// PC GAMER — GAMING
Metro 2039 takes us back to Moscow, but it's still got some delicious bits of Exodus in there
Delicious up until you realise you've wasted all your gas mask juice trying to open a closet door.
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Isn't it always the way? You spend so long yearning to leave home, to strike out and make a go of it all by yourself, but the second you step foot out the door you start missing it. All of it. The camaraderie and the rows, the shared meals and the constant, privacy-smothering proximity, and—of course—the mutated beasts from the overland, intent on your complete and utter destruction.
This is how I imagine it went for 4A Games when it came time to make Metro 2039, the fourth mainline game in the Metro series. Artyom is gone—he took a train off into Russia's carcass in Exodus, but Moscow and its metro endure, and 4A has returned to them for 2039.
In Artyom's absence, you play someone new: The Stranger, a gruff and—in contrast to the previous three Metros—chatty protagonist who's on a quest to find and kill Hunter, the former legendary Ranger hero and (it seems) current overlord of almost the entire metro.
Things have gone to pot since Artyom went interrailing. The metro's many fractious stations have largely been brought under one banner, but it is a fascist banner, ruled over by Hunter with an iron fist. Someone should probably put an end to that.
I've spent roughly an hour in The Stranger's shoes in a sliver of Metro 2039, and I'll say this: it really is a pleasure to be back in the metro. Even streaming the game (a necessity for the demo), it looks lovely, and retains all the thunking physicality that makes the setting distinct and memorable. We are still whipping out a contraption and repeatedly whirring it to make our torch shine brighter, gang. We are back.
But just because we are back in Moscow does not mean we are leaving the innovations of Exodus behind. The bulk of the demo I played consisted not of linear tunnels with the odd secret squirrelled away—as was the case in Last Light and 2033—but an open and above-ground area that invited you to explore and pick through it at your leisure. Or, well, kind of at your leisure. At the leisure of your gas mask filters and your access to resources to craft new ones.
This is a positive development. Metro is a series of small details, and poking into its crannies to find them has always been one of my favourite parts (that and pointing at the screen and telling people when I've been to one of the depicted stations in real life—at which they are always incredibly impressed). Nosing around the area I uncovered modded-up new guns, slices of story, blueprints for new weapon parts, resources and general goodies, locked doors guarding rooms of treasure that I had to suss out the codes for, and multiple angles to tackle my objectives.
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