Last Light’s plot weaknesses are readily visible, too. The only time you ever actually hear him speak is during load screens when he verbally explains what’s coming up next. In a clever twist, these weren’t written by others when found, Artyom will write notes to himself in his journal, working around his silent posture and providing players with one of two ways you get insight from the protagonist himself. You can even see things from Artyom’s point of view in the form of journal entries strewn around the tale’s various chapters. You can spend a great deal of time listening to these conversations, building context for and understanding of the plight of the metro’s survivors, holding on to life by a mere string.

Discovery also comes through conversation, and while Artyom is your typical silent protagonist, everyone around you has a great deal to say, even if they’re not talking directly to you. But there’s more in Last Light than just things to look at. Precious, too, is electricity, clean water, and breathable air, the latter of which becomes essential to gameplay as you constantly have to juggle gas masks and filters to scrub the atmosphere’s isotope-laden oxygen. Factory manufacturing is no more, large-scale agriculture is impossible, everything that already exists suddenly has a new, ingenious use, and just about anything you can hold in your hand – from an old postcard showing the colorful pre-war world to finely made bullets that act as currency – is precious. Some of the better locations successfully transport players to this fictional place and time in question. Exploring the various outposts and settlements you encounter conjures up tangible thoughts about what a post-apocalyptic situation would be like. The mood and atmosphere pad gametime with something more meaningful than loading screens and bad dialogue (though Last Light’s dialogue is littered with sometimes-abysmal Russian accents). The latter are what make Last Light truly shine, for it’s here that you get to experience the careful attention to detail that 4A Games has packed into its dystopian adventure.

Last Light presents itself linearly, but it does a wonderful job of setting up plenty of context for your actions and goes to great lengths to make itself more than just another shooter as it alternates between missions that are action-packed and those that are slower and more deliberate. The political thread that connects everything – how surviving factions lucky just to be alive could still be at each other’s throats - makes the situation that much more interesting. Metro’s world is tangibly dangerous and rife with terror, with a feeling of risk and foreboding around virtually every corner. Artyom, along with his group of survivors - and innocent bystanders in general - find themselves caught with increasing frequency in the middle of warring factions in the metro, a situation made all the more dangerous and untenable by the mutated creatures that live both in the tunnels and on the surface. You’re cast as one of these survivors, a ranger named Artyom, the hero of Metro 2033 returned for another valiant adventure.

Metro last light