PC FPS - It's Been A While: METRO

Yeah I'm back in the U.S.S.R. ...Oh Yeah... Back in the U.S.S.R!

The Beatles Wouldn't Like This!

There's something of a nostalgia about and for Communist Russia - for different reasons depending on whether you are Russian or a Westerner - because it seem that as we look back now the U.S.S.R seemed somehow comfortably quaint... (I won't dwell on the irony of this.)

But post-apocalyptic games like 'STALKER' and 'METRO' paint a different picture, mixing the Communist era aesthetic with a gritty and unsettling visions of an alternative Soviet 'reality' that's creepy and weird. And movies like 'Day Watch' (2006) and the HBO TV series 'Chernobyl' (2019), however, stripped away some of our naïve ideas about the communist aesthetic and ideal, showing how underneath the veneer the whole system was rotten.

The Russo-Soviet era fits nicely into dystopian science-fiction, not only because of the political metaphors and warnings we can infer from works like '1984' and 'Fahrenheit 451' but because of that implied decrepitude of that society. Whether through the ignorance of the rot, or because people preferred not to acknowledge the precarious state of their system, there was always a pervasive and unsettling sense of impending disaster about the Soviet Union... Which, of course, came to pass in 1988.

But what if the U.S.S.R hadn't fallen, what if - instead - it had continued it's downward trajectory and some insidious and catastrophic event had tipped it's society into a nightmarish horror?

Both 'STALKER' (GSC, 2007) and 'METRO' (4A Games, 2010) posit this scenario.

A Blast From The Past of a Future That Could Have Been?

I'm sorry, I am playing with one of my favourite science-fiction aesthetics here - retro-futurism! The idea of going back to an earlier idea of what the future might be to create an alternative reality of how the future might have developed.

This is why I was really glad to have openned STEAM this morning to find that they have gifted me a remastered copy of 'METRO: Last Light' (2014). 

I had enjoyed 'STALKER' but had never tried it's doppelganger - the METRO series - for some reason, so this freebee was a great chance for me to rectify that. Plus, being an older title it might also be suitable for me to install on my low-level gaming laptop for some casual sofa gaming!

Although, I don't know much about the story behind METRO I had assumed it wouldn't be far from that of STALKER and that it would be a FPS survival shooter where I would have to juggle the dangers of a toxic environment while at the same time warding of mutated creatures?

Above: Creeping my way through the crumbling underground, with my flashlight's battery
on it's last legs. Expecting a lot of jump scares here!

I only started up my first session this morning, but already I have been drawn in with that Pseudo-Soviet flavour to the graphics and the nice selection of cobbled together weaponry with which I have to defend myself... The question now is, defend myself from what. And that is where the story begins...

Above: As with 'STALKER' the graphical recreation of a devastated U.S.S.R is very convincing.