'Metro Exodus' muddies up its formula with an empty open world
In a departure from the last two games of the series, Metro Exodus sends players into the great outdoors of post-apocalyptic Russia where, unfortunately, the formula that worked for the last two games falls apart.
If only Metro Exodus had a little more Metro and a little less Exodus.
In Metro Exodus, the third game in the Metro series, the silent protagonist Artyom catches a glimpse of potential life outside of the Moscow Metro where he has lived most of his life since the nuclear apocalypse turned everything above ground into an uninhabitable hellscape. Artyom along with his wife Anna and a group of others set off on a train to see what's out there.
What's out there, exactly, is a few open world environments nearly free of radiation where groups of survivors live in the ruins of civilization. There are zealots that worship a giant mutated catfish, slavers, hunters, and willful fighters who are just trying to get by in swamplands, deserts, forests, and cities.
The problem is that the open world vibe doesn't really work with Metro Exodus, which is unfortunate because that's kind of the whole point of it. It's an interesting idea, but it's often executed in a boring way.
Open worlds aren't for everyone
It's only natural to want to venture into wide open spaces after spending two games primarily moving through dark, dank tunnels beneath Moscow. And it is exciting when you first step out of the train that becomes your makeshift home in a place where you don't need a gas mask, but soon the world reveals itself to be pretty void of anything interesting.
After you leave Moscow, there are three major open world environments you can explore to your heart's content, two of them offering a bunch of extra areas of interest to explore. I explored them and found them all to be pretty much a waste of time.
The extra areas of interest basically offered nothing in return
My main concern at all time in Metro Exodus was making sure I had enough ammunition and supplies to keep myself alive through whatever my next objective was. Because ammo is often sparse, this meant I had to be careful with where I went and what I did because I didn't want to be stuck in a building full of mutants or bandits with no way to defend myself.
Especially not mutants, because they don't give you any ammo when they die.
So not only did I have ammo anxiety, which is a valid mechanic by itself, but I realized pretty quickly that the extra areas of interest basically offered nothing in return for exploring them. Sure, you can grab some more supplies there, but it's not like there were really any major upgrades or anything worth putting in effort for.
Even the areas that seemed to offer story satisfaction -- a docked ship holding a bunch of slaves I went to rescue -- left me feeling like I really didn't do anything to impact the world. I pulled a lever to free all the slaves and they just walked out. That's nice, and I'm glad those virtual people are free, but it didn't even get a short cutscene? I don't even get to see them outside?
If I could go back, I would just stick to the main story and skip all the side stuff. The characters you meet in the main storyline are at least interesting, and honestly you'd be just as well off in terms of supplies and upgrades by only following the main thread.
At least the environments look good.
The good bits
Nestled inside the big world of Metro Exodus is a compelling story and interesting characters that kept me moving forward even in the worst of times.
There's Colonel Miller (Anna's father) and his drive to find where the Russian government is hiding out safely, there are newcomers to the group of rangers that breathe a little civilian life into the military group, and there are heinously evil villains that are just asking to be toppled.
The good parts of Metro Exodus really stand out because they are actually excellent. There's the section where you're running through a bunker killing cannibal after cannibal to find Anna while heavy metal fills your head with Doom vibes. There's the giant mutated bear in the forest that becomes a very scary and formidable enemy. And there's the ending part where you're scouring the tunnels and highly irradiated surface of a city looking for medicine to fight back against the damage caused to your party by nuclear radiation.
The ending (and a little bit before it with the bear) is where the game really picks up, mostly because it feels like old Metro with its heavy focus on dark, lonely tunnels filled with awful monsters and mutants. And of course a little bit of reality-bending hallucinations.
More importantly, there's direction. The open world sections feel aimless and lack any sort of urgency, while the five-or-so hours toward the tail end of the experience are loaded with urgency. You have someone you're close with to save and you know exactly where you need to go to progress.
That's important in a moody game like Metro Exodus, otherwise it just feels like a directionless Fallout without any of the charm, which is pretty much exactly how it felt for the first 15 hours.
Other shortfalls
Outside of exploration, the majority of Metro Exodus is combat. The combat in Metro Exodus is fine. It's not great. It's not bad. It's just fine.
Every fight feels like the same thing
It gets a little boring because every encounter goes pretty much the same. If it's mutants, you shoot or run until they're all gone, and if it's humans you generally try to approach stealthily and eventually get caught and end up getting into a big firefight.
The only thing that really mixes up the formula is the giant bear, which I can't stress enough how much I love. But other than that, every fight feels like the same thing repeated over and over and over.
Speaking of things being repeated, throughout the entirety of Metro Exodus, the audio is distractingly bad.
Between characters speaking over each other, dialogue lines being cut off too early, weird distance issues where nobody is audible more than 15 feet away, and other jarring problems and quality drops, Metro Exodus gets in its own way a little too often in terms of sound. It makes the whole game feel a little rough around the edges.
For a heavily atmospheric game, this is a huge problem, because sound design is key for getting players engrossed in a world. The issues pulled me out of the experience far too often.
At least the ending of the game was pretty satisfying.
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