OnLive: Metro 2033 Review

Oh, Metro 2033, I wanted to love you. I went out on a limb and purchased you thanks to the now-gone-but-never-forgotten $5 Fridays, and began to fall in love. Your commitment to entirely immersing me in every respect to how hard life could be in a post-nuclear Russian wasteland was a beautiful thing. But as I continued to play, poor design flaws began to rear their ugly heads, marring both my gaming experience and my immersion into the story. I gritted my teeth and pushed forward, wanting to know more of your story, hoping that things would get better. Things didn’t get better. My love for you waned, replaced by a wistful sigh for what we had, and a constant wondering of what could have been.

Metro 2033 is a classic example of a game with a fantastic vision, and the potential to be something outstanding…but one that failed to reach that lofty point because of constant design flaws. I say design flaws because they aren’t glitches. These aren’t bugs that the developers missed. I say design flaws because these issues are purposely part of the game….and sadly big enough problems that it ruined the game for this reviewer.

But there most certainly is a lot to love here. Metro 2033 does the best job of any game I’ve played in creating a no-frills realism of how life could be in a post-nuclear, mutant-filled world, with the slightest touch of supernatural elements woven in the plot.  Although there is quite a bit of game in which you play your typical “lone wolf”, there’s a surprising amount of story and gameplay focused on you as a part of a bigger community, and the horrors of trying to keep hundreds of people alive below ground when the world has been wiped clean.

Metro 2033 thrives on bringing these underground communes to life with little touches that are startlingly effective.  For instance, one of my favorite moments was when I was told to hit the Select button to bring up my objectives. Instead of taking you out of the game entirely into the safety of a menu screen, your character raises a small clipboard into the picture with objectives scrawled on it. I was confused at first because I couldn’t even read the objectives because it was so dark. I quickly found out I had to hit another button to bring up a makeshift lighter made out of a bullet casing to light the clipboard enough to read it. All this happened in real time…I’ve been attacked more than once while attempting to get my bearings. Things like this are what make Metro 2033 something unique and special.

Whenever you go to the surface, you have to manually put on a gas mask so you don’t get exposed to the radiation. And yes, you actually have to replace your gas mask filter on a regular basis. Finding the next underground city means running into literally dozens of men, women, and children, all actively involved with trying to survive hell on earth. These touches are what I loved about Metro 2033. The storyline itself really doesn’t seem to break many boundaries, but its effective enough when combined with the atmosphere to keep you moving forward.

Now onto what ruined my love affair. First off, my absolute biggest complaint is how criminally underpowered all the weapons are. For being a first-person shooter, this is a giant flaw. Something is wrong when I have to unload practically an entire clip of an AK-47 into a human enemy for him to go down. I finally got myself a shotgun, and had high hopes that this would help this problem….sadly not so much. The common rat-dog mutants you face on a regular basis in packs can take up to 3 point-blank shotgun shells before they go down. This is fatal when you are currently being mauled by 7 of these at once. Melee attacks? Don’t ever try. I snuck up behind an unwary enemy and used my combat knife, expecting a cool instant kill animation. Instead, I swung the knife like a drunk in his direction and sliced him. He turned around, unfazed, and began to unload on me with a shotgun. I knifed him again. Nothing. I died before I could get the third swing off.

Although the equipment realism (other than weapons) is what I was lauding just two paragraphs earlier, every so often it goes just a bit too far for a video game. One fight in particular almost had me quitting the game altogether. You run into a pack of rat-dogs on the surface, which means you are wearing your gas mask. Your gas mask actually takes damage from melee attacks to you, and within just 4 or so attacks, the mask breaks. This equals instant death to your character. Med kits can’t heal your gas mask, and you can only carry one at a time. Combine that with the underpowered weapons, and you have a severe problem. I literally replayed that fight probably 23 times before I managed to beat it by pure luck.

And here’s another horribly poor design choice: your currency in the game (used to buy armor, weapons, and ammo) is what’s called “clean ammo”…ammo made pre-fallout that is much higher quality. Your guns use “dirty ammo” made after fallout. That by itself is a cool realistic touch. However, what the game fails to EVER tell you is that holding the RB button allows you to switch your gun ammo from dirty to clean if you are in a low-ammo pinch. Yes, this means you can literally shoot all your money away. No warning, no “Are you sure”…it just switches. And currency is HARD to find. Yes, I accidentally shot all my money…and could never make it back. That’s when I decided I was done with Metro 2033.

Metro 2033 on OnLive runs incredibly well. I never experienced lag, and I never felt the graphics were suffering during intense action. Graphically, this is an absolutely gorgeous title that does suffer some during the transition from PC to OnLive, but that’s just the limits of the platform currently. As OnLive ports go, however, the graphics are near flawless. The OnLive version sadly doesn’t feature achievement support either. As ports go, however, this is certainly a great one.

I don’t want to scare you off from ever experiencing Metro 2033. It really is an experience worth having. Maybe the flaws won’t ruin the experience for you like it did me. Maybe you won’t last as long as I did. But it most certainly is a unique game experience that I am glad to say I had. Here’s hoping that Metro: Last Light fixes the problems.

Summary: Some fantastic pros and some terrible cons. But worth your time to see which stands out more to you.

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Stephen Peterson

Writer/Editor for OLF News, OLF forum moderator, host of OLF’s The Breaking Point podcast. Avid video game enthusiast, attorney, husband, violinist, and so on.