Having just spend over 60 hours playing Metro Exodus (completing the game twice and each DLC once) I'm here to tell you all about why the game is bad.

In case you weren't up to date on Metro in general - in 2013 (still looking suspiciously like 1986), the bombs fell. Moscow's remaining population survives in the underground metro tunnels, only venturing up to the irradiated surface to scavenge for supplies and feed the numerous mutants living there. Artyom, the mute (except in level transitions) protagonist, ends up nuking the psychic mutants threatening his home station, only realizing this is a bad idea a bit too late. Some time later, the very last psychic mutant (and remaining supplies \ weapons in the huge nuclear bunker Artyom and company stumbled into) are being fought over by the Communist and Nazi metro factions.

Exodus tosses basically all of that plot away, in favor of a road trip across post-apocalyptic Russia, as a distinct series of levels, each with their own theme and focus.

I (and many other people) have referred to Metro Last Light as Half Life 3. Which I guess makes this HL4? HL 3.5? The distinct levels draw inspiration from STALKER, Fallout, Mad Max and Far Cry, but the actual gameplay style is very Half Life.

I loved the original two (three, basically, as the original Metro 2033 is very distinct from Metro 2033 Redux) games (and the original book, though not the sequels). Replayed them several times, wrote guides... so why doesn't Exodus feel nearly as good to play? Maybe because HL2 feels way more dated now than it felt in 2015? Maybe because it feels as though the developers never played the Half Life episodes and learned all the wrong lessons about what needs to be improved with the formula?

Just looking back - I can think of endless minor and major annoyances, but not a single setpiece, character or sequence that I thought was really good and worth replaying. I guess I played through it while hoping that it clicks, because I really enjoyed the previous games in the series?

The game is pretty enough, I guess (I don't really pay attention to that sort of thing). Things are clearly sign-posted, and you're rarely at a loss of where to go or how to open a secret stash (collectibles and loot, as noted, are another story). Gunplay isn't great, but sniping \ stealthily knifing people and mutants is sorta fun, if things don't glitch out.

Now, in detail:

Did you enjoy being stuck in closed rooms and train compartments at NPCs drone on and on at each other? You know, HL2 style? Well, get ready for hours of this (and that's just the unavoidable plot stuff - NPCs are ever ready to exposit at you for minutes on end if you just stand near them). Your crew is mostly interchangeable (more on that later), have very little of value to say, take twice as long as necessary to say whatever they're going on about. Oh, and the sound mixing is hella odd - press your forehead again an NPCs mouth and turn around so that they're speaking to the back of your head - the sound quality instantly dips to "yelling from the other side of the house". So you have to stare at their (still poorly animated by source engine standards) faces as they keep yammering on and on.

The primary NPCs have very exaggerated and overdone theatrical performances that don't work at all (I'm playing in Russian, obviously). Miller milks the giant sky cow about half a dozen times over the course of the game. Artyom being mute is particularly frustrating with so many people either pretending they saw some sort of response in his eyes or going on about how they can't hear him while over the radio (weirdly, the handy "we can switch to the radio if you wander away, you don't have to keep staring into my mouth" option is taken only once, and apparently never again).

If you thought all the NPC dialog taking forever slowed things down - well, you ain't seen nothing yet. EVERYTHING is cumbersome and slow. Artyom handles like a tank, laboriously climbing over the few obstacles that aren't marked with an invisible wall (the DLCs are particularly bad about this) and running out of breath after sprinting five steps. You want to loot everything you see? A few seconds of button pressing to open every container, another press to loot each once it's open, another button press to strip every enemy weapon for a scant few resources every time, of which you need hundreds. Containers (and particularly collectibles) are unintentionally well hidden - there's so much environmental detail in cluttered brown-beige, that it's hard to find the things that matter (incredibly easily fixed in the DLC by turning up the contrast and lighting effects just a bit).

Did you hate the boat sequence in Half Life 2? Well, imagine it was a rowboat that the protagonist unhurriedly paddled along at a leisurely pace even when attacked by giant mutant shrimps. And that had the turning radius of a barge, getting stuck on random shores or blips in geometry just as you needed to stealth or get away. The developers liked torturing the player with this ♥♥♥♥ so much the boat features in three different levels!

Did you like the car in Half Life 2? Well, it being a fast and indestructible motor buggy was just so unrealistic, am I right? A proper post-apocalyptic vehicle should be a beaten old van that moves slightly faster than your sprinting speed, kills you if you ever manage to roll it over while driving up and down sand dunes, and ♥♥♥♥♥ up your field of view every single time you try to consult your map.

Really, very little about traversing the big open maps really works. It's slow, it's tedious, it's hella buggy - ranging from losing some resources to getting stuck within the level geometry. Of course (of course!) as per metro tradition, you don't get to actually save your game, relying on auto-saves instead. So if things get corrupted, too bad, so sad, time to restart the chapter. Even if you do manage to find a save game you can reload, starting and loading the game takes forever (though my computer might be at fault). The game was actually unplayably slow and stuttery, but this fix solved the matter.

Ok, but the actual linear scripted sequences - underground bases, tunnel stealth, that sort of thing, that still works, right? Kiiiiiiiiiiinda? I wish I spent more time with companions in scripted sequences - a bunch of NPCs you travel with don't really have a personality, and this would have been a good time to get to know them. Conversely, I wish Anna would stop ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ at me about stopping to loot as we're exploring (every single LPer I've watched naturally hated her nagging - such an obvious lesson the developers failed to learn from HL2. Actually, I don't recall your companions being that annoying in previous Metro games either) \ Miller wasn't so fond of pushing ahead of me and slowwwwwwwwwwwwly ambling along down the corridor, blocking my path and wasting my filters.

But the thing about more linear and polished Metro gameplay is that... we've already had three games worth of that, and there's very little innovation there. Same monsters, same spiders and basically the same librarians. Some climbing ghouls, borrowed from Fallout wholesale. Same selectively oblivious human enemies, and the same glitchy stealth. :siren: Realistically :siren:, throwing a can won't get a patrolling enemy to turn around to investigate the noise, but rather to go on alert in order to find you. But having your primary new stealth tool be functionally useless is kinda annoying. Throwing knives directly at a bandit 10 yards away - one knife goes to the left of him, the other to the right. Not fun.

The part that really got me to sigh and go "man, I'm tired of this samey ♥♥♥♥" was "search the building for the bad guy, open a door, he jumps you, cue QTE", which probably earned Artyom some severe brain damage by this point. Sam's Story has a (subjectively, I was getting really tired of the game at this point) infuriating bit - open door, guys jump you, QTE fight ensues... and then just goes on and on and on. "Ok, NOW I'm going to get knocked out and carry on with the story. No? Now? ............... Now? ........ am I just going to fight these guys off, subverting my- nope, finally got knocked out, after wasting so much time".

(At the start of the desert chapter you get a QTE where you're jumped by an enemy as you open a door THREE TIMES IN A ROW)