![]() ![]() For all the countless Rangers I’d seen on my way through D6, Anna was the only woman. He also assigns a sniper to the mission: his daughter Anna. Miller orders Artyom to find the Dark One and kill it, but he doesn’t trust the rookie to handle it all on his own. I basked in the cacophony as I worked my way towards Miller, the commander of the Rangers, to discuss some news: another Dark One has been spotted. Later, I caught sight of rangers training, getting patched up in the medical area, and even working to open some of the still-sealed doors in the base. Some hailed Artyom as he walked by, and it was clear that many did not feel Artyom had truly earned his appointment in the Rangers. Others crowded into the makeshift mess hall, sharing gossip and tall tales. One ranger donned headphones for some precious alone time, air-drumming to the music. Walking through the halls, I saw other rangers crammed into the tight spaces of the base, and glimpsed the little places they made their own. Artyom’s tiny room houses his guitar and treasured cassette player, and its walls are plastered with posters and old photographs. ![]() The Rangers have adopted D6 as their center of operations, and the base now looks wonderfully lived-in. That’s where the game opens, and immediately shows that it can set a scene just as impeccably as its predecessor. Of course, the fact that Artyom helped discover D6, a pre-war underground military base, may have had something to do with that. The rest of the Metro consider him a hero, however, and he was even offered a position in the Rangers, an elite group of politically neutral soldiers who perform peacekeeping duties throughout the Metro. We join Artyom a year later, now riddled with guilt over what he has done. So it’s an officially endorsed alternate story line. But author Dmitry Glukhovsky was still heavily involved in the development of Last Light, writing the main story outline and much of the dialogue. While Metro 2033 was based on the novel of the same name, Last Light deviates from the story as it developed in further novels. After criss-crossing the Metro, he dealt with the Dark Ones through SPOILERS. In the first game, protagonist Artyom is enlisted to investigate a new threat: the “Dark Ones”, towering mutants who can fill people’s minds with horrifying visions. Naturally, the new “station states” started fighting with each other, and with the mutants who call the dark tunnels home. Although twenty years have passed since the bombs fell, the air on the surface is still toxic, and the ruins of the city are infested with dangerous mutant creatures. A quick recap: nuclear armageddon has happened, and the few survivors in Moscow are eking out an existence in the city’s Metro stations, which were designed to serve as fallout shelters during the Cold War. I wasn’t too bothered by this, since the “good” ending is difficult to get on one’s first playthrough of the original game (I only managed it on my second try, with the help of a guide), and because the “bad” ending offers more fertile ground for a new story. Metro: Last Light picks up where the first game left off, but it assumes that the “bad” ending is what actually happened. Since the improvements for Last Light were more minor in comparison to Metro 2033, I decided to just play my copy of the original release rather than shell out for the upgrade. These were developed mainly for the new (at the time) Playstation 4 and Xbox One consoles, but they appeared for PC as well. I should point out that in 2014 remastered versions of both Metro 2033 and Metro: Last Light appeared, with “Redux” appended to their names. I’ve tried to keep this post as spoiler-free as possible, but there are inevitably some very light spoilers for the events of Metro 2033 below. For now, I was happy to return to the highly evocative post-apolcalyptic Moscow Metro, to see if I could keep humanity alive a little longer. Maybe I’ll manage to play that one this decade. ![]() ![]() Now I’ve finally built a new PC, so I can at long last play Metro: Last Light after its sequel, the critically lauded Metro Exodus, has already been available for a year and a half. Then I spent literal years putting off that upgrade. But, since my PC at the time was already struggling with Metro 2033 in places, I decided to hold off on playing the newer game until I’d upgraded. The sequel, Metro: Last Light, released back in 2013, beating my post about the original game by a few months. Long time readers may recall that I quite liked Metro 2033. As always, you may click om images to view larger versions. You may wish to read my post about Metro 2033 first. ![]()
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