Metro Last Light Full Gameplay
Kassim Sin
Metro: Last Light is a 2013 first-person shooter video game developed by 4A Games and published by Deep Silver. A sequel to the video game Metro 2033 and the second installment in the Metro series, its story follows Artyom, a young soldier living in the Moscow Metro after a devastating nuclear war. Tasked with finding the mysterious Dark Ones, Artyom must venture to different parts of the metro system, and the surface filled with radiated gases, and fight against different factions and mutated monsters. The game improves on various gameplay mechanics of 2033, and introduces elements such as weapon customization.
Developed by a team of about 80 people, Last Light is a direct sequel to 2033, with franchise creator Dmitry Glukhovsky writing the game's dialogue and main story outline. Multiplayer modes were planned but were eventually scrapped in order to focus on single-player, which the developers hoped would "rekindle memories of Half-Life 2". The game was originally set to be published by THQ, which provided a very limited budget for the game's development, causing the team to work under extremely difficult conditions. Koch Media acquired the rights to the franchise following THQ's bankruptcy. A planned Wii U version was ultimately canceled. The game was released for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 in May 2013.
The game received generally positive reviews from critics. Praise was focused largely on its atmosphere, world design, tone, graphics, and gameplay, while criticism was directed particularly at the artificial intelligence and technical issues. The pre-order bonus Ranger mode, marketed as the definitive way of playing the game, triggered controversy. The game was a commercial success, with its first-week retail sales in the United States surpassing the lifetime retail sales of 2033. The game's novelization written by Glukhovsky was published as Metro 2035 in 2015. A remastered version titled Metro: Last Light Redux was released in 2014 for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. The remastered version was also included as part of a compilation titled Metro Redux containing both Metro 2033 Redux and Metro: Last Light Redux. A sequel, Metro Exodus, was released in 2019.
Like its predecessor Metro 2033, Metro: Last Light is a post-apocalyptic-themed first-person shooter video game with stealth and survival horror elements. It is played from the perspective of Artyom, the player-character. The story takes place in post-apocalyptic Moscow, mostly inside the metro system, but occasionally missions bring the player above ground. Combat alternates between the player fighting mutants and hostile humans.[1] Areas are larger in Last Light compared to 2033, and the game encourages exploration by having multiple routes.[2] The game offers more freedom to players, allowing them to utilize different tactics to combat enemies.[3] It features destructible environments, in which certain objects, such as pillars, collapse after being shot.[4] Numerous diary entries, written by Artyom, providing additional insight regarding the game's story, are scattered throughout environments for players to collect.[5]
As a first-person shooter, Metro: Last Light features a variety of firearms, some fictional and some based on real weapons, which the player uses in combat. The game's protagonist, Artyom, also has the ability to kill an enemy directly with his melee weapon.[2] Artyom has three weapons slots. Players can put any weapon into these slots without restriction.[3] Players have access to four different secondary weapons, including throwing knives, incendiary grenades, and hand grenades.[6] Mutants do not possess weapons and tend to physically attack the player in swarms, while humans fight with the same firearms available to the player. The player can knock out or kill most human enemies instead of shooting them, using stealth to avoid detection. As enemies are inefficient in spotting the player character in darkness, players can turn off oil lamps and light bulbs to gain an advantage over their opponents.[7]
In the post-apocalyptic environment, ammunition is a rare and essential commodity. Pre-apocalypse, military-grade ammunition is used as currency. Players can avoid consuming all the valuable currency by using lower quality bullets made within the Metros.[8] Due to the scarcity of ammunition, a crucial aspect of gameplay is scavenging.[8] The player can loot corpses and the environment for spare ammunition, as well as weapons and other items.[9][10] The military-grade ammunition can be used to purchase other ammunition, weapons, and items within most of the Metro stations. Weapon attachments, such as scopes and silencers, which improve weapon efficiency, can be purchased with these bullets.[6]
There are certain subtle moral choices in the game that provide karma.[17] Good karma can be acquired by positive actions, such as rescuing people from enemy characters, listening to conversations between NPCs, or sparing enemy soldiers. Bad karma can be acquired from negative actions, such as unnecessary killing or stealing things. Karma affects the ending that the player experiences.[7]
Khan, a wandering mystic, informs Artyom and the Rangers that a single Dark One survived the missile strike. Khan believes that it is the key to humanity's future, and wants to communicate with it; Colonel Miller, the Ranger's leader, wants to eliminate it as a potential threat. Miller sends Artyom to the surface, accompanied by Miller's daughter Anna, the Rangers' best sniper, to kill the Dark One.
After they test negative for the virus, Artyom again encounters Khan. They locate the young Dark One, and in a series of hallucinatory flashbacks, Artyom recalls that he was saved by a Dark One as a child; he was psychically linked to the Dark Ones, intended to form a bridge between their species and his. Artyom vows to make amends by protecting the little Dark One, and the two travel to Polis, the Metro's central area, where a peace conference regarding D6 between the Rangers, Red Line, the Reich, and neutral Hansa is taking place. Artyom defeats Lesnitsky and Pavel during the trip. Along the way, the little Dark One senses that there is a group of hibernating Dark Ones in D6. After arriving at Polis, the little Dark One uses his telepathic abilities to make the Red Line leader, Chairman Moskvin, publicly confess that the peace conference is a diversion to enable General Korbut to seize D6. Artyom and the rest of the Rangers rush to the bunker to make a final stand against Korbut's army but are incapacitated by an armored train ramming into their station. Red Line soldiers surround and prepare to execute Artyom and Miller.
The karma the player has acquired determines the ending. In the "bad" ending, Artyom destroys D6 to prevent Korbut from using the facility to wipe out the remnants of the other factions and possibly humanity, resulting in the deaths of himself, the surviving Rangers, and the Red Line forces. Later, Anna is shown telling their son of Artyom's bravery. In the "good" ending, later revealed as the canonical ending, Artyom prepares to destroy the bunker but is stopped by the little Dark One, who, along with the awakened Dark Ones, defeats Korbut's army. Artyom calls the little Dark One humanity's "last light of hope". In both endings, the young Dark One leaves with the surviving Dark Ones to find safety, while promising that they will come back in the future to help rebuild the world.
The Ukraine-based lead developer 4A Games made the game with a team of more than 80 people.[18] A sequel to Metro 2033 written by Russian author Dmitry Glukhovsky, Last Light, is not related to his next book Metro 2034. Instead, it serves as a direct sequel to the first game, with the majority of the ideas created by 4A Games. According to Huw Beynon, head of communications for of THQ, the team chose not to make a video game adaption of 2034 as they thought 2034's tone was drastically different from its predecessor. He described it as an "art-house thriller", and believed that, unlike the first game, it could not be converted successfully into a video game.[19] However, Glukhovsky offered creative input to the project and wrote a brief outline of the game's story, as well as the game's dialogue, which used 3,000 spreadsheet cells in Excel.[20] The team chose the bad ending of 2033, as they believed that it offered an interesting beginning for Last Light, and is consistent with the novel's dark and depressing tone.[21] Glukhovsky claimed that the story would explore the theme of redemption, people repeating their mistakes, and the idea of having a "second chance".[20] The Artyom character also shifted to become more mature and experienced.[18] However, he remained a silent character as the team thought that having him speak would not contribute to his character development and would interfere with the atmosphere and morality system.[22]
One of the key goals of 4A Games was to improve and refine numerous aspects of 2033 which THQ described as a "flawed masterpiece".[22][23] The strong focus on atmosphere was retained, but the team overhauled numerous gameplay mechanics.[24] The game's shooting mechanics were improved, and the firearms featured in the game were no longer underpowered.[18] The animation system was reworked and more visual effects were added.[25] The game's artificial intelligence was also refined to become more responsive to players' actions.[26] After hearing from players about 2033's bullet-based economic system, the team decided to keep the feature in Last Light but improve the explanation about how it worked so that players would not be confused by it.[22] In addition, the team revealed that they would not westernize the franchise to attract a larger audience. Instead, they would overhaul the game's controls to make it more accessible.[26][27] The team also drastically improved the game's stealth sections. The core philosophy in designing these sections was "fun"; players would not be punished too harshly if they made any mistakes. As a result, the alertness of the artificial intelligence features several different levels, making the game more realistic.[21] A competitive multiplayer mode was originally planned that was said to be unique to the Metro series, and would not simply include typical multiplayer modes like team deathmatch or Capture the Flag.[28] However, it was eventually cancelled.[29]
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