Metro: Last Light is a great game, there’s no doubt about it. I finished it a week ago and haven’t been able to get it out of my head. That being said, though, there were things in the game that were really great and things that were… well, not really great. In Part 1, I discussed the atmosphere and environment that the game presented, which was great most of the time. In this part, I discuss the gameplay. **There are spoilers for Metro: Last Light in this post. **If you still want to read, most of it’s spoiler free; just stop at the point where I mention Pavel.
As I’ve enthused to anyone who’ll listen, the gameplay in Last Light is just awesome. I found myself executing near-perfect hollywood stunts pretty regularly. It’s not as good for these types of situations than, say, Far Cry 3, but I still pulled off some really cool-looking manuvers:
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Someone sights me, just a little bit. He turns on his headlamp and comes looking for me. When he rounds a corner, I knock him out.
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There are two men standing together. There are probably paths I could take around them, but I cannot find them. I snipe one of them. His partner looks about in confusion, giving me just enough time to pull out a knife and throw it at him.
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I ghost through a level, taking everyone out silently. Suddenly, I notice that a guard’s patrol route will take him into the body of one of his comrades. Raising my rifle, I aim quickly and take the shot. It’s flawless; he goes down without a sound, and without raising the alarm.
Sneaking up to an unsuspecting enemy
One thing you might notice here is that all of the points I noted above had to do with stealth. As noted back in part 1, stealth is much easier in Last Light than it was in 2033. That being said, it’s still very gratifying when you pull out those awesome moves.
As an aside, only tangentially related: Why did they make the knockout animation so stiff? Every time you punch someone out, you first tap them on the shoulder and wait for them to turn, or grab them and wrench them around, before hitting them in the head. It’s a pretty bad animation, especially when the person you’re knocking out is sitting down. When you hit the key, they magically pop up into a standing position for you to execute your punch. Not only this, but occasionally they’ll yell out “Stupid-“ or “You scum!” instead of a “Huh?” or “What?” when being knocked out stealthily. Every time this happened, I thought for sure I was caught, but really it was just a bug.
Anyway, back to the gameplay. In a head on fight, I usually lost; it only took three or four shots before I went down. This probably has more to do with the fact that I was playing on hardcore rather than that the weapons are impotent, as it was still possible to win after getting caught. The fighting is pleasingly technical, with headshots scoring an instant kill on all enemies except armored ones. For weapons, you’ve got your stock assault rifles, pistols, shotguns, and sniper rifles. On the flipside, you’ve got the pneumatic weapons, which you have to worry about pumping up before using. However, I didn’t really find a great use for these; ammo for them was usually scarce and expensive. Even the Helsing, which launches silent re-collectable darts, didn’t seem very useful simply because I had so much ammo in my silenced assault rifle and five throwing knives.
I suppose I should mention the so called “bullet economy”. Essentially, the unit of money in the Metro series is the military-grade bullet. You can trade these in for guns and normal (crappy) bullets, or you can put them in your assault rifle to deal massive amounts of damage. To me, this was not so much a feature as a hindrance; I’m an instinctive hoarder. Shooting money just to kill a tough enemy seems like a huge waste when I can take it down with normal bullets through just a bit more work, or a bit more time. It didn’t help that the bind to switch to military-grade bullets was to hold down R, so it’s not too hard to accidentally hit it. I did once and didn’t notice; when I did, I was so annoyed that I almost reloaded my previous autosave.
The sections you’ll most commonly find yourself forced to fight head-to-head, mano-to-mano, are the ones taking place in the outdoors. There are rarely humans outside, but there are almost always some form of beastie. They have upped the monster count from 2033; in addition to the demons, nosalises and whip-vines, you’ve got three new mutants. Watchers are wolf-looking mutants who, if not killed silently, will alert the rest of the pack. Shrimps are underwater creatures - no one seems to know what they mutated from - that come in two variants; one is easily taken down and spits acid, while the other is plated but can only take swipes at the player from close-up. Finally, there are giant spider mutants that have extremely armored backs but are vulnerable to light, even going so far as to flip upside-down to shield their eyes from your headlamp.
The fights with these monsters are some of the most amazingly frantic and claustrophobic in the genre. There’s no pop-up cover shooting in this game. Alert a watchdog and you’ll have to quickly retreat into a corner with your shotgun just so you don’t get swarmed on all sides. Walk into a spider-infested tunnel and you’ll have to constantly juggle destroying webs with your lighter so you don’t get slowed, shining lights on the spiders so you don’t get hurt, and shooting the spiders that have flipped upside-down. In the swamp, you’ll have to constantly listen for shrimps surfacing from the water; when they do, you have to backpedal, waiting for the shrimp to drop its defences while also making sure you don’t drop into the water.
The combat has very few problems, and they are small. First off, getting swarmed by watchers is not fun if you are not a crackshot. Assault and sniper rifles will only work if they are far enough out. The pistol only works if you can score headshots, which is difficult if they are very close; otherwise, there’s just not enough bullets in the six-shooter. The shotgun will work, but if you miss one shot you’re mincemeat. The solution to this problem is to hit the watchdog standing watch silently, so as not to alert the rest of them, but I found this difficult to do consistently.
The other problem I noticed dealt with demons. When I alerted one, it just yelled at me and flew away. I figured it was just scared off, but a minute later it came back and carried me into the sky! Even when I paid attention after it flew off, it was very difficult to tell when it was swooping down on me and when it was just flying around overhead. I suppose this increased the immersion a bit - you _wouldn’t _necessarily know what the demon’s in any given situation - but like I said, small problems.
Getting stalked by the armored variant of shrimps
There are a few boss fights in Last Light. They break up the long exploration sections, and are usually signals that you’re about to get a break. The first up is the rhino nosalis, which I actually forgot all about. I only remembered it again when I was looking up the name for the spider mutants, so that one was a bit forgettable. On the other hand, the next boss fight just before the rhino nosalis was the best in the game. It took place in front of the church, against a giant radioactive-looking shrimp mutant. It had been stalking me for some time, showing itself intermittently and staring at me hungrily. The boss fight against it had everything that was great about fighting the shrimps - frantic running around and reloading, not knowing where the land ended and the water began, and oh god is it right behind me - along with, you know, a giant green monster.
By contrast to both of those, I was frustrated by the fights against Pavel and the bear. First, we’ll go with the bear, because it had only minor issues. Basically, the fight consists of you shooting the bear until it’s weakened. Then, watchdogs jump out of the bushes surrounding the clearing. They prowl around for a bit, waiting you to weaken the bear further; once you do, they latch onto the bear, distracting it long enough for you to shoot at its weak point, the back. The first time this happened, I was confused and started shooting at the nosalies. The second time, I did this again. It was only the third time that I realized what they were doing there. Other than that problem, the fight was not too bad.
This game just keeps surprising me; after writing the first draft of the article, I went and looked up the monsters, just to be sure I got all my facts straight. Apparently, there's an achievement you can get for saving the bear at the end, when it's nearly dead, the watchdogs are savaging it and its cubs are looking on in distress. You can shoot the watchers off of it, thereby allowing it to continue living and taking care of its cubs. I had no idea; at the end of the battle, I just walked off into the newly opened passage.
Pavel’s fight was the worst. It was supposed to be the wrap-up of his storyline; he helped me, he betrayed me, and finally, I’ve hunted him down - time for the climax. He yells at me “Come get me, d’Artagnan!” from his hiding place up the stairs. Ok, let’s go. I walk up the stairs, Pavel pops out from around a corner, and I get instantly killed. WTF!?__
Well, at least there was an autosave just before the point I walk up the stairs. I guess I have to shoot at him before he pops back into cover. I try to, and I just get killed instantly again. It takes me a couple more tries before I actually get him to retreat up the stairs. I walk up, and get killed again as he pops out around the corner. Whatever poignancy this moment was supposed to have is ruined as I keep having to reload and retry this moment over and over again. When I finally reached the end, as Pavel was dragged into the wall of arms, I had no idea what I was even doing; the Dark One said something about a choice, but the game only gave me two seconds to decide. By the time I realized I was supposed to walk to him to forgive or ignore him to forget, it was too late. When the Dark One said “You couldn’t forgive him? I see…” all I could do was look at him incredulously.
Dang it, Pavel, I wouldn’t leave anyone to that fate willingly…
Sure, there are those problems, but on the whole, the gameplay in Last Light is great. As previously stated, I would almost recommend this game wholeheartedly, but we’re still not done with its problems yet. There are actually more boss fights in the game, near the ending of the game; however, the entire next post is about the last third of Last Light, so I’ll leave you for now.