Metro 2033 Preview

This atmospheric shooter is one to keep an eye on

Every once in a while a project comes along to remind you that there is always room for new ideas, even within the most crowded of gaming genres. In this case, Metro 2033 offers a potential beacon to those of us crying out for a fresh flavour in the realm of first-person shooters... albeit a beacon that plunges us into an all-consuming darkness.

You see, Metro 2033 is a game that involves spending an awful lot of time underground. Two decades after the outbreak of a devastating nuclear war, the remnants of Russian civilisation are scraping out a meagre existence in the deep tunnels of Moscow's metro system. Individual stations have now been transformed into independent settlements; some are in friendly contact with their immediate neighbours, while others have become fiercely bellicose and territorial. Mutants and other monstrosities stalk the old subway lines, but there's just as much trouble to be found among the human camps: the old political establishments may have crumbled, but several stations have fallen under the sway of Nazi and Communist extremists.

It's a vividly imagined scenario, and it comes as no surprise to learn that Metro 2033 is based upon a best-selling Russian novel of the same name. Dmitry Glukhovsky initially published his book for free online, and over the course of several years the project grew in popularity until it started picking up awards, a film deal, and this gaming adaptation. It's not quite clear how close the game is to the original text (the English translation will be released later this year), but there's certainly no questioning the pedigree of developer 4A Games – a company made up of several of the chaps who worked on the original S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl.

Alright, so we have a dystopian, post-nuclear-apocalypse setting, mutants, and a first-person perspective. By now at least half of you are probably wailing "FALLOUT!" in a Mad Max voice, but as it happens, Metro 2033 is far closer in appearance to the likes of Half-Life 2. It's a cinematic, story-driven FPS with the vast majority of events unfolding in real-time gameplay. It's also solely a single-player experience: there's no co-op, no multiplayer deathmatch shenanigans, just a 10-hour campaign with a strictly linear plot. That may sound like bravery or insanity, depending on your attitude, but either way one thing is clear: Metro 2033 needs to have one hell of a good campaign.

The lack of online play might be a concern for some

As luck would have it, the game has two major weapons in its arsenal. For a start, there's 4A's own engine, which boasts the ability to handle lots of cool-sounding (but utterly perplexing) tricks like "velocity preserving motion blur", "advanced deferred shading" and "parallax occlusion maps". I'm buggered if I know exactly what these phrases mean, but the game certainly looks pretty on the Xbox 360 – and apparently it looks even better running on a PC. The facial animations of human characters are a bit weak, but in all other areas the action looks superb – particularly when there's a heavy interplay of light and darkness. Lighting dynamically changes as you shoot out bulbs, dust particles hang and swirl in the air, and shadows will shift naturally as they run over other objects.

All of these flourishes help to suck you into the underground world, an achievement that neatly brings us to the game's other big draw: atmosphere. 4A have tried hard to create a pervasive, gloomy atmosphere, and it really pays off. The plot setup finds you, an orphaned young man by the name Artyom, setting out on a mission to deliver a vital message to Polis, the largest settlement on the Metro system. A new breed of psychic mutants has surfaced, and unless you can fetch help, the station you call home will be overrun. After a brief flash-forward section that offers up an intriguing taste of what is to come, you'll set on an epic journey through the Metro system, with each station conjuring new threats and allies.

As you might expect, this structure lets 4A streamline the game into a procession of set pieces. I've played through several hours of action, scattered across the first third of the story, and during this time I fought through plenty of unusual battles: a desperate struggle to blow up a tunnel to stop a swarm of mutants, an assignment that forced me to run near-blind through the dark; an encounter with what may or may not be ghosts, their faint voices humming through vibrating water pipes; a full-scale war between Communist and Nazi fighters, propaganda blaring over carefully-positioned loud-speakers.