Metro: Exodus
Playtime: 23 Hours
Playthrough was done entirely on Ranger Hardcore, with limited UI elements enabled (there's a feature to disable all UI completely, which was a bit much for me). Beat the base game; I own both of the story DLC, but I'm not really interested in doing them right now. Those will be saved for an undetermined date down the line, when I have more interest in returning to this game.
Individually, I think most of the components of Exodus are fantastic. The visuals are great, and the sheer fidelity of the graphics certainly do the environments justice. Performance on my rig was very smooth, even on 4K + max settings (felt like a full 144Hz all the way through, with rare drops - never below a playable FPS though). A lot of the combat mechanics are also great, and Ranger Hardcore definitely lived up to its name - though I've never felt that the games were particularly difficult on the max setting anyway. Stealth sucks ass though, but thankfully most of the portions in this game are really easy.
To go into a bit more depth on the story and characters - the previous games (M2033 and MLL) very heavily emphasized the journey above all else, with only a small number of characters that are persistent for large parts of the game (like Pavel). Exodus was instead a journey pushed almost entirely by a very small group of characters, with only 3 (or 4 if Yermak counts) additions for the entire game. I very much like the characters for what they are - I don't think they're half-baked or pointless, and each character gets a chance in the spotlight (while not completely being irrelevant otherwise). However, only Anna and Miller truly pushed the story forward - and even Anna was less of a character and basically a plot device to motivate Artyom with a sense of real urgency for the last 60% of the game. I appreciate the development of Miller though - I think his full character arc throughout this game may very well be one of, if not the best in the entire series thus far. Good thing since he features so prominently.
Speaking on the story motivations & the visited environments - this is what makes me feel like this game is supposed to be a bit of a tech/concept demo. Each level of the game has a completely different feel from all the other parts, which isn't necessarily a bad thing - but it almost feels like the developers forced this diversity out of a fear of committing to just one of them as they did with the previous entries. The Moscow level feels like the War levels from previous Metros, Volga feels like a mix of STALKER and old Metro surface levels, Yamantau felt like new Wolfenstein/DOOM, the Caspian felt like Mad Max but was ultimately kinda boring, the Taiga reminded me a lot of the recent Tomb Raider games, and Novosibirsk was a great callback to the lonely/mutant infested tunnels (and surface) of the old Metro games.
I question if it was really necessary to have the "open-world" segments, particularly for the Volga and Caspian (Taiga doesn't count - that's linear, but open). The Volga definitely did it best, but after a while it felt really dead and boring since so much of it was essentially holding W towards the next question mark. The Caspian was even more lifeless, to the point where the games give you a car so you don't have to waste time walking. This really diffuses the tension in the game, and removes a lot of the atmosphere in the game other than the few enclosed areas in the game, which are quite creepy still. I think the replacement of the distinctly dark, cramped metro tunnels with these new generic environments is a blow to the unique feel of Metro.
There aren't too many new enemies, but the ones introduced for Exodus are kind of iffy as well. I found the humanimals quite lazy, especially since irradiated humans already morphed into the Dark Ones; they're literally just zombies with a new name to sound fancy. Blind Ones are just budget librarians, and the slugs/worms are absolutely terrible and not fun at all. The bear in the Taiga felt like literally every other big bear/cat enemy in Tomb Raider, the Yao Guai in Fallout, etc. Not devoid of creativity but quite close.
Overall, I think the game ends up being a little weaker than the sum of its parts, but it's still great nonetheless. However, other than the DLC (that I might consider doing when the time is right, or not at all), I don't have any interest in revisiting this again - and I think this will likely end up being a relatively forgettable game. The next time I'm really interested in playing something like this, I'd probably just go for STALKER instead; I think that does the open-world aspect better, since it's not waffling between linearity and open levels, and has the RPG mechanics and interactions to back it up.
