And so the story ends. This games accomplishes a rare thing: It concludes a story while also setting up a sequel, and it does so without without any retcon or cliffhanger shenanigans.

Note what an odd beast this is: The “good” ending – that is, the happy one – isn’t the canonical one. Yes, the good ending doesn’t make a lot of sense, but it didn’t bug me because it doesn’t feel real to me. It feels like this odd fan-fiction alternate ending. I suppose it is. In the proper ending you blow the Dark Ones away.

In either ending, note how the Metro society hasn’t solved their original problem. We began the game with the knowledge that monster attacks are increasing, and that someday they will overwhelm the humans. We came here to kill the Dark Ones because we thought they were the cause. Now we know (?) that this isn’t the case. So what then? You set out to resolve the monster problem, and in the proper ending you kill a quasi-innocent third party and in the alternate ending you don’t. Humanity is still screwed either way. The annihilation of the Dark Ones is the result of Humanity lashing out and grasping for any course of action that might give them hope.

The strange cutscene camera cuts are confusing and needless. The gunplay eventually gets old. The gas mask system is an interesting idea that leads to game-killing failure states. The Nazis vs. Commies war is too overblown and under-justified to work. The dual-ending system is obtuse and requires a lot of fussy effort to get an ending that doesn’t make sense.

Despite all this, I admire the game. Metro 2033 stumbled slightly in execution, but it stumbled while trying new things. I think it’s worth a look.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

It’s really interesting to hear these Russian idioms about the Soviet Union, as translated into English. Like Rutskarn, I don’t know what to make of the character who said that D6 was just like old Hollywood movies about the Soviet Union. I’m a present-day American playing a Ukrainian videogame based on Russain novel where a future Russian comments on Hollywood movies of the past that commented on the Soviets of the more distant past. That’s too many layers of removal for me to reconstruct the original intent.

I mean, in the typical Hollywood movies the Soviets were usually bad guys. And oddly enough, this wasn’t because there was much antipathy for the Soviets. They were the bad guys because they were the only guy big enough to be an interesting foil for our American protagonists. Then again, those were movies made by generally shallow writers, intended for an audience that (according to the writers) was even more shallow. Soviets as portrayed by Hollywood according to what Hollywood thought the average person thought of the Soviets. Again, that’s so many lenses that I can’t make sense of the original image. (And this is simplifying Hollywood itself into a single lens, when there are actually a few layers to it, taking into account the difference between what gets written and what gets funded.)

So I don’t know what to make of the Hollywood comment, except that I would love to see how Russians would respond to the average Hollywood depiction of the Soviet Union. It’s obvious our movies have made it over there. Do they laugh? Are they offended? Do they see any truth buried in the cornball fiction? I dunno. My guess is that it depends on the age of the viewer. People who grew up and lived in the Soviet Union are probably more touchy about it than the generations that followed.

In any case, this game is a rare moment where we get to see the Soviet stuff through a non-western lens.

Also, yes I was referencing this song.

And finally: Screw that amoebae section. Screw that and everything associated with it.

This season of Spoiler Warning will wrap up with the next entry.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

So here we are, finally getting to the last few episodes of Metro 2033. I want to stress that a lot of my criticisms this week are just sort of gut reactions to how I experienced the game. I usually offer some commentary on how things could have been done, but I don’t know how to fix these problems without creating new ones.

Case in point: The guntravaganza in Sparta. It’s sort of disappointing to the frugal player to discover they’ve been carefully saving for… nothing. All guns are free, and it didn’t matter if you were frugal or a spendthrift, you still get it all. That’s kind of disappointing, but the alternatives are all worse. To allow the player enter the end game without the weapons they need would lead to potentially game-killing states. And of course having NPC’s sell you the stuff you need to save their lives has always been a silly setup.

Likewise, I don’t know what to think of the James Cameron-style band of misfits we’re dropped into as we reach the final areas. It feels like we’ve stepped into another game, tonally. The guys look so much alike that I couldn’t tell who was who unless they were speaking. Their banter was kind of hit and miss, and I never really felt invested in the proceedings. Then again, if they weren’t there at all then it would feel like the badass Rangers were sending the new guy to go into the pit of hell to save the world while they sat around base shining their guns.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.