After only a couple of hours with the game, and there’s a fair bit to mention.  Obviously this is from a purely technical standpoint, as it wouldn’ t be fair to comment on the game without playing through it in full.  The game oozes atmosphere from the off, with some of the best visuals I have seen on the PC.

awesome scenes

Metro 2033 – The Good

From the perfectly rendered lighting and shadows, and in particular it’s the attention to detail which is astounding.  Flickering light from a campfire cast subtle shadows from every conceivable angle of the environment, a gas lamp burns and a desk lamp are lit in the room you start off in. Its a joy to switch them on and off just to observe the changes in ambient light!

When you bring up your map / log book, it literally is a paper logbook (in your right hand) and you have a lighter in your left hand – and again it casts a really nice light across your book, and onto walls / people around you. The screenshots don’t do this justice. In fact, I’m pretty sure these are the best PC graphics for a cigerette lighter so far (so much so, here’s an animated gif of it. If you know of one better, i’m happy to be corrected on this )

omg! awesome lighter!

These visuals come at a price, however.

Metro 2033 – The slightly odd / irritating

On my test rig:

Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit
Intel Core 2 Quad Q9550  @ 2.83GHz
4.0GB Dual-Channel DDR2
ATI Radeon HD 4850 512mb
Creative X-Fi Xtreme Music

I had an odd experience with frame-rate.  4A Games did a strange thing, in that they don’t allow us to tweak the various typical graphics options in the way PC gamers tend to do.  You can choose between presets:

[singlepic id=21 w=320 h=240 float=center]

With it set to Directx 10 and ‘Very High’, the game looks amazing but utterly unplayable.  Directx 9 ‘Very High’ wasn’t much better.  It was only playable on ‘normal’ but sadly it started to look a bit ‘flat’ after being spoilt by the initial top visuals.  I fired up FRAPS and produced this basic graph to illustrate the differences between the vague graphics settings:

[singlepic id=22 float=center]

Metro 2033 – The rubbish

I’m sorry to report, the sound is rubbish on the PC version of Metro.  Obviously experiences vary between hardware combinations, configurations, operating systems, drivers and speaker hardware.  I am however using a reasonable quality sound card and speakers (a Logitech Z-5450 5.1 home theatre setup) and I usually play games pretty loud so I notice when things aren’t quite right, when they’re good and when they’re awful.

For some reason, during cut-scenes they decided to send the dialogue track to the LFE and front-left/right channels, and sounds as though it being spoken through sock (or something). Its rubbish.  Those audio channels are usually for environmental / ambient and directional effects. When he started speaking, I’m sure things started falling off my desk. .

Once the game starts, dialogue becomes positional (ie it is sent to the channel/speaker relative to the direction you are facing) which is fine.

All gun-fire comes through the centre channel, which just sounds plain odd after a while and lastly, no matter if you’re in a water logged pipe or out in the wide open – gun fire and voices all sound the same – like they’re standing in a vocal booth in a studio somewhere, they didn’t even put a lazy bit of reverb in there to attempt some kind of ‘authenticity’.

Metro 2033 – Conclusion

I will certainly play on as I’m a totally sucker for FPS’s regardless of their quality, and this one really is great looking (check out the screenshots at the bottom) and so far the gritty atmosphere has definitely got me interested.  If you read this and come up with a solution to my odd audio issues, drop me a message in comments box.
Danke.

Written by CMC_SDG

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