Do you know the one about the Dark Railtracer? Let's Play Metro 2033 Redux

[Montecristo]

Do you know the one about the Dark Railtracer? Let’s Play Metro 2033 Redux

Привет, товарищи! Welcome to

Metro 2033 Redux is the remake of the prequel to 2013’ s Metro: Last Light. Well, kinda. Metro 2033 came out in 2010 and people were quick to note the game had an amazing atmosphere and fantastic worldbuilding, which set it apart from other games. While it was well received, it had some issues which turned a lot of people off the game. I mentioned some of these issues during my Last Light LP:

To be quite honest, I didn’t like Metro 2033 when I first played it. It had a great premise and a fantastic moody setting, but the enemies were bullet spongy as hell and came in swarms, ammo was scarce and you were likely to end up using your Military-grade ammo (the game’s currency) just to shoot monsters, which ended up screwing you in the long run. There was a stealth mechanic in place that helped you get through a lot of the human-populated levels, but since the game never told you you could just stealth sections you ended up fighting your way out, which exacerbated the ammo issue.

In spite of this, the game did well enough that a sequel came out in 2013: Metro Last Light. Last Light delivered much better gameplay while still delivering the atmosphere and ‘feeling’ that made 2033 so unique, and while some people complained the game was too easy compared to 2033 (more on that later), it did well enough that 4A Games decided to update 2033 and Last Light to a slightly improved version of Last Light’s engine, and so the Redux versions came to be.

2033 made the most of the engine change, while the differences between LL and LL:Redux are minimal at best:

Metro 2033 Redux - Graphics Comparison

We’ll be going for the game’s canon ending. If you don’t know what that means, don’t google it and just enjoy the ride. If you’ve played LL or seen my LP of it, you probably know what this means. I may show off the differences between both paths but I don’t want to make promises at this point.

Along the way we’ll be getting all journal pages and I’ll try to show off the game as best I can, so we’ll be doing a fair bit of exploring and taking our time during the civilian sections to show off conversations and interesting stuff. I’ll try and get all safes along the way, but this will not be a priority, so if I notice I miss one I may just show it off as an extra after a video.

Update Schedule?
I’ll try and update once a week, probably on Fridays. I’m aiming at 20-30 min updates, so depending on length a single video may have more than one level.

Jesus H. Christ you still suck at FPS.
Still not a question. Still true.

Oh hey you missed X and also you didn’t mention that Y happens when you Z
Let’s get this out of the way: I’ll miss stuff. Fell free to point it out, just don’t be a dick about it.

Spoilers?
Let’s keep it spoiler free. I know that some of you may come from my Last Light LP I’d rather not start discussing things before they happen.

Warnings
Expect violence of the shooty/explodey kind, and and gigantic fuck-off spider-scorpion hybrids in some videos, which I’ll be tagging individually As with LL, this post will have the tags, the second post will explain exactly what to expect in a given video.

[Montecristo]

No journal entries for this update.

No journal entries for this update.

[Montecristo]

Update time!

Where we catch a ride.

Journal entries for this update:

[YourEvilTwin]

Loving your subtitled commentary, a great balance between informative and humorous.

You did a nice job with those gameplay clips at the end of the Intro video; if I wasn’t already familiar with the game I would have thought that was an official trailer/demo video that played at the start of the game!

Also delighted to discover you’ve done Metro Last Light. I look forward to checking out those videos as well.

I like the fact that you’ve gone with “Survival” and “Normal” difficulty for the LP. (I gather they made enemies far less bullet spongey in Normal compared to original Metro 2033.)

Funnily enough, I found that Hard mode played better than Normal in the original game. Counter-intuitively, enemies were more bullet spongey on Easy difficulty, moderately bullet spongey on Normal, and less bullet spongey on Hard. On Easy or Normal it took loads of bullets to kill a mutant, but they wouldn’t hurt much when they bit or slashed you. On Hard you could gun down mutants with ease, but if any of them reached you then you were a gonner. The difficulty settings also adjusted the amount of ammo found in pickups, in Hard mode ammo was scarcer but each bullet was more effective.

Of course ‘Ranger’ difficulty turned that up to ridiculous levels, where both the player and enemies died from one or two bullets, and ammo availability was reduced to almost zero. Unfortunately Ranger mode in Redux does that as well, as well as hiding important HUD elements for the sake of immersion.

I remember on forums loads of Metro fans went on and on about Ranger being the proper way to play these games, that it makes things so much more “realistic”, but it always struck me as fake difficulty rather than realism. In Ranger mode every gun or ammo magazine has just 1 or 2 bullets, as if everyone that fights a monster always dies right before they completely run out of ammo. And why would someone stash 5 separate ammo magazines in several lockers, despite each magazine having no-more than 2 or 3 bullets in it? (Surely they’d just put all the bullets in one magazine!)

Sure, Ranger mode means you’ve got to be careful with ammo management. In the game’s story, ammo is supposed to be a precious resource. But then you have the absurdity of enemies spotting you and happily blasting away at you full-auto with infinite reserves of ammo. (And when they die you can only pick up 2 bullets from their corpses.) Ranger mode is a clumsy way of enforcing stealth gameplay in a game that was designed to be stealth OR action. Surely “the enemies are dangerous and can kill you quick” should be a good enough reason to be stealthy, rather than also “if you get spotted you’ll won’t have enough bullets to shoot the bad guys”.

Also in original Metro 2033 you could carry a pistol and two bigger guns. A refreshingly plausible way of handling things; it makes sense that pistols go in their own slot, as you can’t put a rifle or shotgun in a pistol holster on your leg. In Last Light - and Metro 2033 Redux - they changed it to 3 weapons of any type. That was less realistic, but I can understand them doing that in order to give the player more choice. Except in Ranger mode they enforced a 2 weapon limit instead! Like Call of Duty or Halo. Very annoying in a game that has weapon upgrades; upgrading anything becomes risky as you never know when you might have to abandon that gun. Again, Ranger mode making things arbitrarily more difficult at the expense of logic. So yeah, to hell with Ranger mode.

[Montecristo]

You did a nice job with those gameplay clips at the end of the Intro video

I am super proud of that montage, so thanks for this.

Hope you enjoy LL; it was my first LP and it’ll probably show, especially during the first few videos (I’m saying this like I’m an LP veteran and this is only my third ).

(I gather they made enemies far less bullet spongey in Normal compared to original Metro 2033.

I think so but I’m not 100% certain? I originally played 2033 Redux on Spartan -I misinterpreted a recommendation I read somewhere- and it felt super easy, because it had LL levels of ammo and damage. Enemies feel a bit chunkier right now compared to that, but that may only be the mode difference; only fights I’ve been in so far are the nosalis pack during chase and later on the bridge and I’m packing an unmodded Bastard and Duplet, so I can’t quite decide if the enemies are still OG levels of sponge, my weapons suck or I’m just a lousy shot (I am).

[Montecristo]

UPDATE TIME!

Two short levels this time. This could be called the end of the tutorial areas, and next update will be the first big level proper.

Where we trip balls. (No journal entries for this update.)

Warning: for Riga: Lady of the night wearing a fishnet top. Nothing terrible, but just giving a heads up.


Where we meet a trustworthy companion.

Journal entries for Riga:

[YourEvilTwin]

Hah, at first I was surprised when it seemed like you were going to miss that encounter with Nikki altogether… but of course you put it in as extra footage at the end, I shouldn’t have doubted you.

By the way, even if you are going for the canonical ending, you can safely interact with all the instruments etc.

If you get lots of Moral Points then you can choose which ending to do: at the end you are given a 20 second window to make a choice and determine the ending.

If you get insufficient Moral Points, you miss out on a few visions/cutscenes, and at the end there’s no 20 second window, Artyom automatically does the thing that causes the canonical ending.

And of course if you get enough Moral Points to unlock the final choice, then you can simply do one option, then load the last save and do the other, and see both endings.

[Montecristo]

I’m gonna have bigger Moral issues than missed instruments pretty soon (when the “tests” start showing up) I know that I’m not saving time by avoiding the instruments, but it’s one less thing I have to keep track of when planning levels and they don’t really add anything to the experience like the conversations or the little worldbuilding sequences. It’s less avoiding them on purpose and more not caring about them :V

Unfortunately, there won’t be an update today, I’ve had a hell of a rough week and I didn’t want to half-ass the video, so I’ll see you guys next week. Thanks for understanding.

[Montecristo]

Привет, товарищи.

I need to deal with some IRL stuff before I can put in the time and effort required to keep doing this to a level of quality (don’t laugh) I find acceptable, so I’m putting the LP on indefinite hold.

Thanks for watching. All 5 of you

See you next time.