Metro Exodus - Gold Edition

After 18 hours of playing, the Use button stopped working. I can't progress in the game anymore. All my saves are ruined. This is a widely reported bug on the Internet that the developers never bothered fixing. Avoid. P.S. Thanks GOG for the 30 day money back guarantee!

So i liked the other metro games and when i saw this one was on sale i thought "why not?" They keep taking away control from the player at every turn. If it's not a cutscene they just take away control to make your dude do something cool instead of letting you do it. It's really jarring when you're just trying to play the game and it won't let you. The story is really average to which doesn't help things. The gameplay is a solid 4 but because of all the control being taken away it's a 2 from me.

I played this on gamepass PC so I only played the main story campaign and not the 2 DLCs included in the gold edition. While this is better than its predecessors in just about every way it's still not a great game. I preferred the narrow corridors and oppressive atmosphere of the previous games. The open world killed the tension for me but made up in one area: this game is absolutely beautiful to look at. The vast open vistas and the dense flora make for an incredibly stunning scenario. The graphics alone are worth the price of admission. If you can run this at 4k you are in for a treat. I could only use 4k for screenshots because of my lower end PC but I can assure you I never used the photo mode on a game like I did with metro exodus. Unfortunately, for me, the story is hampered by the constant monologue diarrhea that NPCs subject you to. The relations with other characters also suffer in my opinion from this because you can't interact or make a decision for once. You are a mere expectator as far as narrative is concerned and I always felt unattached to the events and main characters of the game. This was unchanged from previous games but the richer atmosphere made up for it a bit. I expected a bit of development here. The enemy AI is bad, you have to be extremely careless to get detected. You can cheese you way through most areas by waiting (sleeping) until it's dark and take out entire outposts with your night vision goggles wich provide a ridiculous advantage. Weapons are terrible, as usual, and I stuck with the few that seemed to work the majority of the time. Resources were not a problem this time around, even if you keep all gear in tip-top condition throughout the game. Also I really disliked being called a B every 10 seconds by the opposition. In the end the game felt more like a technical achievement than anything else. Sadly, gameplay and story-wise, I find the Metro series has barely made any progress since the original 2033 released a decade ago.

I have played the previous games in the series. I had a few problems with this game crashing about 50% of the times I launched it. Never had a crash when it got up and running though. I also experienced a lot of various minor bugs. Items being stuck in characters hands, characters phasing through walls, head getting stuck in the roof of the car after you've checked the map and so on. None of these bugs are gamebreaking, but they are inexcusable given the current age of the game. It suffers a lot from being a console port, the movement is very floaty and the inventory management leaves much to be desired. For being a game that is focusing on exploration/crafting/, there just isn't much in there. The maps are quite small and generally lack interesting locations, most are just variations on the bandit camp. The only slightly interesting locations, are places you'll go by playing the story. There is little to no chance of finding something interesting while just scouting around. The loot isn't that interesting either, as most weapong upgrades are just a slight improvements to accuracy, damage, fire rate and so on. Your gear upgrades matter a bit more, but only in the sense that you can avoid charging your flashlight all the time. The crafting is just making ammo for the different weapons. The story is alright, but nothing special. The characters are serviceable but not really memorable. The story moves past way too fast for anyone of the crew to make any sort of lasting impact. The game would have benefitted from a dialoge tree or some other form of interaction when talking to the crew. The only way to interact with anyones is just staring at the creepily for long streches of time while they talk amongst eachother. Your character is mute in gameplay, but for some reason talks in cinematics and level intros. This game lacked the focus of the other games, and I think it would have been better served by scrapping the exploration aspect for a more focused story.

I feel bad leaving an average review of EXODUS because the visuals, from neat little spaces with Orthodox ikons, to the breathtaking vistas, badass bandit outfits, junkpunk guns, and crazy storms are amazing. However, I can't in good faith endorse some of the choices they've made, especially with the forced cutscenes, quicktime events, and endless conversations which, while you can disregard, you can't rush along in any way if if you just want to see them play out. You either wait there and do nothing for ten minutes or go and lose them forever. It's clear to me that they wanted EXODUS to feel like this grand adventure, but that's simply not possible with a constrained shooter that lasts about a dozen hours. So the emotional conversations and moments with the crew come across as indulgent schmaltz at best or dull padding at worst. The gun customization is cool, but has one fatal design flaw: when you can fit a scope to any weapon - congratulations! - you've just turned them all into snipers. There's no reason not to go with the one that has the lowest resource cost to craft bullets and call it a day. Enemies aren't varied nor particularly thrilling. And if you choose to stealth your way through most human encounters, then you're basically left with a handful of imbecilic mutants to last you the rest of the game. Had they just committed to the Volga level and fleshed it out into a proper game then I suspect this would've been great. Or maybe not, who knows. But if they wanted the journey, they should've kept it level-based and taken you to different places to give you that impression of travel. As it stands, they went with a vision that doesn't suit the franchise and made some pretty terrible choices about how to bring it about with the limited and shallow "open world." Paradoxically, you don't have time to get fully immersed in any of the areas before you leave them, but there's also way too few (just three) to achieve what they wanted.