Metro Exodus

Having adored the preview two games, I finally picked this up last sale. The environments are fantastic and the maps are huge and full of places to explore. There are a few very frustrating flaws with Metro Exodus however. The saving system has been discussed at length and I must agree that having none/limited saves is a very poor decision by the devs. What's worse, is having just a single save slot.. Even if you quicksave, there is no tracking back to earlier if you've made a "bad" decision. I started the water mission in Caspian not realizing I couldn't complete Anna's missions to free slaves afterward. Getting water for my starving comrades seemed a more pressing issue than exploring the airstrip and harbor.. I had gone far beyond that point before I realized it.. Not replaying the Caspian, not sure if I want to continue. Furthermore, I "lost" a few important weapon attachments when traversing from Volga to Caspian. Possibly a bug where not all weapon mods are stripped from your weapon when you change it out in the field.. Massive open map with plenty of enemies, but my 4x scopes are gone. Wonderful. The gunplay is ok I suppose. AI are elite marksmen. Stealth play is not great but passable. I found the controls and movement a bit clunky but I'm probably out of practice. The story has gripped me thus far. It's a bit too fast paced for my tastes but it's good nevertheless. All in all I feel pretty frustrated with Metro Exodus. There's a great game in there but hampered by some baffling dev' choices and bugs.

Metro Exodus is an immersive and terrifying game that haunted me in my dreams when I was done playing it, but honestly, I didn't mind. It stuck with me often after playing it, even after I tried a palate-cleansing JRPG before bed. It really hooked me. No one creates atmospheric ruined hellish landscapes and buildings quite like 4A Games. Some folks may not like some of the minutiae the Metro series games force you to interact with, but I love it. The tension this creates is ingenious. There's nothing so freaky as trudging through a water-filled basement also filled with monsters in pitch-black and your flashlight runs out of batteries, and you must swap to your battery-charger, spend several valuable seconds charging it and watch your flashlight come back to life. You must swap gas mask filters and pump up your air-driven Tikhar rifle. When you find a workbench, you should clean your weapon so it doesn’t randomly jam or overheat. I find these things to not be obnoxious in this game, but rather it does wonders for the immersion. The game is not perfect. The writing and dialogue are hit or miss. I played with the English voice acting, and I grew to love the characters even though the acting wasn’t always amazing. There is plenty of heart in Metro Exodus though, even though so much of the setting is so depressing. It’s a wonderful thing. The DLC Chapters, Two Colonels and Sam’s Story were also very good and well worth playing through for more story and horror to play through. Well worth playing.

I played the old one back in the day and while the Atmosphere, story and graphics were all 10/10 the core foundfation of gameplay/gunplay was severely lacking and mediocre. 10+ years went by and I didn't touch Metro. I heard that Exodus improved the gunplay significantly so when it was on sale for $6 via EGS I said what the hell and gave it a shot. The Atmosphere, story and graphics are still spectacular and I heard right, the gunplay is very good now! Also this game is semi-open world as opposed to the linear design of 2038 and they do it very well. NPCs fight each other out in the wild which leads to some pretty awesome and unexpected encounters. Supplies are limited which encourages exploration and has you picking your battles and aiming for the head to conserve supplies. I have a few minor complaints, this game has cheap jump scares, the Audio is kind of fucked up. It's low in nature and the voice acting can sound a little distorted at times. Your character doesn't talk neither which can be awkward at times as people just shout at you via radio and your character offers no response. Also, there are like 10 of us out there but yet they make me do everything and go on suicide missions alone while they sit at the train remaining warm and cooking smores. This could have been executed better. Monster respawns are kind of annoying as well. I can kill some ghouls from a distance and within a few minutes there are some back in the same location. Still I am enjoying myself very much, much better than the original.

Metro Exodus is quite an adjustment for me, and nearly all good and bad reviews here apply. Lol. I throw many cans at soldiers on train, and am making some progress; but there are MANY cutscenes, almost plays like an interactive novel, yet IS based on a book. I think with this release Metro invented a new genre, maybe not for everybody, and annoyed me at first, but I think I am beginning to like it. When I came up with that can thing was fun: Gameplay is versatile in this way, yet somewhat linear, but not so much as previous titles in the series. It's also dark enough, yet is not so dark either as the others. I tried playing the original Metro more than once, other version than GOG: The frustration and tunnels had me giving up; this one has me trying harder partly because of the more open and detailed environment. Again, I would just read all other reviews here and say 'yes', they are ALL correct; so anyone Considering a purchase has been Informed: If you want to try something different, this is a great game for that... buy it at sale-price. Finally, I probably have not progressed to reported glitched areas, but so far have found none. I am also running the vanilla, not enhanced and with minimum specs on an i5 nv730: Turn off 'blur' completely in the userconfig file, right in the root directory, display at old-school resolution (about 1280 to 1440), quicksave whenever possible, and have a ball! Also does not do well on dx12 on my Win10, at first start; so be patient and change that: The 2 minute wait for changes is caused by this and the blur setting; so is any lag... I think I want to learn this game, so giving it five stars; thanks again GOG! :-)

I played metro exodus when it came out in 2019, and that was the best decision of my life.