Metro 2033

Another grim Russian first person shooter, but is it just STALKER by any other name?

Metro 2033, first shown to game journos last November at a Russian preview event (just the rumours of which make our collective liver hurt), is a game with a fascinating pedigree. Being Russian, a shooter, and sharing some of the same crew that developed that other Russian dystopic epic, STALKER, it seems like it would be easy to draw comparisons. It's an easy bow to pull, in fact, but there's another game you might want to look to for comparison - The Witcher, an excellent game that also started life as a work of fiction.

Metro is based on a series of books by Russian author and journalist Dmitry Glukhovsky. He wrote Metro 2033 in 2002, and at first it was released online, for free - it was a huge hit with internet audiences, garnered a cult following in Mother Russia, before finding its way into print, where it became a best seller.

Glukhovsky's a fascinating guy. He's a journalist by trade, and through Metro he delivered an effective critique of the modern Russian system - Russian artists love allegory. He's published a sequel, 2034, and released it online a chapter at a time, as well as collaborating with other artists to make a complete multimedia project. Thankfully, before the game comes out in March, we'll be seeing an English translation hit Australian shelves - from our recent hands on look at the game world, it looks like it might be worth picking up.

Not all vodka and roses
The premise of both book and game is simple - the world has turned to shit after a nuclear war, and now the survivors are forced to live underground (in Moscow's old Metro tunnels - get it?) in fear of overland marauders and strange tunnel-dwelling mutants alike. Again, this sounds very familiar... it's got the post apocalypse feel of STALKER, with a healthy smattering of Fallout. But both are entirely superficial likenesses. Metro 2033 is very much it's own game.

You play the role of Artyom, a young member of one of these underground communities. At the game's start, you appear to be part of on operation to recover something on the surface; this is both tutorial (so expect all those classic "You've fallen down a hole! Here's how to use a ladder!" kind of shenanigans), and prologue, as the operation goes horribly wrong when you and your team are over-run by evil dog-like things and flying demons. As the screen fades to black, we're treated to an ominous subtitle: 'Eight days earlier..."

This kind of storytelling trickery is interesting, but in media res really works best for non-interactive media - or at least it needs a slightly more deft hand. Too many instances of a player asking of a game "what's going on?!" can really get in the way of suspension of belief. But with the prologue past, a lot of things - though not all - start to become clear.

For something that's being touted as very much an action game by way of a PC shooter, there's a lot going on, and it takes a lot of dialog to get it across. At time of preview, though - and this might just be our ear for accents - it sounds like the entire voice pool consists two Russian men and a very spooky child or three.

But it gets the job done. You see, apart from the horrible radiation and what-have-you above ground, the mutants are getting worse. In fact, it's entirely possible that they are the next superior evolutionary step - that's what one NPC posits early on, and it nicely sets the tone.