METRO Exodus Review and Walk-through Part 1

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Welcome to the expanding universe of Metro.

Not the first game in the series, Metro Exodus builds upon the previous titles where you enter the realm as Artyom also known as the Chosen one.

Before I go on, let me provide you with the PC specs requirements list.

Metro Exodus is a survival horror game of sorts, set in a first-person shooter type of gameplay.  As you can see even from the Minimum Requirements, it will need a relatively modern PC and powerful PC.  My PC falls into the Extreme Category and I will provide the parts I am using a bit later in the review.  This will be a multi-part review as I progress into the game providing you with more information, so please stay tuned.

One pretty big thing to note for many is that this is only a single player campaign, it does will not support a multiplayer mode.  A sad thing as the maps seem pretty large at the moment, but let’s get into the review.

Starting the game, we are back in a nuclear winter setting in a post-apocalyptic Russia, more specifically Moscow.

With that Arytym, remembers how the times were before the war and how beautiful Russia was back then from his eyes from within a train, but you quickly see it start unraveling.

With that unraveling, comes the last war and the surface being burned by the radiation and engulfed by the new monsters that have appeared.

Regardless of that, they have rebuilt and banded together to make that world a little more inhabitable, even though there were all underground.

Sadly, with mans greed and the monsters needing some food, even the underground was dangerous at times but Artym wanted more, and he was not going to stop at just wanting.  Artym was going to do something about it (you would know if you played the others in the series).

So the intro leads us here to where it looks like Artym is parachuting down, but I didn’t see a parachute.  As the camera pans down, we go into the sewers, and the game starts.  Before I go into the game, check out my system specs below.  The specs are a bit of the reason this review has taken so long.  I ran into an issue with one of the vendors which caused a delay for all, but that is another story.

System Specs

So now we get into the game itself and I warn you, because I had a disadvantage when I started, make sure you setup the Gamma properly in the game, I could not see too much.  You could see it all in the video but I could not myself while playing, it was rough.  Check out this video of the play though:

https://youtu.be/MbJoxMNDaCw

Beautiful, we start off by being introduced to some skeletons burnt to a crisp.  Walking through a door we hear some rats and we begin our dredging through the nasty slimy waters.  The graphics are beautiful, the screenshots are from the video.

The tension builds in the game as you hear noises and everything around you is dark, VERY dark.  Each drop of water you hear crystal clear, by the way I am using the Alienware Wireless Gaming Headset AW988, so I hear it all.  To add to the frustration, there is a counter on the bottom right hand corner that appears and then quickly disappears, I don’t know what that is just yet.  The counter before was the filter timer, but I am getting ahead on this, so I will talk more about it later.

And then you meet your first enemy.  This one, is more to scare you as you just quickly have to bash on the E-key quickly to save yourself, and once your pry it off of yourself, you have to shoot it down.  Careful with your ammo in this game, ammo is VERY scarce and once you run out, you have to run for your life.

After a little travel, very little you come up to 4 of these mutant rats of sorts, there are 4 of them at once so you quickly run out of ammo and are left to just using your fists… yeah they will be real helpful here.

I finally found a way out, and I was able to run through a door as the 4 got right behind me and I was able to close the door on one of those bat/rat/bear mutants and get rid of them.  Coming through the but I got into another huge issue but I met some friends.

Here we meet Alyosha, Damir, Duke and Roger.

It seems like they already known me

They bring me back into their inner sanctum where they all live safely, kind of at least and I get a bit of a scalding.  My FPS counter was not showing in this first video, this is the longer video I posted above, the others will be a bit shorter, I lost track of time playing this.

Here, once placed in my resting spot, I am reunited with my wife Anna.

The scolding starts by non-other than the kernel who happens to be Anna’s father,… my father in law.

Even the doctor gives it to me, I can’t promise I’ll be able to bring you back next time… please, I got this.

At least some people still love me, I am greeted as I walk through and find Anna and my daddy talking.  A week later, it looks like we are back at it.

We are back outside searching for signs of other life, of which Anna isn’t to thrilled about, she swears there are no other survivors because daddy says there is not…. But I swear there must be, we can’t be the only ones alive… can we?  Now I am reminded of the other in the series of Metro.

Every so often, you have to replace your filters from your mask.  This helps remind you of the world you are in today and adds to the annoyance of life here.  Not only do you have to fight the tons of mutants, but you have to worry about your ammo and your filters and finding extra filters and ammo throughout the game.

On our way down, we encounter some more mutants and annoyances, we need to find medkits too.

Exploring the world, we come across these

The screen shows 3 of them but it was an entire hoard of these creatures swarming by us.  A braver (and foolish) person would have opened fire here, you can if you like but I held my trigger just in case one of them decided to look back.  So now we move on and we find we can take photos in the game too.

Now things get a little more interesting.

On our trip, we find this train actually moving on the outside, though it is being following by 2 pterodactyl like beasts, it’s on the surface, the train is on the outside on the surface surely being driving by humans,… other humans…. Actually outside, this is HUGE in Metro.

Does this mean there are actually more of us, was I right all along?

We hear honking and we find these guys pull up, our guys Anna says, potentially following the train as well, let’s get in.

After getting Anna in, I get myself in and I hear screaming and get welcome by a swift gun butt to the face and pass out.

So it seems that we were picked up by Hansa, the other group of people living in the sewers and underground train stations like us,.. our enemies.

As we are being driven to where ever we are being taken to, it turns out in the van with us are 2 other captives, an elderly couple.  We learn from them that they are from a village, two hundred kilometers from where we were just picked up,… they are not from Moscow, so there is life outside of Moscow?  Wait till we tell Daddy,.. if we can.

So it seems that only in a post-apocalyptic period women will say a man is right, Anna says I am right, people really do live out there.

The van stops and we are pulled out of the van, the elderly couple first and Anna mentions about giving them their masks back, but the soldier states “They wont be needing any masks”, it looks like they are going to execute us…. But they don’t know, I am Artyom.

I jump out of the van, attempting to snap the gunners neck but then one of their dogs get on me and they shoot me and push me into a pit with other bodies.  As I pass out, I can hear the soldiers take another shot and drop another body or 2 on me.

After getting back up and almost suffocating, I put my gas mask back on and start walking through this pit I was thrown into.  Off in the distance, we can see 4 spinning windmills, the others have power?  Trudging my way through dead bodies feet and hands, I find a medkit, so I am good for now.

Making my way through, I find what seems to be a train station and that train pulling into it, but I can see a light over a broken grate covering a sewer pipe, looks like we are going back into the sewers.   What happened to Anna?

Walking through the sewers, which is really a straight line we find this gate, we can see and hear 2 soldiers talking and once they walk away, I try to open the gate but it is locked.  Don’t shake it too much as you will make too much noise and the soldiers will come investigate, I shook it twice but luckily it wasn’t enough noise.  Turns out there is a ladder off to the left, now we climb.

Eeke, climbing up the ladder and making a left, I see 2 soldiers seemingly looking right at me, but I slowly backed away, they didn’t see me.  After turning around, making another left then a right, I come across an opening but also an argument.

A soldier pushes open the door and pushes and older man down onto the ground, calling him an old fart.  The enemy of my enemy is my friend, right?

As the soldiers leave the man there, warning him not to exit (meaning there’s an open door), I come out of hiding, thinking perhaps the elderly fellow will welcome me, but he calls for the soldiers and attempts to strike me, before noticing I was not a mutant but a fellow human.  Thankfully the guards did not come to his rescue.

He then helps me out and he talks about Anna and that Anna has been talking non stop about me, I am the one.  Here I talked about the detail on his face, you can see each and every pore as well as the lighting and reflection off of his beads of sweat, RTX is On.

He leads me out of the door and instructs me of where Anna is and how to walk around without the guards seeing me.

He also goes on to making sure they don’t see me and turns off all of the lights.  Why is this guy helping me, I know the enemy of the enemy thing, but these guys are in fact keeping him alive, maybe he wants a way out of here too?

Yermak, the older guys name, instructs me to stay close to the way, so that the guards don’t see me and go for the ladder off to the right

Climbing up the ladder, I make my way to the rafters.

From here is some more sneaky and slow crawling to make sure I don’t scare the guards.

After a few seconds of crawling, I come to this guy, time to snap a neck.  Yermak visits me up here on the rafters, where now we can walk, but everything is still sooooo dark.  Yermak leads me to this door.

Problem is, not the entire factory is without power, only certain sections and as you can see here there is light on that door, but its not a regular light, it is a light being controller by a guard and he is moving that light and looking everywhere that light goes.  How can I distract him?

Right behind you there is some garbage that you have to throw to distract the guard, throw the trash towards the light at the door and it will distract the guard long enough for Yermak to open the door and let you through, for some reason I could not open the door.

Once through the door, yet another pipe we have to crawl through

It’s a short pipe, but we can hear Anna arguing with one of the soldiers, so we are close.

After busting the vent and kicking through the door, I find the commander pushing Anna down and getting ready to shoot me down.  I start to struggle with the commander who pushes us both into that room behind us, where we are met with another person with a gun.

We are good though, I managed to get them both knocked out.

After reuniting with Anna, it turns out when I was shot by the prior masked soulders the bullet was dodged by the hunters badge, good stuff.

The Commander gets up, knocks Anna down and starts to wrestle with me.  He makes a slight miscalculation though, the gun I am holding is aimed at the computers.

So he ends up taking down his own equipment during the struggle.

Anna quickly gets back up and pushes the commander aside when we hear the speaker mention that the control unit has been damaged.  The equipment is the radio jammer that stops all of Russia from hearing each other, this is what stopped us from knowing there was other people out there.

Yet again, Anna states that i was right all along… a theme perhaps?  The jammer is blocking the world, not just Russia.

The reason they are keeping the silence is because there is supposedly still a war going on, this was somehow protecting us?

The commander attempted to warn the others of what happened and Anna knocked him out,… why knock him out, just kill him, but it was a cut scene, I couldn’t do it.  You know that this guy will come back and be a problem later, you just know it.

So we are trying to get out now, since the guards were notified of an issue, not sure where and what the issue is as we did not allow the Commander to elaborate but they know something is up.  As Anna rushes for the door, she almost shoots Yermak but I let her know he’s cool, so now we follow Yermak again.

Yermak hands me my weapons back and gives me a little run down of what we are looking at in terms of an escape.

Anna asks him why he is helping us, but he can’t tell us yet.

Once outside, I help Anna up the ladder so that she can be my eyes out there and I am stuck down here taking care of business.

After jump out towards the left side, out of the lime light, I hear 2 soldiers talking and I wait till they walk away.  Following them from the left, where I started out from, they gather together and chat for a bit, so I make my way to the right, right behind them, close by.

I threw a piece of trash off to the left and distracted them, then I went in for the silent kill.

So I ended up killing both, even though I was silent, the other guards around heard me and started shooting.  Anna chimes in stating that she will cover me.  Then I start taking people down one by one from a distance.  I feel a little better about this after overhearing the guards conversation stating they had unlimited ammo.

I run up those stairs on the left to find the box to turn off the lights.

After coming out of the buildings, I make my way up the AC ducts on the left and walk to find another soldier waiting behind the boxes below, I take him out and a few other passers by.

You run out of room on the ducts, so you have to jump down.  After jumping down, there is one other I need to take down before running through the green lit door to the hangar.

After walking through the short entrance, and then another door, we find the engine and the beginning of a new journey.  We find out now that they got Yermak.  They are trying to figure out why they found Yermak out in the Train station.

There are too many guards out here by the train, so I have to jump down into the engine.

I take out the guy real quick after jumping down, silently as to not set off the guards but the fact that there is no light, I had an issue seeing things.  You could see it fine, but with the light I had in the room, so you could see my face made it harder for me.  So it kind of looks like I am walking around aimlessly for a minute.

I turned on my headlight, and now people see me, whoops.  At this point I realize I have been playing for an hour and have to cut this section of the game off.

So during this review/walk-through, we learned a lot of the Metro universe, of course there is a lot more I did not go over from versions passed.

You are introduced into the open, though kind of closed world that is now a reality and just how scary it can be.  So many different possibilities of getting killed it seems from friends and foes alike, beasts, even the air kills you and if enough isn’t enough, you are incredibly limited on ammo, so my usual play style of going guns a blazing is not really an option here, but that is OK.

It is Ok, because the story is very interesting and on top of that the graphics are beautiful, as all Metro games have been, but they just keep getting better and better.

So far, I am loving this game, though a little biased as I have always been a huge fan of the Metro series, this one has not let me down.

This is not the end of this review, but a chapter.  Please stay tuned to see the follow ups, but in the meantime, what do you think?  Are you liking the game, has the review/walkthough helped you any in getting the game or staying far away from it?

I linked up the game to the Amazon store, where you can pick it up for PS4 and for Xbox One, but if you wanted it for the PC (I reviewed it on the PC), you can pick up a copy here: http://bit.ly/2HaIHdN

Please let me know what you guys think.

[P_REVIEW post_id=1083527 visual=’full’]

 

 

 

We are influencers and brand affiliates.  This post contains affiliate links, most which go to Amazon and are Geo-Affiliate links to nearest Amazon store.

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