Gaming Metro 2033 Review

Have you tried sneaking by a hostile patrol in Stalker lately? Yes it's really nice that A-life moves stuff around while you're on a different map but when you actually get up close and interract with them it's all very generic.

Well, at leat Stalker NPCs get bugged up and start dancing around sometimes. That's really amusing.

 

Erm no it isn't. It was published 7 years before the Chernobyl accident, in a different country. I do agree that the location is far more important than the stalker idea for the game though.

 

Overall there is no comparison, stalkers Ai is a lot more intelligent, COP the stealth works great, Metro has some ai bugs as well, bringing up a bug that can happen in stalker is all you got, i rest my case. metro is an average game. All game shave AI quirks.

You can tet up close on them and interact easily, what are you talking about? They are also much smarter in combat, and way more advanced in their day time routines, random encounters. its not even a contest.

 

It's worth bearing in mind though that long before Chernobyl there were/still are areas very much like the Chernobyl fallout zone. That is to say areas so heavily contaminated by industrial waste as to be completely uninhabitable. The old Soviet movie Stalker, from which the game takes it's name, was made in just such an area in the 1970's, with the tragic result that many of the cast and crew died soon after of cancer. China and Russia both have a few of them and I daresay other countries do too. They're the by-product of rushed industrialisation.

If anything the Chernobyl zone is one of the cleanest sites of that kind, because although it has enough pockets of serious radiation to make the area impossible to safely live in (though I've heard it does harbour fugitives) the only threat is radiation, and you can at least detect that with a Geiger counter and stay safe. The areas that have all kinds of assorted toxic waste in them might contain all sorts of threats that cannot be so easily detected and avoided.

I think comparing Metro 2033 to STALKER though is quite unfair. STALKER is an RPG, a sweeping adventure game where you have a pretty long leash to do what you like in a changing environment. Metro 2033 is an end to end shooter. Playing Metro 2033 reminded me more of FEAR than STALKER. To be honest though I didn't think much to it. As has been mentioned the toughness of the enemy breaks up the flow, and it doesn't feel like the most gripping game to begin with, so having what little flow it does have hampered by stodgy combat isn't much fun. I might come back to it for Halloween though.

 

Lucky boogers.....Play.com stil hasn't delivered yet.....
Looking forward to benching it at 16x10 with all the eye candy on

 

Shooting mutants in tunnels with no replay value? sounds more like doom 3 than Stalker to me.

 

When NPCs don't notice that you just shot their buddy and just keep standing around it's not stealth, it's just stupid.

I'm sure Metro AI can get bugged up, but guess what? I haven't encountered it. On the other hand in all the stalker games, every other fight i get into results in one of the NPCs doing something funny.

How so?

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Of course it's not. You're comparing the AI of an open world game with one from a linear game. How can you have "daytime routines" and "random encounters" in a fully linear game?

I was comparing the combat behavior of the two AIs, nothing else and you respond with apples to oranges comparisons.

 

That's a bug, and rarely happens, LMAO. Metro is not a good game, deal with it.

 

What are you referring to?


(And your other statement is simply ridiculous because you treat your opinion as if it was fact)

 

Sorry, but 'lol'. A null sentence if ever I read one.

'Metro is a great game, deal with it' - do I win now?

Games reviewing is starting to go down a very familiar path where the 'in' games are the only games that get reviewed favourably. For example a linear FPS is considered defacto bad, while a non-linear one is often considered good - even if the underlying mechanics are poor (*cough* Far Cry 2 *cough*). For example Metro 2033 and Bioshock managed to create an extremely strong and immersive atmosphere precisely because they ARE linear. I realise Bioshock was extremely well received, but it's the exception that prooves the rule.

A 6/10 from Bit-Tech fortunately means the game is a diamond in the rough - and I think that sums up Metro 2033 perfectly. If you have a beastly fast PC and like this sort of game, it'll be like a wet dream. But if you prefer big open spaces, then the drawbacks will start to really irritate you. I'm pretty sure Stalker Clear Sky got a similar score.

 

I have a core i5 rig, the game is pretty dull. The atmosphere is not even that good, an open world game stalker has a much betetr atmosphere, so can't see how it's linearity makes it have better atmoshpere. Hard to have great atmosphere when enemy groups are lumped in one spot in certain spots, to a point you know where are. a lot better games around then this. On top of that its about 8 hrs long without a shred of replayabilty for 49.99.

The Ai in staklker if anything was too sensitive, they could detect you from too far away, I am beginning to wonder if you even played it. Clear sky is by far the worst stalker, they missed that one up, that's widely known.

 

You did not answer my question.

And that's not a good thing. As far as i can see, the challenge with creating enemy AI is to make them believeably pretend that they don't know where you are.

Have i played Stalker? I might have. In fact i might have been an administrator on the Zone Surival Guide forums, i might have co-produced a mod for SoC, i might have uploaded several videos of dancing stalkers to my youtube channel and if you add me on Steam we might even be able to play CoP multiplayer together.

 

No its not a good thing, never said it was perfect, but i never once came across this, Ai not seeing you and shooting each other like you said, and I played all 3 multiple times.

 

Oh, no i didn't mean to say they shoot eachother, what i was trying to get to is that you can often shoot the guy standing right next to them and they won't notice/care. Sorry if my phrasing wasn't clear.

 

Rarely if ever encountered that. Either way, dont't see how Metro's AI can even come close to Stalkers open world AI. Metro was a pretty underwhelming experience mixed with some decent ideas, game could have been so much more then it is in reality. having AI just camp in one spot is not that impressive, nor do they stand out from any other Ai in any other shooter, they just basically go to cover, rinse repeat, fire, cover. Stalkers moves around a lot, flank in open spaces, and maneuver around in large areas.

 

I think this game should be compared to STALKER as its clearly and unashamedly borrowing a lot from the book and the game, especially that it was made by blokes who used to work at GSC and the book was written by a guy who worshipped Strugatskis all his life.

hell, there are Stalkers in Metro 2033 who are hunters/scavengers just like in Roadside Picnic/game, venturing outside in suicidal attempts for glory and riches...

didnt read the M2033 book yet but its on order...

 

You're doing it again.... open world comparison. Metro Ai can't move around in open spaces because there are no open spaces.

 

Thats half the point, the Ai is just crammed in one spot and rarely moves and you even know where the next batch of enemies are, that along makes Stalkers AI vastly more impressive. The Ai is nothing to write home about as it is.

 

I think the notion of a linear FPS as de facto bad (while not something that Bit Tech's review scores would support given how well MW2 and Bioshock were received) is an interesting one. Personally I'm starting to come around to the idea that indeed the linear FPS might actually have had its day. I mean sure back in the old days environments needed to be small, but in this day and age is there really much scope for a straight shot corridor shooter to be seen as anything but old fashioned? When it comes down to it is a game like Metro 2033 -really- offering that much more than Doom 2*?

In my opinion, at this stage in the development of gaming, a first person corridor shooter (by which I mean a shooter where you a funnelled through a succession of passages, whether they are actual corridors, tunnels, jungle paths or whatever) needs to be phenomenally good to rate very highly, because it's such a very limiting genre of game and it's so hard to find one that does anything genuinely original in terms of how it plays.

 

Hovis, great post. Agreed totally.