demo
space cadet
Great description, that's how I feel too.
I think it could have been fantastic but it just misses the mark in so many areas for me.
Metro Exodus - Enhanced Edition
- Thread starter SirBaron
- Start date
Great description, that's how I feel too.
I think it could have been fantastic but it just misses the mark in so many areas for me.
Ziklitschli
New member
Exodus, in particular, I understand that you can't do the same thing forever. But it went from the chokey death in the icy gutter, to sunny train rides with wife. Just not what I'd expect from it really.
I can imagine a game where you have entire Moscow to roam, but have to make strategic decisions about how much oxygen you take etc, where emergency going down is an entire new game to return to base etc. Not realistic ofc to make, they're too big atm, just sth more in line with what they've done before.
Doesn't mean it's bad ofc, just seems to have lost sth.
I can imagine a game where you have entire Moscow to roam, but have to make strategic decisions about how much oxygen you take etc, where emergency going down is an entire new game to return to base etc. Not realistic ofc to make, they're too big atm, just sth more in line with what they've done before.
Doesn't mean it's bad ofc, just seems to have lost sth.
Nagorak
Well-known member
I went back and forth about where to post this because there seems to be more discussion of the game in the non-EE thread, but ultimately I did play the EE so I'll post it here.
This was a bit of a weird game for me because on paper I feel like I should really have liked it. I more or less like the Metro universe for what it is (it's not Shakespeare), so you'd think an open world game set in that universe would be right up my alley. The fact that they adapted the "metro" concept to being a train was clever, and the fact your train keeps getting longer as you pick up cars over the course of the game was cool. The different environments and factions for the most part were fine, and the gun play was pretty solid.
Like I said, on paper it all seems good, but despite that for some reason the game didn't end up clicking with me. Although I enjoyed it, whenever I loaded into a new area I immediately lost interest in the game and it took me a while to get back to it. It just didn't draw me in. Unfortunately, in the end I think much of the charm of the Metro games to me were the actual metro and the factions and the weird stuff you encountered there. It was ridiculous if you thought about it, but it was still fun.
Let me say at this point, that I agree with pretty much all of the points made by nutcrackr in his review. I'm not going to repeat all of them, but they are all things I noticed myself. Instead I will include a few of my own gripes.
Level Design - The levels felt very inconsistent to me. You had some linear levels to start, but then it switches to a couple of open world levels---Volga and Caspian---which were both pretty good. But then after the Caspian it switches back to being only linear levels again, with the Taiga just being a really long, slow crawl to get through. Even though it remained linear, the game picked up again after the Taiga, although the last level was arguably still a bit drawn out.
Enemy factions - The Taiga level leads me to another problem, which is the fact that even though almost everyone is hostile to you, there are very few actual "bad guys" for large sections of the game. Instead a lot of the factions were simply misguided, but you were still KOS to most of them. Even in the Caspian where you could kill the slaver bandits with impunity, there were still parts where slaves were mixed in with them and those slaves would be hostile to you. Then in the Taiga there are few bandits at all, outside of one camp, and that camp had so many people in it that engaging them wasn't really practical. For the rest of the level there were just different "innocent" forest factions. As a result, if you're playing a good guy you almost have no choice but to sneak through large sections of the game, knocking people out, because if you engage you end up killing "innocents". Literally from the point I got to the Taiga to the end of the game I didn't kill another person, as I just had to sneak through. That's sort of challenging, I guess, but it kind of detracts from the fun.
Combat - Weapons and combat were mostly fine. They were more or less the same as the previous Metros where you could select your load out with various shotguns, rifles, etc. You pretty much wanted a silent weapon, like the ball gun, if you wanted to do any sort of stealth. I really had no complaints about the weapons as they all worked well for what they were meant to do, and you could pretty much customize them as you wanted. The upgrading mechanics gave you a reason to search around for stuff and helped make your weapons feel more capable over the course of the game.
The combat itself was probably one of the stronger parts of the game. However, in terms of difficulty, I found things to be inconsistent again. I played on Ranger difficulty, and early in the game, when resources were tight, there were a few times I got into trouble. I also got into trouble at one point in the Caspian because I ran out of health packs and I couldn't find a bench to make them or a place to sleep to recover, so I was stuck playing at only a single hit from death for a long time, which was frustrating. But then in the latter half of the game, after I got the larger health capacity vest and had plenty of resources, the game almost became too easy.
Story & Voice Acting - The story was decent for the most part, and I include in that how the different factions were written and the conflicts between them, as well as your interactions with the other characters in your group. None of it was amazing, but it served as an interesting enough backdrop. I also liked how the game explored Artyom's relationship with Anna and the Colonel more thoroughly. On the downside, there were times where to get the story you were forced to just sit around for 10 minutes at a time (no exaggeration) while people droned on, and there was no way to skip ahead.
On top of that, the fact Artyom was a mute really stood out and detracted from the experience. It felt really weird how you would encounter people and they'd start babbling away, meanwhile you just stand there dead silent. By the end of the game it had started to feel quite ridiculous. People would call on the radio and I was thinking, "Sorry guys, there's no way Artyom is going to be able to respond to you."
Maybe you are actually supposed to be talking because no one ever mentions the fact you're not speaking and people react as if you understood and/or agreed with them? Unfortunately, it's not really clear. Artyom does speak in the loading screens, so he clearly has the ability to speak, just seemingly not when anyone else is talking to him. Overall, it just seems like a very odd decision to hire a voice actor and then only use his lines in the loading screens.
I've never been convinced that the "Gordon Freeman" approach was the amazing narrative tool that Valve tried to pass it off as, but whatever good there was in it, it's clearly aged incredibly poorly. The mute protagonist may have worked in earlier games where voice acting was mostly just people telling you what to do for the next objective, but it simply stands out too much in situations where your character is having outright conversations with other people.
The final ending with the Colonel's sacrifice was a little bit touching, but ultimately I feel it could have been much more so if we'd gotten to hear more than one side of the conversation.
Graphics - Since this is the EE edition, I guess I should briefly mention the graphics. They were fine but frankly it was the same issue as every other RT game I've played where it looks better but not so much better that I'm convinced it justifies the extreme performance hit. I have an RTX 4090 so I had plenty of performance to max out the RT effects, but on a weaker card I'm not sure they'd be worth it. Also there were a couple of annoying bugs that were present on modern hardware (Radeon 7900 XTX and RTX 4090). In the Volga level there was an annoying green shimmering effect that was present on the water reflections unless I turned them down to the lower setting. Also there was a strange post process filter that really detracted from the visuals by making it so nothing was ever fully black but instead only a dark but not-very-dark gray. Eventually I found a startup command that fixed that problem, but unfortunately that was only after I was nearly at the end of the game. So overall kind of a mixed bag on the graphics front for me.
Overall (7/10) - Altogether I'll give the game a 7/10. I did enjoy it, but it still didn't fully click with me. There were just too many things about the experience that were inconsistent, or clunky, or just plain odd (Artyom being mute). Unfortunately, I think maybe you can't take a Metro game out of the Moscow metro without losing a lot of what made it appealing. Metro Exodus was an interesting attempt to try to expand on the Metro universe, but ultimately I am not sure that it was completely successful. If you've got nothing else to play there are certainly worse games than this one, but there are also better ones, including I’d say the older Metros.
This was a bit of a weird game for me because on paper I feel like I should really have liked it. I more or less like the Metro universe for what it is (it's not Shakespeare), so you'd think an open world game set in that universe would be right up my alley. The fact that they adapted the "metro" concept to being a train was clever, and the fact your train keeps getting longer as you pick up cars over the course of the game was cool. The different environments and factions for the most part were fine, and the gun play was pretty solid.
Like I said, on paper it all seems good, but despite that for some reason the game didn't end up clicking with me. Although I enjoyed it, whenever I loaded into a new area I immediately lost interest in the game and it took me a while to get back to it. It just didn't draw me in. Unfortunately, in the end I think much of the charm of the Metro games to me were the actual metro and the factions and the weird stuff you encountered there. It was ridiculous if you thought about it, but it was still fun.
Let me say at this point, that I agree with pretty much all of the points made by nutcrackr in his review. I'm not going to repeat all of them, but they are all things I noticed myself. Instead I will include a few of my own gripes.
Level Design - The levels felt very inconsistent to me. You had some linear levels to start, but then it switches to a couple of open world levels---Volga and Caspian---which were both pretty good. But then after the Caspian it switches back to being only linear levels again, with the Taiga just being a really long, slow crawl to get through. Even though it remained linear, the game picked up again after the Taiga, although the last level was arguably still a bit drawn out.
Enemy factions - The Taiga level leads me to another problem, which is the fact that even though almost everyone is hostile to you, there are very few actual "bad guys" for large sections of the game. Instead a lot of the factions were simply misguided, but you were still KOS to most of them. Even in the Caspian where you could kill the slaver bandits with impunity, there were still parts where slaves were mixed in with them and those slaves would be hostile to you. Then in the Taiga there are few bandits at all, outside of one camp, and that camp had so many people in it that engaging them wasn't really practical. For the rest of the level there were just different "innocent" forest factions. As a result, if you're playing a good guy you almost have no choice but to sneak through large sections of the game, knocking people out, because if you engage you end up killing "innocents". Literally from the point I got to the Taiga to the end of the game I didn't kill another person, as I just had to sneak through. That's sort of challenging, I guess, but it kind of detracts from the fun.
Combat - Weapons and combat were mostly fine. They were more or less the same as the previous Metros where you could select your load out with various shotguns, rifles, etc. You pretty much wanted a silent weapon, like the ball gun, if you wanted to do any sort of stealth. I really had no complaints about the weapons as they all worked well for what they were meant to do, and you could pretty much customize them as you wanted. The upgrading mechanics gave you a reason to search around for stuff and helped make your weapons feel more capable over the course of the game.
The combat itself was probably one of the stronger parts of the game. However, in terms of difficulty, I found things to be inconsistent again. I played on Ranger difficulty, and early in the game, when resources were tight, there were a few times I got into trouble. I also got into trouble at one point in the Caspian because I ran out of health packs and I couldn't find a bench to make them or a place to sleep to recover, so I was stuck playing at only a single hit from death for a long time, which was frustrating. But then in the latter half of the game, after I got the larger health capacity vest and had plenty of resources, the game almost became too easy.
Story & Voice Acting - The story was decent for the most part, and I include in that how the different factions were written and the conflicts between them, as well as your interactions with the other characters in your group. None of it was amazing, but it served as an interesting enough backdrop. I also liked how the game explored Artyom's relationship with Anna and the Colonel more thoroughly. On the downside, there were times where to get the story you were forced to just sit around for 10 minutes at a time (no exaggeration) while people droned on, and there was no way to skip ahead.
On top of that, the fact Artyom was a mute really stood out and detracted from the experience. It felt really weird how you would encounter people and they'd start babbling away, meanwhile you just stand there dead silent. By the end of the game it had started to feel quite ridiculous. People would call on the radio and I was thinking, "Sorry guys, there's no way Artyom is going to be able to respond to you."
Maybe you are actually supposed to be talking because no one ever mentions the fact you're not speaking and people react as if you understood and/or agreed with them? Unfortunately, it's not really clear. Artyom does speak in the loading screens, so he clearly has the ability to speak, just seemingly not when anyone else is talking to him. Overall, it just seems like a very odd decision to hire a voice actor and then only use his lines in the loading screens.
I've never been convinced that the "Gordon Freeman" approach was the amazing narrative tool that Valve tried to pass it off as, but whatever good there was in it, it's clearly aged incredibly poorly. The mute protagonist may have worked in earlier games where voice acting was mostly just people telling you what to do for the next objective, but it simply stands out too much in situations where your character is having outright conversations with other people.
The final ending with the Colonel's sacrifice was a little bit touching, but ultimately I feel it could have been much more so if we'd gotten to hear more than one side of the conversation.
Graphics - Since this is the EE edition, I guess I should briefly mention the graphics. They were fine but frankly it was the same issue as every other RT game I've played where it looks better but not so much better that I'm convinced it justifies the extreme performance hit. I have an RTX 4090 so I had plenty of performance to max out the RT effects, but on a weaker card I'm not sure they'd be worth it. Also there were a couple of annoying bugs that were present on modern hardware (Radeon 7900 XTX and RTX 4090). In the Volga level there was an annoying green shimmering effect that was present on the water reflections unless I turned them down to the lower setting. Also there was a strange post process filter that really detracted from the visuals by making it so nothing was ever fully black but instead only a dark but not-very-dark gray. Eventually I found a startup command that fixed that problem, but unfortunately that was only after I was nearly at the end of the game. So overall kind of a mixed bag on the graphics front for me.
Overall (7/10) - Altogether I'll give the game a 7/10. I did enjoy it, but it still didn't fully click with me. There were just too many things about the experience that were inconsistent, or clunky, or just plain odd (Artyom being mute). Unfortunately, I think maybe you can't take a Metro game out of the Moscow metro without losing a lot of what made it appealing. Metro Exodus was an interesting attempt to try to expand on the Metro universe, but ultimately I am not sure that it was completely successful. If you've got nothing else to play there are certainly worse games than this one, but there are also better ones, including I’d say the older Metros.
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Nagorak
Well-known member
I agree that having some sort of open world game set in Moscow would have been better. They could have allowed you to travel between the different stations freely and also had points where you went outside. I see a lot of potential there. I don't know how much they're constrained by the source material though. It seemed like the first game was largely the book directly translated to being a video game (and the game was the better version of the two, IMO). Maybe they didn't feel like they had the latitude to actually do something like that in Moscow?