This game presents such a rich, beautiful, and immersive world full of great environmental story-telling and attention to detail that makes the STALKER fan in me jump with excitement. Everything from the beautiful visuals to the immersive first person animations to the management of resources. This game is a lot of fun when it is playing to its strengths. When you're holed up in a shack in a dank swap at night, using up your scarce resources to clean the muck off your gun while ravenous creatures roam the night just outside... amazing. It's just a major shame that it doesn't do this very often. You've probably seen it mentioned in other reviews many times already - but this game has a serious dialogue problem. Characters will talk for numerous minutes, spouting janky voice lines while you sit there and do nothing. I'm a veteran player of STALKER so I can handle janky voice acting, but the problem is that Metro uses a mute protagonist. I cannot express just how awkward and immersion-destroying it is to have every character talk for 2-5 minutes and your protagonist says... nothing. They often ask you questions or ask for your input on story events and your character just says nothing. NPC's will literally dump their entire life story on you just because you walked past them in a hallway or because they stood by a crafting table you needed to use. I simply walked away from them mid-dialogue whenever I could because of how grating this became. This isn't gameplay this is just tedious nonsense. As for the actual gameplay mechanics: It is alright. The game offers some unique mechanics such as hand-cranking to recharge your electrical equipment but has some glaring omissions such as not being able to lean around corners. Enemies can lean around corners and take cover, so why can't I? This isn't the early 2000's anymore. Also enemies are very bullet spongy even on lower difficulties, making headshots the only viable way to not waste all of your ammo.
