well. It has a really great UI and it does a pretty good job explaining itself unlike the older games and I am generally very forgiving on bugs. My son likes to point out every time a texture or a gun clips through a model, but that stuff doesn't really bother me if it isn't egregious. I've got only a few things I require, a stable and smooth frame rate, decent draw distance and rendering, and that the game not have a bunch of crashes and game breaking bugs. Well, let's start with the good. This is the first game in a while I bought on two platforms. I bought it on Xbox first so I can play in my bedroom on my television, so let's start there. On the Xbox One X, Metro Exodus looks impossibly good. It is rendered in 4K meaning detail is unbelievable, lighting is ridiculous, particle effects are stunning, the gun models alone and how they interact with the lighting system is just amazing. Draw distance is great and I really almost never noticed any pop in or bad textures at all. Metro Exodus like all the previous games is pushing hard against what hardware is capable of. I'll get into the art and level design next, but as far as visuals, the game is absolutely stunning. One of the rare games where its visual quality is a real selling point. In fact, as much as I was forgiving of the visuals in Fallout 76, after playing this game, I booted up 76 to look at the difference in apocalyptic settings from games released only three months apart. Look at this, check this out. Metro on console, at least on the Xbox One X, runs at a very, very stable 30 frames per second. So stable and smooth that it took a minute or so for me to even decide if it was only running at 30 frames. I can honestly say I do not recall even one instance of significant frame drops or stutters which is quite the achievement in a game that looks this good. Now, I'm disappointed that I wasn't given the option to choose 1440p in 60 frames instead of 30 and 4k, but for whatever reason console ports just rarely offer that at launch. Now, I am not a graphics whore. I appreciate them and I would prefer nice graphics to shit graphics, but in general gameplay is much more important to me by a very wide margin. But holy crap, on PC Metro Exodus is insane. On my i5-7700k and my GTX 1080, the game runs on Ultra at 1440p and hovers between 60 and 80 fps, usually sitting around 70. The super special hair and advanced physics settings dropped me below 60 so I left those off for a while, but at 70 frames on Ultra, this game looks and plays unbelievably good. When I bumped it up to extreme settings, I got 45 to 55 and the game looks so damn good on extreme at 1440p that I played it like that. The game just looks amazing. So amazing that its graphics are enough to buy the game. Particle effects and smoke, fog, rain, it's just unbelievable. Look at Archim's arm dude. He has hair on his knuckles. He's got veins in his bicep. The environmental detail is like off the charts levels of impressive and more importantly it uses those visuals to enhance the gameplay. Anthem runs like garbage on my PC, but I can admit it's a pretty game. But Anthem's beauty does nothing to improve the actual moment to moment gameplay. It's just window dressing. Metro's visual presentation directly impacts how you play. Because Exodus still leans heavy into its survival horror aesthetic and its stealth focused FPS roots, its lighting is a gameplay mechanic. Darkness and the day night cycle directly impact how you can tackle levels and missions. It changes how enemies behave, what enemies are present. The tension and danger of sneaking through its winding levels quietly is only enhanced because those levels are nearly photorealistic. And the immersion that this level of fidelity and lighting brings is just incredible. Shadows actually respond to your actions. If you reload your gun, your shadow does the same thing. I can't even describe how good this game feels in a darkened room with your headphones on. It is unbelievable. I'm going to go into the gameplay here in a bit, but I needed to make it clear that this is one of the rare games where amazing graphics fundamentally supports and improves the actual gameplay loop. But graphics and frame rate aren't the only considerations in talking about a game's tech. And Metro has some problems, as well as its triumphs. I'm glad I didn't do this video until I played Anthem, because on my first playthrough on Xbox, the game was pretty much broken to the point that it significantly hurt my experience and I'd have had to ding it from perfect to very good with broken. I lost count on how many hard crashes that required me to force stop the application. Throwing a knife, opening my backpack, cutscenes, looking at the map, listening to NPCs, going through a door, there was no rhyme or reason behind any of them. I'm talking like an average of a crash every hour. I literally lost count, but at one point I was up to 15 hard crashes. The Xbox version also had like a strange input problem where aiming felt sluggish like the controller's dead zone and acceleration was off. On top of that, I had several missions broken when doors weren't open or NPCs wouldn't trigger an animation. Well, there was a patch that was meant to fix these issues on console and I did log on to check and the input lag seems greatly improved. I'm not sure about all the game breaking bugs and crashes because I didn't play it all the way through again on console. On PC, the game repeatedly crashed until I started it in safe mode and ran it in DirectX11 mode. After that, I had basically no problems. And playing it on PC, totally uninterrupted with only one or two crashes, so improved the experience it allowed me to fully appreciate everything this game does. It is rare these days that I'll lose like four hours playing a game without realizing it, but that's how good Metro Exodus is. So if you've already played it, I'm sure you, like me, had frustrating stability issues. I can only urge you that you play it again because it's working pretty well now, at least on PC. The story. Metro Exodus is one of the best shooter campaigns I have ever played. Its only competition this generation are Doom and Titanfall 2 and like those two games, it is a unique gameplay experience. Unlike those two games, Metro has an extremely well-paced, well-crafted, and compelling story and world. I'm not saying those games had bad stories or anything, both had exactly as much story as was needed to not get in the way, but Metro's world and story are legitimately engaging and thought-provoking. Occasionally, I will look back over my videos and something becomes very clear. Like, 75% of my videos are complaints, and it's not that I'm a hater, it's that there simply aren't that many great games, man. While Metro Exodus is a great game, on my first playthrough I loved it, but didn't fully appreciate just how great it is. Firstly, because the technical issues pissed me off, and second, because I didn't fully take my time to explore the world, and finally because I was much more focused on the gameplay than I was on this total package. The first two Metro games had really great stories that were sometimes held back by bad voice acting and poor facial and character models. Exodus tells a much more personal story than the first two games, while still retaining all of its interesting political and social commentary. I prefer my games to have voluntary stories, and for good and ill, Exodus refuses to force its story on you. My first time through the game, one of my chief complaints was that RTM squadmates felt like they weren't really characterized or fleshed out, but it turns out, like all confident games, that was only because they didn't force that stuff on me. Much of Metro's character development is done through optional dialogue sections that you can check out while you're on the Aurora. And, while, again, there are some places where the English voice acting isn't stellar, there are plenty of places where it really really is. I'm undecided as to whether the silent protagonist was necessary here, but even with the narrative constraint of a silent player character, Metro manages to achieve emotional moments as good as any I've ever seen in a first person shooter. It is quite unique in that regard. I just did a one hour video on Anthem where I slammed the game's miserably terrible story, which is all the more disappointing because Bioware made the game, but an interesting thing occurred to me as I played Metro for the second time. Anthem and Metro use very similar techniques in their storytelling. In fact, other than the fact that all of Metro's cutscenes are in-engine, they're almost identical methods. Both games have the vast majority of their story delivered in first person. Both games rely on the player to seek out optional story in dialogue moments as well as text and audio logs to flesh out the plot and characters, and both games have a clear focus mainly on the gameplay. What's amazing though is how much massively better told Metro's story is. It has a better plot, better pacing, better direction, better animations, better cutscenes, all of it is better. I slammed Anthem's first person view as being one of the reasons its story worked so poorly, but Metro proves me wrong here. We're going to take a look at two first person story cutscenes. First we'll look at one from Anthem, which ironically I only recorded as a joke because the game refused to allow me to skip it. Let's check it out. Why does Talon even want that journal? And now he's been reduced to this. Now you can see how dead and static that cutscene feels. How bland. Now let's look at one of Metro's cutscenes, paying special attention to the fact that it is also told in first person, but look at the mocap and the actual camera direction and sound design here. I want you to really look. And let's also take a moment to appreciate how Metro's in-engine cutscenes allow for absolutely seamless transitions unlike anything I've seen since Uncharted 4. But beyond that, the amount of tension and emotion in that scene is a tour of how to make a player invested. Animations, sound design, lighting, camera direction, blocking, it all combines and make a scene with power, pacing and tension. It's top-notch stuff and it's indicative of everything else in this game. I'm not going to spoil all the cutscenes in this game, but this is part for the course. They are all this good. But all that is simply execution rather than substance. It's not all that surprising that a game with as much attention and detail as Exodus manages to have highly crafted story moments. What's more surprising for the series is how effective the actual character moments are and again, much of this is down to just how real the characters look and move as well as the very good writing. The game, unlike Anthem, has a well-plotted story weaving in politics, religion, themes about clinging to past political systems and it splices in powerful characters and real emotion. It has momentum to it and at no point in the narrative does anything feel like fluff or filler. The plot of the game moves through several interesting areas each with a distinct visual presentation as well as a concise narrative theme. The first two metrogames had a very heavy focus on the political realities of the metro. It made a statement about people that even after nuclear war, humanity huddled in an underground subway beset by radiation and sickness and mutants would still have warfare between capitalists, fascists and communists. Exodus leaves the political issues underground in the last game and instead has a heavy focus on religion, slavery and tribalism. It also manages to make a statement because almost all of its villains are former officials. The game is relentlessly driving home that even after a disaster like this, people immediately fall back into their hierarchical societies. They look to build the same exploitative systems that they had. In many instances, they even allow the very people who created the previous world to rise to the top of this one. If you listen to the audio logs, you'll find that the Volga level's leader, Father Silancius, was a high-ranking party official who replaces the cult-like worship of the party and demonization of imperial capitalists with a cult-like worship of a fish and demonization of electricity. The Yamantau level features a high-ranking military official and a party doctor who exploit the people of the nation in a horrifying way by appealing to their patriotism. The Black Sea level's Big Bad is a former oil baron who literally enslaves people through labor. The game doesn't beat you over the head with these things and frankly, you can run through shooting monsters and not think too much about it. But what's here is compelling stuff and pretty heady as well. Its villains and its levels are almost perfectly crafted to demonstrate a new society built by each pillar of the Soviet leadership, military, party, business and academic, and doesn't portray these people only as cartoonish supervillains. Even the most outrageous section of the game features a compelling backstory told through text and audio logs. The main antagonists have done very bad things but they are totally believable and in some instances even defensible. Metro succeeds in everything it tries in its story. Its plot is good and well-paced, its cutscenes are excellent, its characters are well developed and memorable and interesting, its lore, text and audio logs are all excellent. Its political and social statements are really deep and compelling and its environmental storytelling is second to none. And let's just talk about that for a moment. When Fallout 76 released, I talked about how I thought the game looked pretty but didn't feel all that post-apocalyptic. Metro Exodus is post-apocalyptic. The levels themselves fully sell the setting and story in a way that Fallout simply did not outside of a few areas. This is where the graphics really help the storytelling and where how you play the game might impact what you think of it. The longer you spend in these levels, the more the setting gets to you. Metro's levels fully immerse you in this hellscape created by the absurd political conflict that I grew up surrounded by. The friendly characters start the game assuming that they need to look out for enemy NATO forces. But it's immediately apparent how ridiculously absurd this is. And it's probably the best statement on nuclear war ever in a game. Nuclear war is so irrational because they cannot be won. This is the inevitable outcome of mutually assured destruction. There's no occupying a nation that's been attacked by hydrogen bombs. The landscape is rendered lifeless and unlivable, poisoned, wiped clean. This isn't the last of us where disease allows nature to take over again. A nuclear war scours nature. It is the ultimate insanity and for people who grew up when I or my parents did it's still pretty powerful. And I should say that Russia and America still have thousands of warheads aimed at each other. An exchange would, aside from the mutants, produce a landscape very much like what's actually in the game. Metro is unceasingly bleak whenever you're actually out playing and endearingly hopeful when you're on the aurora. And best of all, Metro's nuclear apocalypse isn't just a skin for the map. It's a gameplay mechanic, a story beat, a characterization tool, and a lens to view human society through. It's light enough for an FPS player to ignore if they want, but also surprisingly mature and thought provoking. It's just excellent, man. Gameplay. Alright, I promised myself I would make this one short because the anthem video was ridiculous, so I'll keep this brief. I was nervous about Metro's gameplay. As soon as it became known that the game was open-world, I got skeptical. The secret sauce that made Metro great was its level design and its claustrophobic, dark, winding corridors. And because the first two games clearly strived to achieve most of the AAA shooter tropes and failed mostly, I was very nervous that rather than trying to ape Half-Life like Metro 2033 or Call of Duty like Last Light, Exodus would decide it was going to be Far Cry instead. Well, I am very happy to report that this is the best open-world shooter ever made because it's not an open-world shooter. It's a nearly perfect blend of Metro's signature corridors and three stalker-like, relatively large open-world areas. Each of these areas are exactly big enough, and I mean just exactly big enough. It's uncanny how perfectly sized they are. Each of the maps are big enough to hide dozens of areas of interest while also being small enough so that navigation never gets tedious and annoying. In Metro, you find points of interest by using binoculars, and I'm going to do a small PSA for everyone here, because while Metro is the friendliest Eurojank game ever, it's still, deep down in its bones, a Eurojank game, which means it really, really doesn't want to explain itself to you fully, and if you miss something, you're pretty much fucked. When you use the game's binoculars, you can scan the horizon to find points of interest, which are then added to your map. But if you happen to miss how Crest explains this to you, you simply won't figure this shit out. So here's the thing, you've got to be wearing headphones to really make this work. As you slowly scan the horizon, you will hear a very slight click. If you keep scanning, you'll hear another click indicating you've gone too far. You need to go to the first click, zoom in, and hold the binoculars in place until a map icon pops up. I didn't really fully figure this out until my second playthrough, and this mechanic is extremely useful and important. It's probably the best map marker system I've ever seen in a game, and it's just yet another well thought out, fun, interesting, and immersive gameplay system in a title that is just chock full of them. Rather than having a magic map with yellow exclamation points and a mini map, you've got binoculars, and a paper map, and a compass you can use in real time. Using the binoculars leaves you open to attack, and they work best if you can get to high ground. Using the map requires you to turn on your flashlight and leaves you vulnerable. It creates an extremely immersive loop of scanning the horizon, seeing something interesting, pulling out your binoculars and seeing if the game tells you that there's something you need to check out there, and then slowly making your way to it using your map and the compass. Metro is a very slow burn. Movement is cumbersome, and you are constantly slowed by mud, or cobwebs, or undergrowth. This and the game's insanely short sprint, followed by ridiculous panting recovery, can be annoying at first. But if you can just let it go, and agree that the game refuses to let you run through its world, you will eventually appreciate this design decision. The game is entirely reliant on you slowly creeping through the map and making decisions about where to go next. And because of the way the game is paced, it's possible to beat this thing in 15 hours or 40. I love that the game doesn't force this exploration on you. I found all the map areas because I was having a good time exploring the map, especially in the bold and caspian levels. Each area has between one and two dozen areas of interest, with each of them being fun gameplay sections, or useful upgrades, or story moments, or crafting materials. They are well spaced enough to feel like you're actually exploring, and fits into Metro's classic gameplay loop really well. One of my biggest problems, again with Anthem, is how ad hoc and poorly implemented almost all of its systems were. Metro is really tightly designed. Its exploration ties into its story, and its crafting. Its crafting ties into its combat. Its combat ties into its progression, and all the way back again. Every pillar of the game is supported by the other pillars. Crafting and scrounging keep exploration meaningful, and the combat is easily the best in the series, with gunplay feeling really great, and sounding unbelievably good. Check it out. This smaller, tighter version of Far Cry is actually a really good iteration on the genre. Basically, open world games have gotten consistently bigger and bigger and bigger. Here's an example of one that got smaller, to its benefit. It's basically Far Cry distilled to exactly what is needed, and nothing more. Frankly, it puts Far Cry to embarrassing shame, and I like the Far Cry games for the most part. Still, if that loop was all there was, the game would have probably gotten boring, like Far Cry does. But luckily, 4A is aware of what they do well, and each of these maps features several handcrafted corridor shooter levels that are almost always something akin to narrative dungeon sections. This is where the game, like the first two, really shines. When playing on normal or especially hard, you dive very quickly in Metro. Only one or two shots or swipes from a monster can kill you. This means that stealth is extremely important, at least to thin out groups of enemies before getting into a firefight. An exodus of stealth works very well. Archyom has a light meter on his wrist which allows the player to know whether or not he is visible. When you play at the default gamma settings, the game is probably too bright. In order to really get the full experience, I think you've got to turn the gamma down so that the stealth becomes believable. I turned it down far enough so that if I turn off the lights, I can't see it all. The actual mechanics here aren't anything new. It's the same FPS stealth system that Far Cry has made ubiquitous, but it works so very well here because stealthing around feels great in Metro because of how fantastic the lighting system is. And luckily, the actual shooting is the best the series has ever featured. Guns look and sound amazing, gunshots, light up rooms, and actually cast shadows, walls chip when you shoot them. It is unbelievably immersive and real-feeling. The game makes the very smart decision to once again not have regenerating health, meaning that ducking behind cover isn't just a boring easy mode. The reason the pop and shooting Call of Duty is so damn boring for me is that all it does is serve to make you wait. You pop out, you shoot someone, and then you wait for your health to go back up before doing it again. In Metro, you have limited healing, limited ammo, a crafting system you can do on the fly, and using your guns degrades them, causing them to jam right when you need them most, meaning that simply ducking behind a box isn't enough. You've got to figure out a way to win the encounter. With wonderfully designed levels and decently good AI, the combat has a really great flow to it. This is a fun shooter, above all else. And when you are actually in the darkened tunnels fighting mutants or fucking spiders, the game is just masterful, like an FPS dead space filled with tension and terror. As much as the story and open world sections are good, it is the designed, Metro-style levels where the game really shines the most. Exodus doesn't alter its formula so much as it perfects and paces it better than ever before. I deeply hope they don't consider this a final game. Because they've got something truly excellence here now. It is a totally unique blend of open world exploration, crafting and resource gathering, narrative FPS, and survival horror corridor shooter. There's nothing else like it in gaming. And in Exodus, it has finally achieved a uniform level of excellence the series has always tried for but never quite hit. There is no horrendous turret section. There's no absurd QTE sections. There's no awful set piece chase sequence. Exodus isn't trying to be like anything else and failing. It's finally just being Metro and doing it better than it ever has. Alright, I'm not going on for an hour this time. There is so much more to this game. It has to be played and I don't want to spoil too much either. I recommend that if you only plan on playing once, you go slowly. Use all the mechanics, play on hard, read and listen to the logs, talk to all the NPCs. I appreciate that these things were made optional but they are so uniformly excellent that I think it'll be easy for people to miss much of what makes this game so great. Metro Exodus is an unbelievably great game. Buy it. I bought it on the Epic Store after Xbox because I liked it so much I wanted them to get a larger cut of the sale and it's 10 bucks cheaper there. Though to be fair the epic version doesn't have achievements so if that matters to you, you should probably buy through Steam. Exodus is the best game released in 2019 so far and it is one of the three best shooters of this entire generation. It puts recent games by much larger studios to shame in story, level design and gameplay. Alright, I'm playing and liking Devil May Cry 5, Sekiro is coming up in a couple of weeks but as of right now, I'm not sure I will enjoy a game as much as I've loved this. Alright, see you next time. Thanks for coming. Bye.