The first Metro: Last Light gameplay video is out and the action looks a little more shooterrific than our last foray through the Moscow underground.
I won’t defend Metro 2033 as perfect but I will say that I loved it, and that I didn’t find its warts nearly as pronounced as a lot of other gamers. The stealth mechanic was twitchy, but stealth is hard, and the craptastic guns were a central part of the experience; the last remnants of humanity are living underground like rats, so it’s hardly reasonable to expect everyone to be running around with the latest Austrian assault rifle.
Given the nature of the first game, I have to wonder a bit about the presence of a minigun in this demo. Bullets are a scarce resource in the Metro world, hard enough to come by that the good ones are actually used as currency, so hosing down a half-dozen Reich goons as they come through a door is fun but hardly cost-effective. It’s possible that the segment is a one-off set-piece built around an old, salvaged weapon that just happened to be left lying around, but regardless of the specifics I hope the new game doesn’t give up the primitive, cobbled-together feel of the original.
Also interesting in the recently-released Prologue video that precedes this gameplay segment. According to the narration, the Dark Ones have been “scorched from the Earth,” suggesting that the “bad ending” from Metro 2033 is actually canon – which, when I think about it, is pretty much par for the course for Russian shooters.
Metro: Last Light is scheduled for release in the first half of 2012 for the PC, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.
